Will we ever look beyond the skin?

The opening sequence of Inglorious Basterds is a masterclass in how to write a lede. There's a lot to be said for its aesthetic treatment, but Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa really locks you in the chair, rendering your phone, your partner, and the jar of popcorn in your lap useless for the next few minutes. While investigating Perrier LaPadite, a French dairy farmer, the fate of a Jewish family in the neighborhood, Landa begins to explain his work.

"If one had to determine which attribute the Jews share with the beast, it would be that of the rat..."

In Nazi Germany, Jews were known as Untermenschen. Sub-human. The Germans were convinced that while the Jews looked every bit like other human beings, their skin concealed a dangerous, parasitic, and dirty creature.

The genius of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay is such that Landa addresses the psyche behind this thought in the same conversation. He mentions how similar squirrels and rats are in most characteristics; however, rats are much more hated.

Around the same time that the Schutzstaffel was rounding up Jews in occupied France, a few thousand miles to the northeast, a Russian Jewish poet, Ilya Ehrenburg, was doing propaganda among Stalin's army. She called the Germans "two-legged animals who have mastered the art of killing." Further east, the Japanese called the Chinese "chancarro", translating to animals or vermin.

It is easy to consider these groups as isolated armies, drunk on propaganda and hatred, suspending all principle of humanity towards their enemy. And we would be wrong every time. Xenophobic language has a long history, well beyond the Nazis, the Bolsheviks or even the slave trade. It goes back as far as Aristotle's most influential works. He postulated that races outside the Hellenic Friendship umbrella were natural slaves. One of those words commonly used to refer to Gypsies or Sub-Saharans: barbarians.

Dehumanization is not just a way of speaking; it's a way of thinking.

And the reflection is not limited to war generals or propagandist speakers. There is a famous nursery rhyme taught in Palestine. It says something like "Palestine is our country, the Jews our dogs". Not every child in Palestine will grow up to pick up a gun. Some will become doctors, some bankers, some writers. Some might even develop an affinity for sports. You know, like ordinary people. Just like the average football fan in a stadium, dressed in club colors, beer in hand, bellowing slogans of victory and glory. Last Sunday, when the home crowd at Mestalla Stadium heckled Vinicius Jr., it wasn't just an illustration of a specific group of people. It was the thought, the psyche, that they represented and had no problem expressing. So when Vinicius says something as loaded as "In Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists", he's not necessarily pointing to the C-Row Z block in, say, San Mames.