Lessons from history

I would never normally advocate watching something or reading something when you already know what the ending is going to be, but I think sometimes it is good for the soul. Case in point: Deborah Moggach's version of The Diary of Anne Frank for the BBC. There is something dreadfully poignant about watching this 'tweenager' dream about her future as "a dancer, an ice-skater, I haven't really decided yet" when you know that in fact she is going to die in the typhus-ridden Bergen-Belsen camp only a few years' later. I know people often feel that Holocaust literature has been done to death, but it never ceases to be important to remind people of what they are capable of - both good and bad. This is, we are told, an opportunity to learn the lessons of history, but do we ever? I'm not sure where I stand on the current situation in Gaza, but I know it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. What are the lengths we would go to to protect our own? The recent changes in British legislation are another example, opening the gates for a myriad of unsettling situations justified under 'anti-terrorism' laws. The fact that Iceland was recently declared a terrorist threat to the UK in order to allow the financiers to gain access to British funds in failing Icelandic banks is nothing short of disasterous. The dystopic worlds of Orwell and Huxley apparently exist, quietly and irrevocably, under a veil of polite deniability and 'human rights'. I would like to think that were such a situation as Anne Frank's ever to arise again, I would do the right thing, no matter how hard it may be. The absolutely terrifying thing is, however, that I do not know what I would do until I am faced with doing it. More terrifying, even, than that is whether there would be anyone to help me and mine if we became persona non grata for some reason or another.