A man with a knife. A Swiss train station. A nation famed for its neutrality and order now forced to confront the same spectre that haunts the rest of Europe. The stabbing in the quiet canton of St. Gallen is not a random act of violence. It is a symptom. And the UK’s sharing of intelligence merely confirms what we already suspect: the continent is sliding into a security coma, one blade stroke at a time.
Let us avoid the reflexive moralising. The media will speak of ‘lone wolves’ and ‘mental health’. They always do. But consider the historical cycle. Rome did not fall to barbarians at the gates; it rotted from within. The lines at the border grew porous, the civic religion of shared values faded, and the state lost its monopoly on violence. Today, Switzerland — the very emblem of alpine order — finds its railway stations transformed into stages for the primal scream of an age that has forgotten how to cohere.
The attack is small in scale. One assailant, a handful of wounded. But scale is not the measure of significance. The symbolic weight is immense. Switzerland has long been the offshore vault of the Western world, a place where stability is currency. If Zurich or Geneva now require the same intelligence sharing that London and Paris have grown weary of, then the European project is not merely in crisis; it is in open retreat.
The UK’s offer to share intelligence is both generous and ironic. Generous because it extends a hand to a nation that has often kept its own counsel. Ironic because Britain itself has spent years grappling with the consequences of a security model that prioritises social cohesion over open borders. We have learned the hard way that tolerance without backbone is an invitation to chaos.
The Swiss must now learn the same lesson. They will increase CCTV. They will deploy more police. They will speak of ‘resilience’. But the deeper rot remains unaddressed. Why are young men reaching for knives in the heart of Europe? What ideology, what despair, what sense of dislocation drives them? These questions are uncomfortable, for they lead to the border, to integration, to the failure of multiculturalism as it is currently practiced.
Do not mistake me for a xenophobe. I am a contrarian, not a bigot. The Fall of Rome was not caused by the barbarians; it was caused by Romans who forgot what it meant to be Roman. Similarly, Europe’s current crisis is one of identity. When a nation no longer knows what it stands for, any passing fanatic can fill the void with a blade. The Swiss stabbing is a footnote in a larger narrative of intellectual decadence and national amnesia.
The UK shares intelligence because it recognises the pattern. But intelligence alone cannot solve a crisis of the soul. The question before us is not how to stop the next attack. It is how to rebuild a sense of belonging that makes the attack unthinkable. Until that question is answered, the knives will keep flashing, in St. Gallen, in London, in every station where the European dream has been deferred.
