The coverage has been extensive, of course. On television there have been the now familiar images of huddled crowds and flickering vigil candles, the interviews with those who witnessed or narrowly missed death, the debates about lessons learned.
Most coverage of last week’s Brussels attacks has been solid and sober, some of it extremely moving. But there has been something missing.
It’s not the media’s fault. It has been missing from many other conversations about the attacks too, whether on social media or around the kitchen table. For those at a distance, not directly involved or bereaved, last week’s events have somehow lacked the intensity that accompanied the two strikes on Paris that bookended 2015. Then the world declared #JeSuisCharlie or mourned the Bataclan Generation. The carnage at the airport and on the metro has been labelled with the functional, rather than poetic, #BrusselsAttacks. The reaction has felt sad, of course, but more dutiful than impassioned. Some of this is natural, perhaps. Fewer people were killed in Brussels than in Paris last November. Maybe the choice of target was less emotive too. The murder of satirists at Charlie Hebdo raised questions about free speech; the Friday night slaughter at a music venue and the attempted slaughter at a football stadium seemed to be attacks on joy itself, a war against youth and laughter and human pleasure.
But to target the infrastructure of mass transit was, in terrorist terms, utilitarian: a way to bring the greatest suffering to the greatest number. It was an attack on people engaged in the plain, unromantic business of getting to work or moving around, an attempt to make the basic functioning of a modern city impossible.
The nature of that city has also played its part in this week’s more subdued response. Odd to single out this one line for challenge, given what else he comes out with, but Donald Trump’s immediate, tweeted reaction to the murders struck this note: “Do you all remember how beautiful and safe a place Brussels was.”
Chances are, not many of his seven million followers do remember that, no: Brussels does not hold that kind of place in the global imagination. The city’s current pain is sharp and real, but the world does not cherish Brussels in the way it does Paris. Indeed, within Europe what associations that do exist are rarely positive. “Brussels” has become a byword for the remote, detached institutions of an unpopular European Union. Brussels is for Eurosceptics what “Washington” is for Tea Party Republicans, the hated imperial capital of the despised elite. Coming from the lips of a certain brand of Brexiteer, last week’s sudden declarations of solidarity with Brussels ring a little hollow. For me, it stirred memories of how America’s legion of rightwing talk show hosts had to perform a rapid body swerve when a federal government building in Oklahoma City was bombed in 1995. Rush Limbaugh and his imitators had spent years demonising “government bureaucrats” as the enemies of liberty, yet now they had to mourn their passing. All of these elements have been at work in reducing the intensity of the global reaction to the Brussels attacks. But there’s something else.
Continent under quarantine
Much opprobrium has been heaped on those who instantly piled in, before the bodies were buried, with declarations of how the killings in the Belgian capital proved why they were right all along. That was Trump — again — reissuing his call for Muslims to be barred from entering the US, only to be outdone by his rival Ted Cruz, who called for “law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods”. In Britain it was the forces of the leave campaign, shouting that Brussels proved Europe was so swarming with terrorists that Britain had no choice but to put the infested continent under quarantine, sealing the door shut on June 23.
Of course, those kinds of argument need to be fought. Not only is Cruz’s plan racist and sinister, it is also laughably self-defeating. He says his anti-Muslim patrols will sniff out and prevent radicalisation, when it’s screamingly obvious they will cause it.
As for the Brexiteers, one doesn’t even need to invoke the benefits of cross-border security cooperation. We just have to point out that abolishing EU freedom of movement wouldn’t prevent a horror like last week’s in Brussels — or indeed the 7/7 attacks in London. The former were committed by Belgian citizens, the latter by men born and raised in Britain. Unless you plan to abolish freedom of movement between Leeds and London, this threat will remain.
Yet I understand why such arguments find a ready audience. Because they promise an instant and easy solution to a problem people are desperate to believe can be solved. When Trump says of Daesh, “I alone can fix this problem!” he promises that this is a problem that can be fixed, that there is a solution if only we were willing to grasp it. And people are, understandably, desperate to believe there is something that can be done.
For this is what is so disabling about terror: the fear that it might be entirely beyond our control. In his lengthy interview with the Atlantic, Barack Obama said he often reminds his advisers that terrorism claims fewer American lives than “falls in bathtubs do”. It’s a classic example of the liberal mistake of thinking rational evidence can best what is, in fact, emotional and visceral. It doesn’t matter that statistically bathtubs are more dangerous: I don’t fear the bathtub because I think I can control what I do in there.
Even on the roads, we tell ourselves — perhaps we kid ourselves — that we could look out for, and guard against, a reckless driver. But against a terrorist determined to kill and ready to die? We know there’s next to no protection against that. So people are bound to grab hold of anything that promises — however falsely — to put control back in their hands, whether that’s exiting the EU, sacrificing their civil liberties, or even turning on a single religious minority.
Meanwhile, at the same time, we half-know these promises are illusory. Reluctantly, we sense there is no magic button to press that will make this horror stop. That the Brussels attacks came so soon after the murders in Paris adds to the feeling of glum resignation, captured by the cover line on the latest edition of the Economist: “Europe’s new normal”. This too, I recognise, is another coping strategy, a way to get through what could be a sorrowful few years or even decades ahead. But it may be necessary. And this may be what we glimpsed in the more muted reaction that greeted last week’s agony in Brussels. Perhaps we are beginning to become inured — thickening our skin and hardening our hearts, proofing ourselves against the pain to come.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jonathan Freedland is the Guardian’s executive editor, Opinion.
