Your scribe infrequently inflicts film reviews on you, but a screening of Nuremberg was an inspiration.  Not that I mean to cast a shadow over its illustrious predecessor, Trial at Nuremberg. 

The latter-day film lacks the deliberate portentousness of the 1961 effort, but perhaps its message is every bit as important, spelled out at the end, for those of us not keeping up, by Rami Malek’s character, Dr Douglas Kelley: the narcissism of the top Nazis wasn’t some trait reserved for mad Germans.  This character defect was to be found in any population, and it behoves us to be on our guard always against its rise in our midst, and particularly against its traction in our ruling elites.

Kelley, the psychiatrist, has been dispatched by the US Army to get inside the heads of the Reich’s top brass: what made them tick?  

Enter Hermann “Fat Stuff” Goering (the sobriquet is used to tease out of Hermann that he speaks English adequately). Our Rusty steals the show, as intended.  What world-class narcissist who had thought to rule all he surveyed would expect anything less. 

Crowe brings another dimension to Maximus: he’s a deal heavier than he was 25 years ago, but still has the gift of command. Exceptional and only occasional Australasian vowel twangs when he’s speaking English aside, Russell manages the opening scenes in adequately guttural German, although no doubt Germans im Kino will get a giggle.

It’s Justice Robert Jackson, played by Michael Shannon, who, as history records, has the show stolen from him, with the British deputy prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E Grant), having to step in to put Goering in his place. 

Maxwell-Fyfe, later Lord Chancellor Kilmuir, had been Churchill’s SG during the war, but was later remembered for his 1950s ramping up of homosexual prosecutions, amongst his trophies being Alan Turing of Enigma fame and Alec Guinness.

Jackson is portrayed as peculiarly witless, outmanoeuvred for the centre seat on the US Supremes by Fred Vinson, and then (despite forewarning by Dr Kelley) being wrong-footed by Goering in cross-examination – enter Maxwell-Fyfe to pull the necessary chestnuts out of the fire.

The lay film-goer will be homeward bound assuming Jackson was a dummy, but that would underestimate his gift for epigrammatic insight. 

His treatment of Bills of Rights, in the context of freedom of speech, in West Virginia Board of Education v Barnette 319 US 624 (1943) was deathless (as previously quoted by Procrustes here; Ed.)

The Jehovah’s Witnesses opposed their children being required to give a salute to the US flag every morning at school (a curiously Nazi style of stiff right armed address). Jackson led a majority of the Court (over Frankfurter’s laissez-faire for the State theory from Gobitis only three years earlier) in a judgment that underlined the primal importance of allowing competing views – at least in the setting of a school yard, where State power was arrayed against the religious beliefs of a minority.     

“As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” 

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Which takes us to the empty spaces behind Government House in Adelaide, where Writers’ Week has traditionally been held.  The Writers’ Week Board disinvited the Palestinian author, Ms Randa Abdel-Fattah, an outspoken Zionist critic. 

About 120 of the authors invited to the March talk-fest withdrew in sympathy with Ms Abdel-Fattah. Members of the Board then began to resign, while Premier Malinauskas played the drone accompaniment of defending free speech, so long as it was the right sort, and Abdel-Fattah wasn’t. 

The Director of Writers’ Week, Louise Adler, a secular Jew, then resigned and the event was cancelled in a flurry of counter-resignations. But opinions will out: even in the midst of this graveyard of the vanities, there’s talk of a “guerilla” writers’ week.  Adelaide City Council seems to be green-lighting the proposal to use the space originally allocated.

This might seem a storm in a teacup in the light of Trump’s approach to stifling dissent both in America and at its borders, but the pressure placed on the Writers’ Week Board to block Ms Abdel-Fattah’s speaking came from influential Jewish spokespersons. 

This follows the pattern of the attacks on Antoinette Lattouf, a casual presenter on the ABC, and on Nick Poynder, barrister, then at Frederick Jordan Chambers. Lattouf posted on her Instagram account a Human Rights Watch video on the theme of the Israeli Defence Force creating starvation in Gaza, an action substantially mirrored by Poynder. 

The Furies descended and they certainly motivated Ita Buttrose, then Chair of the ABC, to get rid of Lattouf: see Lattouf v ABC (No 2) [2025] FCA 669.  Poynder was also called out, amid much tub-thumping by The Australian.

It is obvious that a community substantially composed of the immediate descendants of Holocaust survivors will take its place in Australian society seriously.  The connection between the Jewish community and Israel seems axiomatic to many of these people, but that doesn’t make it necessarily so.  To the non-Jewish community there seems to be a clear distinction between being antisemitic and being critical of the Israeli government’s dealings with Gaza.

Fortunately, when push comes to shove from Jewish complainants about commentary disparaging Israel, our managerial class, the Great and the Good, stand their ground judiciously, calmly taking a long view and pouring oil on troubled waters. 

Hell they do. The first reaction is “off with the heads of the trouble-makers”.  This has the desired function of making the complaining noise go away (read the emails from Ita set out in Darryl Rangiah’s Lattouf judgment for a sample, and the reactions of the Writers’ Week Board and of the NSW Bar Association, aided and abetted by Freddie Jordan, are a match).

In a period when the collapse of the separation of powers in the United States has led to government by bullying, it is all the more important that we allow for a diversity of views, particularly in our bastions of intellectual thought and process: Writers’ Weeks, the ABC and the Bar. 

These are not street brawling institutions. There’s a need to keep the temperature down in public demonstrations, but debate in appropriate forums on matters of public interest should not be stifled by pressure groups.

We cannot afford the unanimity of the graveyard.  Can we have some backbone from the Great and the Good?