Beppe Severgnini, MILAN :
EUROPE has been in full panic mode since last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris. But while the deaths of 130 people, mostly young, in those attacks is mind-boggling, this is not the first time Europe has been racked by violence. If the European Union has recently appeared an oasis of tolerance and security in a troubled world, it’s because the previous two generations of Europeans didn’t lose their cool.
Many of those born in the 1920s and 1930s lived under dictatorships – from Germany to Italy, from Portugal to Poland – and fought a long war, which resulted in ten of millions of casualties. Their children – my generation, the European baby boomers born between 1946 and 1966 – grew up with terrorism.
Most of that terrorism was homegrown, though some of it originated in the Middle East. Nothing was as catastrophic as the Paris attacks, but it was still shocking. And the era of terror lasted longer.
In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorist attacks were a daily occurrence, and just as horrible and frightening as the threat later presented by Al Qaeda, and now by the Islamic State. From Ireland’s Irish Republican Army to Spain’s Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, from France’s Action Directe to Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion, to Italy’s Brigate Rosse and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, violent extremist political cells were almost the norm.
Other madmen came from outside Europe. High-profile terrorists like the Palestinian Abu Nidal, and the Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – known as Carlos the Jackal – were behind many of the era’s most spectacular and bloody attacks. You could never tell where and when – and how – the next attack would come. Terrorists might kidnap and execute a politician, or blow up a nightclub. They might hijack a plane, or take over an embassy. And unlike today, the authorities, at least at first, lacked the resources and experience to stop them.
According to the Global Terrorism Database, the years of terror peaked in 1979, with 1,019 attacks. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the average was about 10 per week. Some 440 people were killed by terrorism in 1988, including 270 in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, by terrorists acting at the behest of the Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
In Italy, between 1969 and 1988 we had over 1,300 terrorist attacks, by both left- and right-wing extremists. They included the kidnapping and execution of a former prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978 (five bodyguards were also slaughtered), and the bombing of the main railway station in Bologna in 1980, which killed 85 people and injured 200. In two decades, 458 people were killed – including politicians, magistrates, trade unionists, journalists and academics – and more than 1,000 were seriously wounded.
And yet: The center held, Europe continued to function. Governments fell, but politicians, and the people, kept their cool. For our children – the millennials, born between 1980 and 2000 – what is happening now is new and terrifying. President François Hollande of France, noting that most of the victims in Paris were under 35, called it “the Bataclan generation,” from the name of the concert hall where the majority lost their lives. These talented, open-minded young men and women – from whatever ethnic background – consider Europe their home. They must not be forsaken.
Twenty-five years after the last era of terror, our generation – the generation that witnessed and weathered it – has a duty to remind our children what worked against terrorism and, in the end, defeated it.
First, do not allow these killers any credibility. Just like their predecessors, they are fanatics convinced that their beliefs justify any and all actions, including slaughtering their fellow human beings. Nothing – no ideology, no cultural values, certainly no God – justifies killing innocent people in a cafe, stadium or concert hall, or at railway stations and on buses and trains, as occurred in Madrid in 2004 (191 deaths, 1,800 injured) and in London in 2005 (52 deaths, 700 injured), the two deadliest atrocities in Europe during the last decade.
Second, terrorists must be insulated from the rest of society to prevent them from spreading their poisonous beliefs. Take Italy. In the 1970s, the activists from the Red Brigades known as brigatisti rossi tried to recruit workers, trade unionists and students so they could progress from terrorism to revolution. They failed. The factories, schools and universities said no. They might not have supported the government or the status quo, but they weren’t prepared to kill to make their point. Today’s Islamic State fanatics seek the support of Europe’s Muslim communities; it is vital they don’t get it.
Third, “keep calm and carry on.” This slogan, devised by the British government in 1939 to boost morale in the face of mass air attacks and the threat of actual invasion by the Nazis, was recently rediscovered and printed on countless mugs, cards, T-shirts and signs. It is a cliché. It is also sound advice. One attack does not destroy the principles behind our forms of government or ways of life, and the best response to the terrorists is to show that our beliefs are stronger than theirs.
Throughout the deadly ’70s and ’80s we youngsters went on studying, working, playing, falling in love and traveling – across Europe and beyond. We refused to let a bunch of psychopaths derail our lives. And we won. Our children will win, too.
