Mulled wine and Heckler & Koch assault rifles don’t belong together, except in Christmas films like Die Hard. Festive visitors to Christmas markets in Berlin, London or Strasbourg this year will notice the pairing all the same. Concrete blocks surround fairy lights, and the scent of cloves and cinnamon wafts over armed police carrying submachine guns.
Concrete blocks surround fairy lights, and the scent of cloves and cinnamon wafts over armed police carrying submachine guns
Since an Islamist drove a lorry into the Breitscheidplatz market in Berlin in December 2016, killing twelve and injuring dozens, we deck the halls with blast protection. There are still tacky wooden chalets selling sausages, but they are now often surrounded by steel posts, truck-proof planters, and one-way systems designed to stop SUVs achieving murderous velocities before hitting crash barriers.
A Saudi doctor with extremist views – their nature is unclear – drove his car into the market in Magdeburg, Germany, last December, killing six and injuring hundreds. This year’s market is back on, despite some reports the event had been cancelled. The security infrastructure there is considerable.
Terrorism is supposed to be the tactic of demanding the impossible, said Christopher Hitchens, and demanding it at gunpoint. The impossible demand here is that open societies should not be open. Our response, however, has not been to fight back but to accept a siege mentality. We empty our water bottles and remove our belts at airport security. We find ways to adjust to the looming threat of terror.
Hitchens, earlier than others, took jihadist terror for what it said it was, refusing to accept it as a misunderstood plea for social work or reasonable historical reparations. He would not have been surprised that Christmas markets have become targets. Puritans always find joy offensive, and all the more so when it is cheerfully commercial and theologically slapdash. One can imagine a jihadi propagandist captioning his TikTok of the Christmas market in Birmingham with increasingly furious accusations: idolatry, drunkenness, Glühwein, and – the omnipresent bonus slur – Zionism.
Not all vehicle ramming attacks are carried out by jihadists – only, as one recent study found, most of them. (We sleep safe at night, social science research stands guard.) Hitchens characterised Islamism as possessing the unholy trinity of self-pity, self-righteousness, and self-loathing. Our daily beauty makes them feel ugly, and the freer and happier we are, the more they hate us.
Governments have fenced off the problem with concrete and public order measures. Breitscheidplatz is now surrounded by the permanent bollards and fortifications that have become depressingly familiar in our cities. They have been introduced, in the dead language of consultancy, as a layered approach to threat mitigation.
The infrastructure of fear colonises our streets. We seem dismally accepting, but this is not a problem that time will ease. Bins used to be absent where the IRA might leave bombs. That struggle ended only with effort, mutual sacrifice, and the victory of those who believed politics better than killing. Islamism is not a foe that will be satisfied with anything less than our destruction.
Liberal societies must acknowledge that Islamism regards pluralism as blasphemy, and blasphemy as mortal sin. There are those who flinch at naming this totalitarian ideology, speaking reverently of ‘communities’ and spending more energy worrying about the display of British flags than the murder of British citizens. In 2016, when police in Manchester rehearsed a terrorist assault at a shopping centre, they were made to apologise after the mock attacker yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’. A failure to recognise Islamism as the main force behind the terror threat is sentimental in the sense Hitchens used the word: a refusal to look facts in the face. What were police in Manchester supposed to shout? ‘I kill you in the name of an unspecified God!’ sounds precisely as ridiculous as it should.
Pride in British values is fake without the courage to defend them. Our country is threatened, and not by the possibility someone will display a St George’s Cross. We need to remember the old fashioned duty of saying, publicly and repeatedly, that there is an enemy of our way of life at large, that we are not going to pretend otherwise, and that we propose to resist – not only with police cordons but with unembarrassed merriment. Resistance means teaching Enlightenment values explicitly in schools, refusing to apologise when police training depicts jihadist threats accurately, and swift action – including deportation or imprisonment – against those preaching violent theocracy. This is a step in the defence of liberal values, not a far-right alternative.
Vehicle Security Barriers embody our accommodation to barbarism. These defences should be endured as temporary impositions – sufficient to buy us the safety to gather, in the open, under the festive lights, and behave as if we mean to go on living. Tinsel should never need to be guarded by submachine guns.
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