These are times that test our intelligence and courage. We're so close to what's going on that it's sometimes helpful to step back and look at current events from a larger perspective. These three artistic works can help us understand what's presently happening:

• The movie: "Judgment at Nuremberg"

• The movie: "In the Name of the Father"

• The novel: The Last President

I'd suggest that viewing the two movies and reading the novel will help you achieve a clearer discernment of what's occuring in the world today.

• Put yourself in the place of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

• Feel what it means to be tortured in modern-day Britain (or an American prison in Cuba).

• Enter the role of a patriotic military leader who dares to stand up to an American president's criminal military orders.

Judgment at Nuremberg

This 1961 Academy Award-winning film referred to the Nuremberg war-crime trials of three classes of war criminals:

• Nazi villains such as Goering (though not depicted in this movie, the Nuremberg tribunals included Goering's trial and conviction as a war criminal)

• Ordinary criminals such as the German judges who took advantage of the Nazi tyranny to feather their own nests

• Germans who prided themselves on upholding the nation's principles, such as Emil Janning, former German secretary of justice (portrayed in the movie by Burt Lancaster) and the widow of a convicted German general executed for ordering the execution of American POWs (portrayed by Marlene Dietrich). These kinds of people were shocked when they found that the world held them responsible for what had happened in Nazi Germany.

     Abby Mann's brilliant screenplay "Judgment at Nuremberg" drives home several crucial points that we cannot afford to overlook:

• We're responsible for being aware of of what's going on in our society; we can't plead ignorance. In the movie, the defense attorney argued strenuously that all those who supported or tolerated Nazis were guilty, not just those individuals then being tried.

• We must make sure we're aware of what kind of criminal trampling of our constitution and war crimes our government officials may be involving us in.

• American leaders (especially the Bush family), Britain (open letter to the "Times" by Winston Churchill in 1938 praising the strength of Hitler), the Vatican (corcordat with the Nazis), and others were all complicit in creating the Nazi horror, as the defense attorney in the movie pointed out.

• We cannot legitimately try to excuse ourselves with catch-phrases such as:

  • "My country right or wrong"

  • "I'm only following orders"

  • "We don't make the laws, we merely carry them out"

  • "I'm only agreeing with the ideas of our leaders"

  • "If I'm critical of my country's leaders, I'm a traitor"

     The Bush administration is currently, and was previously, involved in war crimes in Afghanistan and is complicit in encouraging Israel's war crimes against the Palestinian people (just as the Arab states are encouraging Palestinian terrorists to commit war crimes in their suicide bombings).

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says he's too busy to answer a subpoena ordering him to appear before a Paris judge investigating crimes by the Kissinger-backed Pinochet regime in Chile.

     Former President Bush and other United States leaders committed war crimes against Iraq (during and following the Gulf War) and Yugoslavia (in the invasion of Kosovo) and are still under indictment with the International War Crimes Tribunal.

It's possible that American leaders at any level could at some time in the future be brought before an international war crimes tribunal for those criminal acts. None of the excuses above (the catch-phrases) would be allowed as mitigating circumstances. In the movie, the defense attorney argued in support of mitigation the fact that all German judges during the Nazi regime were forced to swear to the Civil Sevant Loyalty Oath of 1934.

     Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and the other members of the current administration are trying to frighten Americans by telling us that we are traitors if we criticize their actions. On the contrary, they are traitors to the American practice of democracy in trying to suppress honest citizens'"""""""""" thought and dissent. It's possible the tables may be turned, as in post-World War II Germany: the leaders who forced obedience to criminal acts may be put on trial for crimes against humanity!

     You could, sometime in the future, be put on trial for FAILING to fight against the crimes against humanity that the Bush administration is now perpetrating! You certainly are complicit in the Bush administration's destruction of constitutional freedoms if you fail to speak out against:

• their refusal of due process and habeaus corpus to foreign detainees in Cuba and the U.S.

• their allowing the CIA, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies to spy on American citizens (tapping phone lines, seizing property based on trumped-up charges, monitoring internet usage, and on and on)

• their deliberate, unabashed destruction of worker's rights and welfare in acting for big-money interests (e.g. Enron, Halliburton, agribusinesses, Afghan pipeline) in every arena

In a democracy such as ours in America, it's the responsibility of citizens to inform themselves and to struggle against any encroachment of constitutional liberties. If some people are too unintelligent or morally deficient to see the tyrannous acts of the Bush administration, if some people are too cowardly to stand against those acts, it's still your individual responsibility as an American citizen to uphold the principles of democracy on which this nation is founded.

"Imagine if you can a world in which truth is one general and something we will call blindness is the opposing general. These two simple factors one must choose between. There are no neutrals. We are frankly for or against and hold our positions by the force of the effort we put forth. The great struggle is not only to conquer our opposing forces, but to reclaim and form them into fighters for the truth." Stewart Edward White

You are not so much struggling against the Bush administration or any other form of tyranny as you are fighting for the inalienable democratic principles which make this nation free:

• The individual does not receive government and authority from a deity who gives his secular sword to princes and magistrates to rule by his divine right.

• The individual does not have a subordinate place in a divinely inspired hierarchy, in which kings, nobelmen, political leaders, and corporate executives are placed above him as 'your highness.'

• Government is voluntarily established by free individuals through a willful act of contract, individuals rationally consenting to limit their own freedom and to obey civil authority in order to have public protection of their natural rights.

• Government's purpose is to serve the interests of the people, to enable individuals to enjoy peacefully their rights to life, liberty, and property.