[Spoken]
I was in Germany around the time of the terrorist attack in Munich. A mass shooting in which nine people were killed. July 26, 2016. Two days before there had been an axe attack on a train in Versburg–No casualties. Two days after there would be a machete attack in reutlingen–Two casualties. These events were unusual, both in their nature and in their proximity to one another. They made headline news across the world. You might not remember them, but you almost certainly heard about them at the time. They came at a time when tensions surrounding the refugee crisis were and still are, at the point of recording, hitting a boiling point, not just in Germany–France had suffered a brutal terrorist attack less than two weeks earlier in Nice–eighty-six casualties, and in Paris the previous November–a hundred and thirty casualties, and in Belgium, as well, where an attack on Brussels airport had left, uh, thirty dead in March, and in Greece whose economy was already sinking into the ocean back in 2010. On whose shores thousands of refugees were now landing every day. Back home tensions were just as high, if not higher. Now we hadn’t had an attack since the London bombings in 2005, mind you–fifty-two casualities, but the news was waterboarding us daily with footage of the make shift camp in calleg containing just under seven and a half thousand refugees seeking sanctuary in the U.K. Now compare that number to the number Germany had taken in by some estimates, over 1.1 million, and we, like most islanders I guess, start to look a little hysterical in the face of change and overly concerned with maintaining the sanctity of our personal space. Whether our anxiety was justified or not, our country and the rest of the continent was divided–Between those who felt that there were lessons we had to learn from the fallout of the holocaust and the second world war. That we had nothing short of a moral duty, an obligation to take in as many refugees as we can realistically afford to care for, and on the other side, were those who were worried that having a large group of people entering the country, regardless of their country of origin, would be a strain on our resources, and a threat to our culture, with the added twist that these people were coming from a region that we had been for over half a decade bombing the (lives) out of. Where extremist anti-western sentiment had been coalescing under the flag of a so-called islamic state–A group who were now explicitly stating that they were going to be sending sleeper agents into europe along with the refugees. It was a mess. Nobody knew what was going on, and everybody was watching Germany. To see whether it was worth following their lead. “There will be blood,” said the continent’s right wing. And then when the Munich attack happened. We on the left, privately, started to wonder if they were right after all. Nobody had any real information, and so the tabloids and the blogs, increasingly indistinguishable from one another, did what tabloids and blogs do best. Syrian asylum seekers, refugee crisis, muslim terrorist attack–th-the human brain is not designed to be a truth detector. It’s designed to respond to stories. The more evocative the better. There is a..There is a gap that was left empty when we outsourced our folk storytelling to Hollywood that the tabloid press has stepped in to fill its place. They take the familiar pieces of our day to day lives: the shopping centers, the airports, the immigrants, the weird unfamiliar religions, and they rearrange these pieces in front of our eyes into terrifying constellations until one of the constellations snags against something dark and amorphous in our subconscious, triggering the release of a potent natural speedball into our system: dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline, keeping us coming back to the same papers and the same websites again and again for more of that feeling because we enjoy being afraid, and we enjoy being afraid because that payload of dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline, is the same bunch of chemicals that is released when we are happy, That’s why a lot of us feel amazing after watching a horror movie. It’s why a mediocre horror movie is, for many of us, more enjoyable than an Oscar-winning drama, and it’s why the horror movie industry is effectively a money printing machine, and it’s the same reason why the mail online is the internet’s most visited english language news provider. You don’t just enjoy hearing stories about monsters, you go looking for them. You do this because your brain thinks it’s learning from them. It’s a particularly ingenious quirk of natural selection, the fact that we can be scared by and alter our behavior in response to abstract fears. This is what has kept us nimble, and vigilante, and alive for tens of thousands of years. The hunter who now really avoids getting eaten by a tiger, who is given a main line dose of pharmaceutical-grade mortal terror, firing up learning synopsis of their brain like watching the burning of Alexandria in reverse. This hunter is unlikely to make the mistakes that almost got him killed more than once, but how do you pass that knowledge on without throwing your children at tigers and hoping they come home? If the hunter is a decent storyteller, able to induce in others even a fraction of that terror, emulate the conditions, replicate the lessons, the people who hear the hunter’s story will be at an evolutionary advantage without needing to see a tiger, but we are not hunters anymore. Not really. The Mail online is not saving anybody–from anything, and I was aware of all this. I knew the games the (they) right wing played. I thought being onto their games meant that I was safe from them, that I could dip in and out of the swamp at will without fear of being infected by it, and I was dipping in and out of it. Regularly. Because I was following the most interesting U.S. election cycle in modern history. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The great unpopularity contest. A nation-wide poll to see who was the least unlikable. Everyday I would wake up, and it would be the first thing I’d google, and Donald Trump had made xenophobia the keystone of his entire campaign, to listen to him speak, meant to open your gates wide open and inviting his memetic trojan horse into your brain. I did this every. Day. This is how people go insane. This is how people forget what is real and what is a smear of on their window pane. On my way home, from germany, I stayed overnight in a hotel in Paris, and I woke in the middle of the night…to the sound of screaming. Gunshots. Commotion. And next to my bed, standing over me, two middle eastern men, with assault rifles, speaking in a language I didn’t understand, and I knew, instantly, as you do in dreams, that a group of terrorists had taken the hotel, and were going room to room executing the western infidels. I knew…but then I woke up, and I took a deep breath. I opened my eyes, and my bedroom was empty. This is the exact moment I realized that the monster stories I’d been laughing at for years..had slipped through the bars of their cage, burrowed through my eyes and ears and had hatched while I was sleeping. They weren’t just on the news and in the papers anymore. They were in my head, emulating the conditions, replicating the lessons. This is how I learned that I am not above being a scared little white man. I am not too smart to fall for all the rhetorician bile. I am not immune to the disease the right wing is deliberately trying to spread. These stories do not deserve our respect, but that doesn’t mean we can be careless around them, and for the rest of my life, whenever I see a brown person wearing a puffy jacket or a rucksack or carrying a sports bag, my heart rate will increase, and my pupils will dilate, and my brain will secrete dopamine, endorphins, and adrenaline into my bloodstream, and sometimes, sometimes I will forget that this is happening because I’m weak. Sometimes..hopefully not too regularly, I will make the stupidest mistake it’s possible to make. I will assume that my fear of something is evidence that that something is worth being afraid of.
You know the killer behind the Munich terror attack? Was eighteen year old David Sonboly. A secular German born citizen, who was targeting Turks and Arabs because it was Turkish and Arab children who had been bullying him. He idolized Anders Breivik. A norweigen terrorist who killed, among others, fifty-five children who he believed were apart of a global left wing conspiracy. David Sonboly supported Germany’s far-right political party, and he considered himself a proud member of the arian race. I try to remember this…when I have the..well..the-the narcissism. The feel…Unsafe. In this country.