Nuremberg critique that digressed into modern media platform reflection

I recently watched Nuremberg, and it brought me back to middle school, specifically to a phase where I was oddly into historical fiction about World War II, especially stories about life inside internment camps.

I think part of it had to do with my dad. He loves history, and when I was around the age of 10 to 13, he was deep into anything WWII related. That meant Band of Brothers, Darkest Hour, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State, The World at War just to name a few. My dad was more interested in the strategic and political side of history and I liked stories that followed people rather than armies. I read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Prisoner B-3087, The Boy on the Wooden Box, The Diary of a Young Girl, and a few others I can’t quite remember now.

Those books weren’t really about the Nuremberg Trials though I did read some literature like exerpts from The Rise of the Third Reich in highschool because of APUSH. So when I recently watched Evil on Trial on Netflix with my dad, and then the new Nuremberg film, it made me wonder why I've never heard of Dr. Douglas Kelley's book mentioned in any of the documentaries. Of course there is a high likelihood I could've missed its mention (documentaries vs. teenager 💤) but it surprised me given he was conducting psychiatric evaluations on Nazi defendants during these unprecedented trials. A Google search and some skimming fixed that and it makes a lot more sense why his book never really took off.

People on the internet said they felt as if it lacked academic rigor and it was morally incorrect the way Dr. Kelley sympathized with the men on trial. Dr. Kelley wrote something about how they're just ordinary people who weren’t uniquely evil outliers but simply men shaped by circumstance, opportunity, and ideology. And yeah, I agree that that framing is unsettling. The book warns that anyone could become these men like business tycoons, professionals, people who believe they're moral and rational.

I haven’t read Dr. Kelley’s book so I’m not one to evaluate its academic merit. I only know it through summaries and how it’s been talked about, or more so, how it hasn’t. From my perspective, now after having read reviews, what stands out to me is the overall reaction to it. Some went so far as to label the book “anti-American." I think that itself felt telling.

At the time, ideas like this lived or died through a slower process. People read, discussed, argued, and decided individually whether something was worth their attention. A book’s success depended on whether readers found it convincing, morally justifiable, or intellectually sound. Rejection was visible and intentional. Something could be published and still collectively be refused.

That filtering process looks very different today.

Modern media makes it incredibly easy for ideas, good, bad, thoughtful, hollow, academic, or completely ungrounded, to instantly reach massive audiences. That accessibility is great. But it also means that ideas no longer need depth or moral clarity to spread. They only need momentum (mass audience * the velocity that it's reaching screens).

Not always intentionally, but algorithms don't care about truth or nuance. Nor does it distinguish between thoughtful vs inflamatory ideas. Rather it amplifies what performs because engagement is its main concern and indignation engages better than reflection. I think everyone can agree that unworthy and unjust ideas can be overrepresented and circulated on media platforms these days. I don’t think this makes media inherently evil, but it’s hard to ignore that media platforms, by design, reward certainty over curiosity and alignment over discussion. Division isn’t always manufactured, but it's most definitely overamplified in current structures.

It’s worth acknowledging that these are private platforms with incentive structures, not neutral public forums.

Despite how these platforms are constructed, the bigger issue now isn't just how and what gets amplified, but what gets absorbed. Ideas can now spread fast. This is the new standard and inevitable given how technology has developed. There are always pros anc cons to advancement but when it comes to media, participation should not mean acceptance and disagreement shouldn't be a risk.

If amplication replaces judgement, then that creates a culture where belief is justified by reach rather than reasoning. If something is everywhere, it must be right. If many people believe it, it must be worthy of my belief. My beliefs must align with what is currently seen as "righteous" rather than my own personal values. But mass visibility isn’t the same as moral or intellectual grounding.

Well then, at this point, belief stops being something from individual reason and becomes something you inherit. And I think it’s worth asking how reliable that kind of belief really is before embracing it as your own. If an idea feels compelling primarily because many people already believe it, then is that your conviction or to your convenience? To decide what matters before letting the crowd decide for you doesn't seem farfetched but its application is few and far between. This especially when people can select the comfort of conformity.

Looking back at Kelley’s book, it is not whether it deserved attention, but that it was at least subject to refusal. Today, it’s harder to tell what we actually stand against, because so few ideas ever fully meet resistance. They circulate, mutate, and fade without being fully articulated, properly discussed, or scrutinized.

History tells the story over and over of what happens when there are less honest conversations. Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda didn’t operate in a vacuum. It worked because people learned which voices were safe to echo and which weren’t worth risking.

And in that sense, this drift feels anti-American, not in a dramatic ideological way, but in a sense of how it pulls us away from the idea that everyone has a responsibility to contribute their own perspective.

The most unsettling thought isn’t that these systems exist, but that we’re slowly losing the habit of questioning them. Access to information is never a bad thing so long as it's matched with curiosity to critically examine what is assimilated and integrated into our knowledge. The real danger isn’t misinformation alone, but how rarely people pause long enough to ask whether something actually reflects their values or whether it just happens to be everywhere. Dissent here and there should always be welcomed.

Herd and crowd mentality = bad