News reaches us of a stabbing at a Swiss train station, a scene so painfully familiar to those of us who have watched in recent years as public spaces in Europe have become arenas for random violence. Three are injured. The UK, ever the gentleman offering a handkerchief at a bloody brawl, has offered counter-terror experts. How very British: late to the party, but impeccably dressed.
Let us not pretend this is an isolated incident. This is the predictable consequence of a continent that has lost its nerve. We have spent decades dismantling the idea of the nation state, weakening borders, and celebrating a rootless cosmopolitanism that offers nothing to cling to when the barbarian arrives. And the barbarian is always at the gate, my friends. Sometimes he wears a balaclava, sometimes he wears a passport from a failed state.
The stabbing is just one symptom. The real disease is intellectual decadence: the refusal to call things by their proper names, the insistence that violence is a misunderstanding or a cry for help rather than what it actually is. Compare this to the Victorian era, when a man might stab another for honour, but the state would hang him without hesitation. Today we offer therapy and integration courses.
The Swiss, with their quaint neutrality and chocolate, now find themselves in the same boat as the rest of us. The train station is the new frontier. And the UK's offer of assistance is a sad little reminder that the old alliances are no longer about solidarity but about mutual desperation. We are all passengers on a train heading nowhere, and the conductor has lost the keys to the guard's van.
I shall leave you with this: Three injured bodies on a platform. A thousand words of official condolence. A million more of empty analysis. This is the fall of Rome happening in slow motion, and we are too busy trying to look enlightened to notice the fire.
