I've looked at my Netflix rental activity over the past few months to confirm what I just realized: I've unintentionally watched a long string of movies relating to Nazi Germany and WWII. It started in February with Apt Pupil, about a boy who discovers that one of his neighbors is a fugitive Nazi war criminal. Then there was a break of 3 weeks until I watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which tells of the young son of a concentration camp commandant who befriends a boy his age who is living on the other side of the fence, where everyone "wears striped pajamas" in his words. Then, a month after that, in the same week I watched Max, which is a fictitious account of Hitler's aspirations as an artist and how his failings there may have influenced his move into politics, and The Reader, about a young man who has an affair with an older woman whom he later finds out is a Nazi fugitive. Two weeks after that was The Pianist, a true story about a Jewish concert pianist who escaped the holocaust and the difficulties he faced in doing so. Two weeks later was the drama, Downfall, about Hitler's last days in his Berlin bunker leading to his suicide. That same week, which was last week, I saw Valkyrie, which is about one of the most notable failed assassination attempts on Hitler by his own officers. Now, tonight, I will watch Defiance, about Polish resistance fighters during WWII. Looking back even further, I saw The Good German, which takes place in post WWII occupied Berlin. Somewhere in there, I saw Miracle at St. Anna, which is about a small group of black "Buffalo Soldiers" during WWII, and how they had to battle racism as much as the Germans during their war.

I wasn't intentionally choosing these movies based on the theme, but I have always been intrigued by the holocaust and the people that were responsible for it. I think the thing that keeps bringing me back to it is wondering how modern, civilized people could institutionalize murder, and carry it out without the blink of an eye, as a nation. It has always baffled me. Sure, there were plenty of Germans that were aware of what was going on and horrified. But, there were plenty more who either turned a blind eye or actually participated. Downfall, in particular, was criticized by some for supposedly "humanizing" Hitler. But I think it's important for us to remember that he was human. If we allow ourselves to consider him some inhuman monster, then we allow ourselves to believe that someone like him can never again rise to power and enact such evil upon the world, and that would be a naive thing to believe. We've seen events in Nigeria, Rwanda, Darfur, Myanmar and many other places that are just as ghastly, just as evil as what the Nazis perpetrated. These other countries merely lack the economic strength and infrastructure to carry it out on as massive a scale as the Germans did. That doesn't stop them from trying their best, however. And yet, these genocides largely are ignored by most of the rest of the world. Why? I'm not positive, but part of it probably has to do with the fact that these other countries aren't threatening the rest of the world, so the rest of the world is content to let them kill "their own". Many claim racism, saying that as long as they are killing brown and black people, the world will stand by idly. I can't say for sure, but it's probably a combination of these things. Meanwhile, the hypocrites in our own government justify wars for oil as "rescuing people from tyranny", and yet we don't life a finger to rescue people from genocide. If only the genocides would happen in an oil rich country, then the mighty US would surely swoop in for the rescue. Who knows, now that we have a black man, instead of an oil man, in the White House, maybe things will be different. One can always hope.