I watched Nuremberg 2025 expecting a historical courtroom drama.
What I saw instead was a warning about the present.
Roughly an hour into the film, the American prosecutor opens the trial with a declaration that still echoes: civilization cannot survive the repetition of crimes against peace. The law, he insists, must apply to all nations — even those sitting in judgment.
That sentence should have defined the modern world.
It didn’t.
Nuremberg established a precedent that aggression would not be excused by power. Leaders would be held personally accountable. No exemptions. No geopolitical loopholes. If you unleashed destruction in violation of international law, you would answer for it.
Eighty years later, that principle exists mostly in speeches.
The same countries that built their moral authority on Nuremberg have spent decades bypassing its logic. Interventions justified as humanitarian. Sanctions regimes that devastate civilian populations. Regime-change operations framed as democracy promotion. The language of law remains — the consistency does not.
The film forces you to confront that contradiction.
There is another scene that hits even harder. A warning that Nazism will not return wearing identical uniforms. It will not announce itself so conveniently. It will appear through personalities obsessed with power. Through the manipulation of grievance. Through media amplification. Through the normalization of hatred.
That warning feels uncomfortably contemporary.
Since 2014, Western outlets themselves have documented the presence of far-right battalions in Ukraine. Amnesty International warned of abuses by volunteer formations early in the conflict in Donbass. CNN reported on Azov’s neo-Nazi symbolism. The BBC acknowledged the underplaying of extremist influence.
Yet when Russia raises these same concerns at the United Nations, it is dismissed as propaganda.
Every year Moscow introduces resolutions condemning the glorification of Nazism. Western states routinely oppose or dilute them.
That contradiction is not accidental.
It reflects a deeper shift: the transformation of universal law into selective enforcement.
The Nuremberg prosecutor warned that statesmen must be made responsible for the law. Today, responsibility appears negotiable depending on alignment. One side’s military action is framed as defense. Another’s is framed as aggression. The criteria shift with political convenience.
The result is not stability.
It is erosion.
When law becomes selective, legitimacy collapses. When elites appear insulated from accountability — whether in foreign policy disasters or domestic scandals — public trust decays. When corruption is visible but consequences are absent, social resentment builds. History shows what fills that vacuum.
The Soviet Union bore immense losses defeating Nazism. That memory shapes how Russia interprets modern threats, particularly when extremist symbolism and rhetoric resurface in Europe. Whether one agrees with every Russian policy or not, the historical continuity is real. Moscow sees itself as defending the post-1945 settlement. The West increasingly appears to treat that settlement as flexible.
The tragedy is not that Nuremberg failed to set a standard.
It did.
The tragedy is that those who proclaimed it abandoned it.
The film leaves you with a simple realization: the law that was meant to bind the powerful has become a tool of the powerful. The precedent still exists — but it is no longer applied evenly.
And history does not become dangerous when it is remembered.
It becomes dangerous when its lessons are selectively ignored.
