Six dead in a German mother-child centre. The assailant, a 24-year-old German man with a history of mental illness, turned a place of nurture into a slaughterhouse. British counter-terror experts have shared intelligence, as if this were some exotic foreign contagion. But the truth is more uncomfortable: this is our world now, a world where the barbarians are not at the gates but inside the nursery.
We are living through a period of intellectual and moral decadence that rivals the late Roman Empire. Violence erupts not from grand ideological struggles but from the frayed edges of a society that has lost its sense of purpose. The shooter was not a jihadi or a far-right militant; he was a drifter, disconnected, failed by a system that medicates rather than integrates. The West, from Berlin to London, has become a machine for producing atomised individuals who find meaning only in destruction.
Compare this to the Victorian era, when the state was harsh but communities bound together. Now we have experts and data but no spine. Our counter-terror apparatus monitors threats while the social fabric unravels. The fall of Rome was slow, but we are accelerating. This shooting is a symptom, not an anomaly. Until we admit that our civilisation is sick—and that the cure requires more than intelligence sharing—these tragedies will become routine.
