Yesterday there were three terrorist attacks within a matter of hours of one another. In Turkey, the Russian ambassador, Andrei Karlov, was shot dead by a 22-year-old policeman named Mevlut Mert Altintas who is said to have shouts ‘I am part of Syria, I am on the path of Aleppo’ as he opened fire. In Germany, a lorry drove into a Christmas market in Berlin. A suspect, initially identified as an asylum seeker from Pakistan, has been arrested - although it has (at the time of writing) not been confirmed whether he is the attacker. At the time of writing 12 people had died with more than 50 injured. In Switzerland, three people were shot at a mosque in Zurich.
These attacks come at the end of a year which has seen multiple terror attacks take place in Europe – following on from the attack on Paris in November 2015, 2016 has seen similar events unfold across Germanyas well as in Nice and Belgium.
Since November 2015 and the attack on Paris, close-to-home terror attacks have become more frequent. They’ve become more normal. Simultaneously wars in Syria and Yemen have caused increasingly more and more bloodshed.
It’s not yet clear what the exact political fallout of the attack in Berlin will be. Although that hasn’t stopped Nigel Farage from wading in. This morning alone he’s said that terror attacks will be Angela Merkel’s legacy and accused the widower of Jo Cox MP, Brendan Cox, of supporting terrorists. Meanwhile, the shooting in Turkey seems to have drawn the country’scoup-surviving president Erdogan and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, closer together.
There’s a lot we don’t yet know. As with many of this year’s events that which is uncertain outweighs that which is certain. But what we do know is how we feel. How many of us can escape the creeping feeling that acts of terror have begun to creep, more and more frequently, into our lives? How many of us feel concern? It’s almost impossible not to, when you see friends checking in on Facebook and ‘marking themselves safe’ after an atrocity takes place. Who can fail to feel a bit helpless in the face of awful events that we have no control over? Who doesn’t then wish they could just look away, but feel compelled to continue watching? Who isn’t starting to feel uneasy that, with each brutal act, our shock is diminished just a little bit more, our ability to panic eroded ever so slightly and our desire to deploy empathetic hashtags and national flag themed sympathetic profile picture filters lessens yet again?
The Debrief spoke to Professor Chris Brewin following the attack on Brussels in March this year. He has conducted extensive research on the effects that terror attacks have on communities. He explained that people numb themselves to the magnitude of terror when it happens, the threat of it happening again and the potential consequences after it happens. ‘People do have to have protective mechanisms otherwise one would feel under threat the whole time’ he said, ‘of course if you have a psychological disorder like PTSD you do feel under threat the whole time’. Ultimately he explained that ‘most people are able to supress those thoughts and memories…there are limits as to how much feeling intensely other people’s distress is possible.’
Terror thrives, and has always thrived on the shock of the new: new ways of harming people, new places to attack. It’s not easy to maintain a high level of shock, or to be horrified every time an atrocity occurs, indeed as Professor Brewin points out there are good reasons that we aren’t able to sustain those emotions. However, it would be equally dangerous to ignore these events, to pretend that they haven’t affected the way we think, behave and go about our day to day lives.
In the same era that Islamist terrorists have effectively staged multiple attacks on Western Europe, right wing populist politicians have fed off of the threat they pose. The UK voted to leave the European Union following a campaign which wilfully tapped into xenophobia, Donald Trump defied everyone’s expectations to win the US presidency on the back off innumerable racist and xenophobic remarks and policy promises. Now we find ourselves in a time when Nigel Farage can not only say that such events are directly linked to Angela Merkel’s policy on admitting refugees and accusing the widower of a woman who was murdered by a far right extremist of ‘supporting extremism’. We are now living in a time when The Sun runs the following line hours after a terror attack, ‘what began as an act of great humanity, borne in part out of Germany's lingering guilt for WW2, has morphed into Merkel's political suicide', also linking immigration fears, terrorism and the inevitable decline in political will to help that will follow.
Speaking before yesterday’s attacks, historian Margaret MacMillan spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about how 2016 has, regrettably, reminded her of 1914. ‘I wish I could stop, but I find myself thinking of 1914’ she said. It’s worth quoting the rest of her thoughts in full:
‘The world then had seemed so stable, so manageable. Crises - political, social, economic, military - came and went but "they", bankers, statesmen, politicians, always managed them in the end. Yes, there were grumblings - from the working classes or women, or those who were losing their livelihoods because of free trade or mechanisation. And there were some strong emotions about: fears of rapid change, passionate nationalisms that meant love of one's own country and hatred of others. Ominous in retrospect because we know what happened. But at the time there was a complacency - it would surely all work out all right. That confidence was dangerous because it meant that people didn't take the warning signs seriously enough. I wish I could stop making the comparisons.’
What has followed every recent atrocity is commotion and frenzied clamouring. The backlash which inevitably follows is furious – condemnations, accusations and promises of further ‘crack downs’. What has so often absent, lost in the noise and forgotten in the rush by the likes of Farage to be vindicated, to be right, is not only reflection but realism. In MacMillan’s words ‘history does not neatly repeat itself but, oh, there are so often echoes and rhymes.’ We can't afford to look away.
You might also be interested in:
Women Tell Of Islamophobic Attacks As Hate Crime Numbers Leap
Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.