After a little Sunday School discussion (see previous entry), I went to see The Pianist. Yes, it's another Holocaust movie, but I don't suppose there can be too many, especially if they are as intelligent and well-crafted as this one was.

It was bleak, of course. And gruesome. And horrifying. And depressing.

But when I got in my car after the movie, mulling over it, I turned on the radio to hear of this:

Two nearly simultaneous suicide bombings rocked central Tel Aviv early Sunday evening, killing at least 23 people and wounding more than 100 others, Israeli police said.

And though I'm fully aware that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a complicated mire, fraught with issues not directly related to religion, only the simple-minded would deny that anti-Semitism is a core issue in the relationship between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

So the movie, while another Holocaust movie, covers the lessons yet again that cannot really be overdone, because for many people they still haven't completely learned them.

In the 30's, Germans scapegoated Jews for all the world's ills, centering their propaganda on a focused group of people. And it worked. Dehumanization and misdirected blame is an all to eerily effective psychological tactic. This mode of thought, not really thought at all but rather distilled, irrational hatred, accomplishes the twin goals of giving people an enemy and deflecting attention away from their own root problems. Ultimately, taken to an extreme, it fosters in human beings to subject the most abhorrent acts of cruelty on fellow human beings.

And as disgusting as these lessons are to watch, it is vitally important to learn them. Over and over again if need be. In the movie, an old man is hoisted out of his wheelchair over a balcony because he won't stand in respect to a German soldier. Babies are smothered, children are beaten, men and women alike are shot in the head indiscriminately, at the whim of the soldiers. As shocking as it is, we look at it and say, "How could people do such things?", and rationally we want to believe it's just a movie, that it didn't happen, and that people aren't capable of such things.

But the simple fact is, they are. Humans are all too easily capable of the most abominable inhumanity. To deny this central fact is to deny human nature.

We can't be reminded often enough, it seems.