There's nothing sadder (or better) in the cinema than a DeSica movie

I have just linked over at Pajamas what I think is one of the more interesting – and, alas, depressing – blog posts I have read in a while: Do We Now Return to the Garden of the Finzi-Continis? from our esteemed ShrinkWrapped. The doctor is worried that, with the departure of Ariel Sharon, we (and when I say “we” I don’t mean just Jews) may be be headed “back to the future,” or should I say “future to the back”?, to the horrendous decades of the Thirties and Forties. The spectre on the horizon in all this is, of course, the Iran of the maniac Ahmadinejad, not to mention our friends in Al Qaeda said to be infiltrating Gaza with alacrity. As ShrinkWrapped puts it:

I have written before (in “Good Muslims” and “Good Germans” and again, in A Ticking Clock) that in our war on Islamic fascism, we are in the late 1930’s. We can stop Hitler/al Qaeda/Islamic fascism/Iran now at some indeterminate, possibly terrible cost, or stop them later, at horrific cost.

Of course, the CW is that these people cannot possibly touch us. After all, we are so well-armed, so modern. And they are so primitive, so Third World. What a racist conception that is.