I am sitting in a pub in Soho, nursing a gin that tastes faintly of despair and lemon peel, when the news crawls across my phone like a slug of pure evil. Six dead. At a mothers’ and children’s centre. In Germany. Suspected far-right attack. The words blur together because my brain refuses to accept that we are still doing this. Still letting these tattooed, basement-dwelling, Reich-fetishising tosspots crawl out from under their rocks to murder people who just wanted a cup of tea and a safe space for their kids.
Let me paint you a picture of the scene. Imagine a place designed for soft colours, plastic toys, and the smell of stale biscuits and wet nappies. A refuge for women fleeing violence, for children who have seen too much too young. Now imagine a man, a true believer in the master race, walking in with a gun. A man who probably spends his evenings on encrypted forums swapping memes about ‘remigration’ and ‘Jewish world orders’ while his mother does his laundry. Six bodies. Six families destroyed. Six futures removed from this planet because someone decided that their twisted ideology was more important than a toddler’s smile.
This is what passes for ‘political action’ among the far-right. They talk about ‘saving Germany’ or ‘preserving European culture’ while shooting mothers in the face. They claim to defend children while orphaning them. Their logic is a Möbius strip of self-pity and hatred: they are victims of a multicultural plot, so they become executioners. They demand safety for their own kind, so they make everyone else unsafe. It is the intellectual equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum and blaming the furniture for being in the way.
But do not let the word ‘suspected’ fool you. We know. We always know. The shooter will have a manifesto, a YouTube video, a trail of online breadcrumbs leading to some Austrian nutter’s rant about the Great Replacement. The police will find swastikas, copies of ‘Mein Kampf’, and a laptop full of incel poetry. And the politicians will offer thoughts and prayers, and flags will be lowered, and then everyone will move on to the next outrage while the far-right continues to fester in the dank corners of the internet, waiting for the next martyr.
I have reached the bottom of my glass, and the gin is not helping. My fingers are typing this bile because I am angry, and being angry is the only honest response. We need to stop pretending this is about mental health or social isolation or ‘a lone wolf’. It is about an ideology that has been given a safe harbour by mainstream politics. It is about parties that court the far-right vote, newspapers that peddle anti-immigrant hysteria, and a public that shrugs and says ‘what can you do?’
The answer is: plenty. But we won’t. Because that would require effort, and it’s easier to retweet a crying politician and go back to scrolling. So here I am, a drunk journalist in a London pub, writing a eulogy for six people I will never meet, killed by a hatred that we all pretend is fringe but that everyone enables. The gin is gone. The world is still mad. I am going to order another.
Rest in power, you six. I am sorry we failed you.
