Pip: Fascism as moral aberration, justice as emotional spectacle, and eight women whose humanity supposedly unlocked Nuremberg's true meaning — freerein61 has thoughts, and they are not gentle.
Mara: This episode follows a single extended argument: a review of Natalie Livingstone's The Nuremberg Women, and what it exposes about how liberal historiography handles fascism, class, and the politics of the postwar trials.
Pip: Let's start with the book, the review that praised it, and why both together tell a story that the post argues is more comfortable than it is honest.
The Nuremberg Women: Liberal Mythmaking and Fascism's Class Roots
Mara: The post opens with Natalie Livingstone's own framing of her book — eight women at Nuremberg, a "fresh" and "humanising" account that, she claims, made the proceedings "more democratic" and contributed to the perception that "justice was served." That self-description is where the critique begins.
Pip: And the critique lands hard. The post's core charge is that centering personal stories at Nuremberg is not just incomplete — it is ideologically functional. The comfort is the point.
Mara: Katja Hoyer's review in the TLS is the immediate target. The post describes it as "a refined form of liberal historiography — graceful and compassionate, yet ultimately evasive," one that replaces structural analysis with narrative empathy and turns "structural violence into emotional spectacle."
Pip: Graceful and evasive is a devastating combination. You feel like you've understood something and you've been carefully steered away from it.
Mara: The post is precise about what Hoyer omits: the trials as geopolitical performance, the selective prosecution that left German capitalism's economic foundations intact, the reintegration of former Nazis into the Cold War state. None of that appears in Hoyer's account.
Pip: Instead, Nazi defendants become psychological monsters, the women become moral witnesses, and Nuremberg becomes a cathartic encounter with evil. Tidy. Reassuring. Structurally useless.
Mara: The post extends that charge directly to Livingstone. Her focus on figures like Erika Mann observing Göring and Streicher as "gaunt," "broken," or "like wild beasts in a zoo" is described as "trivia presented as historical insight." The condition of Nazi leaders in 1945, the post argues, tells us nothing about the class forces that brought them to power.
Pip: The industrialists — Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben — largely avoided serious punishment. That absence is the argument's spine.
Mara: On Laura Knight, the British war artist, the post makes a sharp point: her paintings are presented by Livingstone as capturing the proceedings' humanity, but "art at Nuremberg did not uncover deeper truths; it helped construct the trial's image as civilised, rational, and humane." Livingstone accepts that image without criticism.
Mara: The post also takes on Livingstone's treatment of Ursula von Kardoff as a symbol of the new Germany — and rejects it. The German bourgeoisie was not remade after 1945; it was preserved and realigned westward. Casting its postwar representatives as enlightened democrats, the post argues, aids rehabilitation rather than reckoning.
Pip: And on gender, the post is equally direct. Livingstone treats women as moral anchors by nature. The post calls that liberal-essentialist — gender as a social relation, not a moral category, and the gendered labour at Nuremberg served the trial's ideological presentation without overcoming its political limits.
Mara: The closing judgment is unsparing: "Empathy cannot replace analysis. It is not enough to sympathise with the women of Nuremberg; we must examine the conditions that shaped their labour, the political forces that defined their roles, and the ideological purposes their presence served."
Pip: The women of Nuremberg as workers, agents, and participants in a politically constrained legal proceeding — that's the recovery the post is after, and it's a genuinely different frame than the one either Livingstone or Hoyer offers.
Mara: The throughline is consistent: liberal historiography describes the emotional aftermath of structural violence but cannot explain its foundations.
Pip: Which means the next question is always the one it won't ask — what produced this, and who was protected when it ended.
Natalie Livingstone describes The Nuremberg Women as a “fresh” and “humanising” depiction of the Nuremberg Trials, highlighting eight women—including journalists, interpreters, witnesses, artists, and administrators—whose efforts, she claims, made the proceedings “more democratic” and contributed to the perception that “justice was served.” Nonetheless, the book aligns with contemporary liberal historiography, emphasising personal stories, moral judgments, and depoliticisation. It masks the underlying class conflicts of fascism and neglects the political limitations inherent in the trials.
Livingstone’s book aligns with a recent microhistorical genre that emphasises personal experience rather than broad historical causality, prioritising emotional immediacy over political clarity. This creates a narrative filled with anecdotes but potentially misleading regarding its historical and political significance.
The book has been thoroughly reviewed. Notably, Katja Hoyer’s critique in the TLS stands out from a political viewpoint. Her review of The Nuremberg Women exemplifies a refined form of liberal historiography—graceful and compassionate, yet ultimately evasive. It demonstrates a style that appeals to the reader’s moral instincts while subtly lacking the political and structural context of the event. By lauding Natalie Livingstone’s microhistory, Hoyer reflects a broader ideological pattern: replacing detailed analysis with narrative empathy and transforming structural violence into emotional spectacle. As a result, the review appears to enhance our understanding of Nuremberg but in fact limits it by depicting the women in the trials as moral witnesses rather than active participants in the postwar justice system.
Hoyer aims to humanise the Nuremberg Trials by highlighting women who typed transcripts, translated interrogations, and experienced the surreal environment of occupied Germany. While recognising the importance of reclaiming women’s labour, she does not view these women as part of a gendered labour system. Instead, she portrays them as emotional mediators—conscience bearers, moral stabilisers, and psychological interpreters. This approach is more sentimental than historical, disguising insight with emotion. The women were not merely moral spectators; they were integral to the bureaucratic machinery that facilitated the Allies’ legal theatre. Their work was organised, exploited, and instrumentalised, and reducing them to psychological witnesses ignores the conditions that made their roles necessary.
Nuremberg Without Politics
Hoyer’s review is most revealing in its omissions. The Nuremberg Trials were not simply a moral reckoning with fascism; they were also a geopolitical performance that legitimised the postwar order, a selective prosecution that spared the economic foundations of German imperialism, a mechanism for reintegrating former Nazis into the emerging Cold War state, and a legal spectacle that concealed the class forces behind fascism. Hoyer acknowledges none of this. Instead, she presents the trials as a psychological drama in ruined Germany, witnessed by women whose moral clarity offsets the defendants’ brutality.
This is the liberal fantasy: fascism appears as a moral aberration rather than a structural product of capitalist crisis. Hoyer’s praise for Livingstone’s narrative craft is revealing. She commends the book’s vivid scenes, reconstructed conversations, and psychological atmosphere, but narrative is never neutral. It organises meaning ideologically, privileging the exceptional over the typical, the visible over the structural, and the personal over the political. In Hoyer’s hands, microhistory becomes a way to avoid the larger question: what social forces produced fascism, and what political economy shaped its juridical aftermath? By centering individual women, Hoyer displaces the trials’ structural contradictions, replacing analysis with empathy and empathy with moral reassurance.
The Depoliticisation of Fascism
What is most troubling in Hoyer’s review is its understated depoliticisation of fascism. She presents the Nazi defendants as psychological monsters, the women as moral witnesses, and the trials as a cathartic encounter with evil. The framing is comforting, but historically misleading. Fascism was not a mental pathology; it was a class project, a violent defense of property relations amid capitalist crisis. The Nuremberg Trials did not dismantle that order; they purified its image, punishing the most visible criminals while leaving intact the structures that made their crimes possible. Hoyer cannot confront this because her method forecloses it: liberal humanism can describe the emotional aftermath of structural violence, but not explain its foundations.
Empathy cannot replace analysis. It is not enough to sympathise with the women of Nuremberg; we must examine the conditions that shaped their labour, the political forces that defined their roles, and the ideological purposes their presence served. Hoyer’s review offers emotional satisfaction while withholding historical understanding. It is an elegant evasion.
Katja Hoyer’s review exposes a broader weakness in contemporary historiography: the dominance of liberal sentiment over structural analysis. It presents history as moral reassurance rather than explanation, humanising power instead of scrutinising it. The women of Nuremberg deserve more than the role of emotional witnesses in a liberal morality play. They should be understood as workers, agents, and participants in one of the twentieth century’s most politically charged legal proceedings. To recover that reality, we must move beyond Hoyer’s humanist framing and confront the structural conditions her review leaves untouched.
The Personalisation of History
Livingstone presents the trials through the lives of eight women, including Erika Mann, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Tatiana Stupnikova, Laura Knight, Ursula von Kardoff, Ingeborg Kálnoky, and two others whose roles are framed as morally or emotionally decisive. Their stories are rendered with sympathy and detail. Yet the book’s central claim—that these women’s “human” and “intimate” experiences disclose Nuremberg’s “true” meaning—rests on a false and politically reactionary premise.
Contrary to Livingstone’s account, the Nuremberg Trials were not a moral drama in which personal courage and emotional labour delivered justice. They were a legal response to a crisis of world capitalism, shaped by Allied geopolitical interests and the emerging Cold War. Politically selective and tightly constrained, they could not confront fascism’s social roots. By centering individual experience, Livingstone sidesteps the essential question: what social forces produced fascism, and why did Nuremberg fail to hold them accountable?
The Erasure of Capitalism’s Responsibility for Fascism
Livingstone’s narrative accepts the juridical fiction that fascism was the work of a handful of political criminals. Her focus on the Nazi defendants’ physical and psychological decline, as Erika Mann observed at Camp Ashcan, reinforces this myth. Descriptions of Göring, Streicher, and others as “gaunt,” “broken,” or “like wild beasts in a zoo” are treated as evidence of moral collapse, but this is trivia presented as historical insight. The condition of Nazi leaders in 1945 tells us nothing about the class forces that brought them to power. Fascism arose not from individual pathology, but from the crisis of German capitalism, the destruction of the workers’ movement, and the support of monopoly capital. The industrialists who financed and sustained Hitler—Krupp, Thyssen, and IG Farben—largely avoided serious punishment. Livingstone does not confront this because her framework obscures it. Nuremberg’s failure to indict capitalism was not incidental; it was the trials’ central political limitation, a reality her human-interest narrative conceals.
The Liberal Myth of “Democratic Justice”
Livingstone repeatedly argues that women’s participation made the trials “more democratic” and “more humane.” The claim is sentimental but politically hollow. Women interpreters, journalists, and artists did not alter the trials’ fundamental character, which was determined by the geopolitical aims of the United States and Britain as they moved toward confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Tatiana Stupnikova, the Russian interpreter, exemplifies this problem. Livingstone presents her labour as evidence of international cooperation and moral seriousness. Yet the emerging Cold War shaped every aspect of the trial, as the Allies disputed charges, evidence, and the scope of prosecution. Nuremberg was not a harmonious exercise in global justice, but a site of political conflict. By turning these tensions into background for personal drama, Livingstone reinforces the liberal myth of Nuremberg as a triumph of Western democratic values.
Laura Knight, the British war artist, allows Livingstone to aestheticise the trial. Knight’s paintings are presented as capturing the proceedings’ “humanity,” but this framing has an ideological function: it turns a legally constrained, politically shaped process into a cultural scene of moral reckoning. Art at Nuremberg did not uncover deeper truths; it helped construct the trial’s image as civilised, rational, and humane. Livingstone accepts that image without criticism.
Livingstone presents Ursula von Kardoff, the German journalist, as a symbol of the “new Germany”: a nation prepared to confront its past and embrace democracy. This distorts history. The German bourgeoisie was not remade after 1945; it was preserved. The class forces that supported Hitler were absorbed into the postwar order and realigned with the Western powers against the Soviet Union. Livingstone’s portrayal of Kardoff therefore aids the rehabilitation of the German ruling class by casting its postwar representatives as enlightened democrats.
Gender as Moral Category
Livingstone treats gender in liberal-essentialist terms, casting women as moral anchors, emotional mediators, and guardians of humanity. Their labour—as interpreters, witnesses, reporters, and carers—is presented as inherently humane and democratising. A Marxist analysis, by contrast, understands gender as a social relation rather than a moral category. The gendered labour at Nuremberg shaped the trial’s ideological presentation but did not overcome its political limits. Livingstone’s sentimental feminism humanises the proceedings while obscuring their structural constraints.The Nuremberg Women is polished and readable, but politically reactionary. By personalising history, moralising justice, aestheticising suffering, and erasing fascism’s class roots, Livingstone ultimately reinforces the dominant liberal narrative of the postwar order.
The book’s central claim—that the emotional labour and personal courage of eight women reveal Nuremberg’s “true” meaning—is untenable. Nuremberg can be understood only through a materialist analysis of the social forces that produced fascism and the political limits that shaped the trials.
“We are hurtling towards a seismic shift in terms of really every aspect of our society is on the brink of being transformed by emerging technologies and, in particular, artificial intelligence.”
Laura Bates
“I’d also like to live in a world in which women can do whatever they want, without fear of what men might do to them. But we don’t live in that world. Our present reality demands that both men and women accept the existence of the sexual asymmetry, even if that means curtailing our freedoms.”
Mary Harrington
“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Rosa Luxemburg
“Fucking ain’t fair, act accordingly” (Female Dating Strategy blogpost, 2021)
The New Age of Sexism is a lucid, well-written and deeply researched book on how right-wing and fascist forces are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to attack minorities and women in general.
The subject matter contained in the book is, to say the least, disturbing. The degradation of male-female relations has reached a new apex with the use of this latest technology. AI, virtual reality, robotics, and the metaverse have delivered a “new age of misogyny” and, according to Bates “, We are standing on the edge of a precipice”.
As Barbara Ellen writes, “One recurrent theme is that women are no longer being ‘merely’ harassed, they are also being erased–replaced by increasingly realistic pornographic tech-proxies. Among them is a new generation of sex robots that can be purchased online and delivered to your door. Some models have mechanically articulated necks to simulate orgasm. Others give oral sex with back-and-forth head motions that Bates likens to a “pecking chicken”. Although vocal interaction can be enabled with sex dolls, many men don’t want it. It wrecks the fantasy – they prefer them mute.”[1]
The book is graphic in its accuracy, the rise of cyber-brothels, in which, believe it or not, robot sex workers take care of your every sexual need. Bates recounts in the book how a robot called Kokeshi: “A silicone shell being offered up as a warm, willing, breathing, talking, consenting sexual partner.” Bates comments that the robot’s labia have been torn off. “Perhaps bitten off. I feel sick.” Writes Bates. Even more disturbing is that she finds sex dolls made to look as young as five, with child vulvas, holding teddy bears.
Although Bates wonders why society accommodates this parallel universe, the answer is not far away. In one chapter, she examines the rise of the so-called Metaverse and its control by oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and his global Meta empire. Zuckerberg’s promotion of a “virtual-reality social world” is a big money maker, and so lightly policed as to be non-existent, providing a license to print money by the billions.
As Laura Bates writes in a Guardian article: “Mark Zuckerberg has grandly promised: ‘In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.” It’s the sort of promise that might sound intensely appealing to some men and terrifying to most women. Indeed, the deeply immersive nature of the metaverse will make the harassment and abuse that many of us endure daily in text-based form on social media feel 100 times more real, and will simultaneously make moderation 100 times more challenging. The result is a perfect storm. And I am speaking from experience, not idly speculating: I spent days in the metaverse researching my book, The New Age of Sexism. She continues, “I visited worlds where I saw what appeared to be young children frequently experiencing attention from adult men they did not know. In one virtual karaoke-style club, the singers on stage were young women in their early 20s. However, based on their voices, I would estimate that many of the girls behind the avatars were likely around nine or 10 years old. Conversely, the voices of the men commenting on them from the audience, shouting out to them and following them offstage were often unmistakably those of adults.”[2]
The role of Meta and other social media websites, which are easily accessible on the latest smartphones, in spreading and profiting from this online abuse and illegality is well-documented. Although not documented in the book is the role played by corporate advertising in helping perpetrate this abuse. But as Thomas Scripps writes “The real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.[3]
Meta is not the only one profiting from this sexual degradation and exploitation. Companies such as Elon Musk’s (X) and Sundar Pichai’s (Google) are in charge of the algorithms, datasets, systems and search engines that promote and deliver this disgusting filth.
If the growth of cyber brothels was not enough, Bates tackles an equally disturbing phenomenon, and that is the massive rise of deep fake pornography. Bates has been the target of this illegal behaviour. In the book, she describes a panic attack after being sent deepfake pornographic images of her. Bates’s experience is just the tip of a massive iceberg of this kind of abuse. A report by the Children’s Commissioner for England makes the following points.
“The growth of the online world is a technological revolution, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed in centuries. The internet has enhanced our lives immeasurably by opening up education, communication, and research in ways that those of us who are now well into our adulthood might never have imagined. For children growing up in 2025, who are among the first generations to have never known a solely analogue life, being online is second nature.
It is an incredible asset in our daily lives, but it has also fundamentally changed the nature of how we interact with one another, how we stay safe, and how we maintain our privacy. For most children, if not all, it has introduced a darker side. They are forever in their digital playgrounds.
Every day, children tell me about the violent, upsetting or degrading things that are shown to them online by algorithms designed to capture their attention. That’s why, as Children’s Commissioner, I have been relentlessly focused on driving for greater safety online. It has also been driven by what I observed in children’s changing behaviour during my years as a teacher and headteacher, as they learned to navigate life through a digital lens. But the subject of this report – sexually explicit ‘deepfakes’ – is not one I was familiar with until more recently, despite having worked with children every day of my professional life. Of all the worrying trends in online activity children have spoken to me about – from seeing hardcore porn on X to cosmetics and vapes being advertised to them through TikTok – the evolution of ‘nudifying’ apps to become tools that aid in the abuse and exploitation of children is perhaps the most mind-boggling. [4]
There is no doubt that Bates is a sincere activist and her books are an essential part of opposing this alarming abuse of women, but her work is only half the story. Bates, by her admission, is not comfortable debating, and her critics are caricatured or derided as “male” or, worse, “Right-wing”. My criticism of her is not from the right but from the left.
In my review of Lost Boys by James Bloodworth, I examined the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.
There is a flip side to Manosphere, and that is the rise of the Femosphere, which Bates has studiously avoided examining in any detail. This movement was spawned by the growth of the right-wing #MeToo movement.[5] The Femosphere, it must be said, is equally as reactionary as the Manosphere movement.
Bates has so far not commented much, if at all, on this right-wing movement, which has been written about in numerous academic papers and been fabled and glamorised in equal measure in books such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Stephanie Lacava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You.
In her excellent article [6], Rachel Healy examines the work of Dr Jilly Kay, specifically her use of the term “Femosphere” in a paper published in 2024. [7] Healy writes that “Kay has been researching a reactionary turn among young women, and how a backlash against mainstream feminism has created new spaces online. In the femosphere, instead of “incels” – male involuntary celibates – there are “femcels”, and instead of pickup artists there are female dating strategists and so-called “dark feminine” influencers who encourage women to find men to support them financially.”
It is not within the scope of this brief review to examine everything in Kay’s excellent research paper, which is freely accessible on the web. One of the more disturbing features of this so-called new feminist movement has been its adoption of the same fascist ideas as its male counterparts.
Kay quotes from an FDS podcast episode, which discussed a Reddit post entitled “40 Years a NEET: Reflections of a Stay-At-Home Son. One of the hosts said:
“I think men like this can’t be saved, I believe that the only that can be done about them is to allow them to perish on their own time […] we shouldn’t slaughter people for being like this but, like, they’re going just not to reproduce because again, they don’t have the drive to find a wife, they’re not gonna have kids, and I think it’s just better if their bloodline dies out, honestly, that’s probably just the best thing for society […] the only men who deserve to have families and kids are men who are gonna model ambition, drive and healthy relationship dynamics.”
The only difference between this group and their Manosphere counterparts is that the men have more ready access to guns than their female counterparts. It is undoubtedly only a matter of time before one of these trainee female fascists decides to launch a murderous rampage in the name of modern feminism.
To be blunt, this type of reactionary feminism would not look out of place in Nazi Germany. Their modern-day eugenicist ideas will be embraced by fascists worldwide. They make the same arguments that were put forward by the nazis. Only a cursory read of Mein Kampf would confirm that.
There is nothing progressive in this modern feminism, as Kate Randal points out. There is more talk of gender today than at any previous moment in history. The #MeToo campaign in the US has supposedly brought the conditions of women to the fore like never before. The Global media and Hollywood are animated by hardly anything else. But this is a fraud. The women receiving nearly all the coverage belong to the upper echelons of society, the richest five or ten per cent. Working-class women are largely absent from this discussion, except for a few token exceptions that highlight the rule. As Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.[8]”That is true today as it was in Luxembourg’s day.
London-based author and activist Laura Bates, 37, is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a website that collates first-hand accounts of sexism from women around the world, using those experiences to press for change. She’s also the author of bestselling nonfiction titles including Misogynation and Men Who Hate Women, as well as novels for teens that grapple with issues such as revenge porn and slut-shaming. Her new novel is Sisters of Sword and Shadow.
[1] Sexism with a silicone face-observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/sexism-with-a-silicone-face
[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence- violence-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html
[4] “One day this could happen to me” Children, nudification tools, and
sexually explicit deepfakes April 2025-assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2025/04/Children-nudification-tools-and-sexually-explicit-deepfakes-April-2025.pdf
[5] See – She Said: The origin story of the #MeToo campaign, or a version of it- it-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/21/bcwe-n21.html
A Trumpet of Sedition 