What are the chances of Berlin happening here?

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Berlin has come to symbolise many things over the centuries – many good and, sadly, many bad; all of the fault-lines of 20th century history seemed to pass through Germany’s capital city.

From the First World War to the perniciousness of Nazism to the physical manifestation of the great schism between capitalist Western Europe and communist Eastern Europe – it was the original version of Donald Trump’s great big wall except it was real and not just a post-truth marketing tool.

After that wall was dismantled in 1989, a united Berlin slowly became a great city, a symbol of unity, and tolerance and new possibility. It has long been Germany’s most interesting city, young, tolerant alternative and imaginative, a beacon for artists and writers.

On Monday night, over a quarter of a century after that historic moment, a truck ploughed into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin.

It was a deliberate act of terror, designed to foment another breach, this one between the secular west and radical fundamental Islam, with its sinister sociopathic culture.

The attack was very similar to the one in Nice earlier this year. Like Nice, a civilian vehicle became a weapon that was ploughed into defenceless people.

It was indiscriminate and random – the target was everybody, anybody it was western society and the tolerance that these fanatics find intolerable.

We are used to terror on a similar scale here (and in Britain) where dozens have died in bomb attacks. You can’t begin to start comparing them or put them onto a scale of atrocity – all are appalling, all involve senseless death.

Is what happened worse than Birmingham or worse than Birmingham in 1974 or worse than Omagh in 1998 or worse than the Dublin-Monaghan bombings?  Such attacks strike fear and invite hardline reaction. They are actuated by hate and invite a hateful response.

There are connections here. Not direct ones. But connections all the same. The terrible horror wreaked on Aleppo – Syria’s second city reduced to rubble, tens of thousands killed.

The waves of desperate evacuees seeking refugee status and finding only indifference or hostility.  The other conflicts fuelled by fanaticism in the middle east, that spread like a cancer.

It’s galling to think that Germany was the lone European voice of reason – that its chancellor Angela Merkel was the only one who didn’t pull up the drawbridge.

She too was just about the only European leader who didn’t grovel or back-peddle when the US elected Donald Trump as its leader.

Let us hoped that the horror in Berlin last night won’t blunt the tolerance. You can see why this city was chosen as a target. It stands for everything that Al Qaeda, ISIS or Daish hate.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.