Will We Repeat Our History

There is a Holocaust museum located in Washington D.C. that I had the pleasure of visiting many years ago that took me on a journey that I will never forget.  The journey through the museum is one much like the trip the Jews may have gone on when they were going from camp to camp.  At the camps people were kept in fenced in areas, maybe not in cages like in Children of Men, but they were behind barbed wire, starved, kept in close quarters and tortured.  The lines of people waiting to be tortured looked like the lines at the camps in Germany lining up for death marches, gas chambers or waiting to be shot and killed.  The dead bodies in Children of Men were lined up in a similar fashion as the ones who were tossed away in the Holocaust.   They were laid body on top of limp body, lying face down in the dirt, waiting to be buried or taken away to a mass gravesite.  We do not see what happens to the people in the Children of Men, but as the bus passes each section, we see a story line of what their future holds for them here.  Torture, physical and humiliating torture followed by waiting and watching of other fellow immigrants.  Finally, as the bus pulls away, you see the lines of bodies waiting to be taken away.  This sequence is short, much like their lives are, much the lives in the whole movie are. 

Both groups of people, the Jews and the immigrants of Children of Men are suffering, immensely.  The Jews were taken from their homelands and dragged into a cramped shelter where they waited to die.  In Children of Men, we find foreigners searching for a new home and are rejected by the government in the most forceful way possible, forced into cages like wild beasts.  In during the time of the Holocaust, the world was fighting the Germans to free the Jews, but in Children of Men there is no one fighting for the freedom of the foreigners.  You see no protest against what they are doing other than the continuation of people flooding into Britain for safety even though they know their punishment could mean their life.

Did we not learn anything from this the first time?  We are shown that only one race and nationality is accepted, the British.  Though they do not all have to have blue eyes and blonde hair, people with different skin color or speak another language are easily spotted and taken away.  This truly is no different.  The reasoning to exterminate different races is much different; in contrast, they are getting rid of people do to over population not due to the dislike of what they look like.  But the outcome is the same.  Killing people for their background and heritage because it is not like their own.  So in answer to my question, no we have no learned from our mistakes, instead we are repeating them just applying them to different situations and difficulties.   It is repulsive and upsetting to think that this is what the director and screenwriter believe this is what our future is going to look like.  Taking all of our horrible memories of the past, and reenacting them in one final push for some kind of human resistance.