The Exception

The medium of film is capable of bringing nuances of power to audiences, even when the story-world is steeped in autocracy and totalitarianism. The Exception (2016) is such a film, for in terms of power the film shows the relationship between the Nazi government of Germany and (retired) Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Netherlands, which has just been occupied by Germany. The Nazi officials represent the state, whereas Wilhelm’s “soft” power stems from royalty. As Wilhelm’s attendant, Col. Sigurd von Ilsemann, observes, no one is safe from Nazi reprisals, not even Wilhelm and his high-brow wife. So he is not the exception alluded to in the title in the sense of being exempt from raw Nazi power; the night of the long knives demonstrated that no one is safe, even though the former king still means a lot to the German people. The exception refers instead to Capt. Stefan Brandt, and in particular to his moral scruples concerning the Nazi mass murders in eastern Europe. As the story unfolds with a visit by Himmler, Wilhelm becomes an exception in this sense too. Even in a totalitarian autocracy, a surprising amount of soft power can exist in opposition. Taking a moral stand can manifest "soft" power even though an ethic is semi-permeable by power-aggrandizement.

The full essay is at "The Exception."

Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

The full essay is at "Valkyrie."

Distortions of Political Perspective in Foreign Affairs

When the human mind becomes too affixed to a political ideology, rather it is “right,” “center,” or “left,” one way that the excessive attachment can be seen by other people is by perspectival distortion. A very basic illustration of this cognitive-perceptional lapse is when someone claims that only X but not Y is problematic even though both X and Y can be criticized using the same or even related criteria. Besides the fact that ideology is inherently partial rather than wholistic, “sins of omission” concerning X or Y (but not both) due to a cognitive-perspectival distortion, which in turn comes from the partiality of any ideology, can easily be viewed as unethical in virtue of being patently unfair as well as self-serving, ideologically. This very abstract paragraph sprang from news reports of U.S. Senator Linsey Graham referring to Iran’s Khamenei as a Hitler-figure while giving Israel’s Netanyahu a pass even though by January 11, 2026 when Graham spoke, the large-scale killing and suffering of a people had easily dwarfed the few thousand Iranian protesters who had been killed on the street. Even mentioning an equivalence would have been sufficient in terms of which leader comes closer to being a 21^st century Hitler. As a result, the U.S. senator’s credibility undoubtedly took a hit—except, interestingly, to people sharing the senator’s foreign-policy ideology. This too flags political ideology itself as problematic for the human mind.

The full essay is at "Distortions of Political Perspective." 

Political religion: Hitler Youth

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

The full essay is at "Political Religion."

Protests in Belarus: Raw Violence Versus Moral Power

Once Syria’s Assad regime folded, Travis Timmerman, an American who had entered Syria on a religious pilgrimage, was freed from a prison after seven months there. A border guard had thrown him into prison. That Timmerman is Christian may have had something to do with it. Austin Tice, an American journalist who had been missing since his abduction in Syria 12 years earlier, was still unaccounted for days after the fall of the Assad regime. Incredibly, Timmerman said of his prison experience, “I was never beaten. The only really bad part was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to. I was only let out three times a day to go to the bathroom.”[1] Timmerman’s experience can be used to calibrate just how violently police handled Belarusians who protested the rigged election in 2020 in Belarus, and the quick, unexpected fall of Assad can remind us of the plight that could be in store for Lukashenko. For as soon as enough state “riot” police decide not to follow orders to beat, falsely imprison, and even torture non-violent protesters, what seems like a solid dictatorship could unravel surprisingly quickly. This is especially so because, like Assad, Lukashenko has used violence solely for the same of retaining power, rather than to further an ideology. This renders the violence committed on the orders of Assad and Lukashenko as more shameless than Mao, Stalin, and even Hitler, all of whom sought to radically reshape society in the broad sense, including the economic and political systems. The shameless systemic violence against non-violent individuals is especially ripe for a Gandhian approach of resistance wherein moral power is intentionally set against the raw power of violence.

The full essay is at "Protests in Belarus."

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1. Mohamad El Chamaa, Abbie Cheeseman, and John Hudson, “U.S. Citizen Found in Syria Says He Was Imprisoned for Months,” The Washington Post, December 12, 2024.

Inconvenient Truths

When I was a post-doctoral student, I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an 80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and, if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth.  I was surprised, as I had been brought up with the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares.  To be sure, the victor’s history fits the horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a person. Even the epitaph of monster does not fit with the notion of the banality of evil visible at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Eichmann had been responsible for making the trains run on time to the concentration camps.

About a decade after my conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran of World War II.  Did the American people know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment. One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I found interesting.

The full essay is at "Inconvenient Truths."

Toward a Theory of Ethical Leadership: Beyond the Ideologies

Constructing an accurate ethical-leadership concept that is not over-extended by one’s ideological agenda ought to begin with defining leadership itself. That is to say, more attention should be paid to thinking about what leadership is. Beyond its attributes and any contextual artifacts, leadership itself must be identified as a distinct phenomenon before we can go on to highlight the ethical dimension that completes “ethical leadership.” Then what counts as the ethical dimension of leadership can be clipped back to that which is implied in the definition of leadership, which in turn is entailed in the essence of the phenomenon.

Often overlooked, what is leadership?    Image Source: Gaebler.com

Material from this essay has been incorporated in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon.

The Boys from Brazil

Josef Mengele, an SS physician infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation on prisoners at Auschwitz, is in this film a character intent on furnishing the 95 Hitlers he has cloned with Hitler’s own background. Crucially, Hitler’s father died at 65. So too, Mengele, reasons, must the adoptive fathers of the boy Hitlers. Otherwise, they might not turn out like Hitler. The ethics of Mengele’s task—killing 95 innocent 65 year-olds—is clear. When Ezra Lieberman stops Mengele in his tracks, the question turns to the ethics of killing the 95 boys so none of them will grow up to be another Hitler. This is a much more interesting ethical question, and the narrative—and film as a medium, moreover—would be fuller had the script been deepened to make the question, and thus the ethical and ontological dimensions, transparent for the viewers.

The full essay is at "The Boys from Brazil."

New Rules for a New Millennium: Russian Invaders Beware

At a joint EU-US news-conference on 26 March 2014, Presidents Barroso, Van Rompuy, and Obama discussed the problematic Russian invasion of the Crimea province of Ukraine.  The “chairman” of the European Council and the “chief executive” of the European Commission both responded to concerns that the European Union had not stood up to its business interests in order to enact economic sanctions capable of putting Putin back in his pen. Even though the two EU presidents sought to "puff up" the force latent in the sanctions already in place, Barroso insightfully made the more significant point that invading parties just aren't done in the new century. In this essay, my task is to sideline the debate over whether the EU had not stood up to its domestic commercial interests in favor of Barroso's much more significant point concerning a paradigm shift whose time of recognition has come in the new millennium.

(The remainder of this essay is now at the International Relations section of The Worden Report)