Two cars used as rams.
One, in Charlottesville, was driven by a neo-Nazi who plowed into a crowd of antiracist counterprotesters: it is a miracle that more people were not killed.
The other, driven by a European Islamist radical, careened blindly around Las Ramblas in Barcelona, killing 15 and injuring 126.
Except for the similar modus operandi and the fresh proof that all forms of fascism eventually come to resemble one another, the two events are different in nearly every respect.
1. In Charlottesville it is obvious that there were not two “sides,” as Donald Trump claimed, but rather two opposing camps, two visions of society and the world that had nothing in common. In Barcelona, by contrast, there was but one camp, that of nihilism and death for everybody, absolutely everybody, with no priority targets and no exceptions: the whole world, every political leaning, every nationality, every religion (including Islam, of course), all jumbled together on the sidewalks of a city hated precisely because it was a city, full of people of all sorts out strolling in blissful innocence, with no particular goal in mind, enjoying the pleasure of one another’s company.
2. The assassins of Charlottesville are known: David Duke, Richard Spencer, “Baked Alaska,” and the others who whipped up the crowd and pushed them to crime are regulars on television and over social networks—they would not be hard to find if a decision were made to hold them to account. The perpetrators of the slaughter in Barcelona were anonymous, masked, faceless and nameless right up to the moment of action and the instant renown it brought— well nigh impossible to see them coming; and, as for those who gave the orders, they are hunkered down between Iraq and Syria in what remains of the Islamic State, ready, when the time is right, to move their portable headquarters to more congenial climes; they are invisible and elusive; no doubt they will remain so for some time.
3. To the Charlottesville tragedy it is not impossible to imagine possible responses. We know, for example, that laws prohibiting the airing of opinions that are in themselves offenses—even though the American Constitution makes such prohibitions unthinkable, at least for the present—would help to reduce the threat. In the case of Barcelona, one faces the dizzying unknown. Except for tears and grief, no solutions are anywhere in sight, not a one, to deal with the secret, sprawling army for which a driver’s license is a license to kill and that can decide at random where and when to strike—any place, any city at all, provided it has open spaces and, in those open spaces, pedestrians, passers-by, and a whiff of the sweetness of life.
4. The Charlottesville mob convened to defend a statue honoring Confederate general Robert E. Lee, who fought to preserve slavery. The members of that mob were (and remain) nostalgic for a past that refuses to pass away, despite clearly being obsolete. And the reappearance of what had been repressed, the reemergence of the racists from the sewers into which fifty years of struggle for civil rights had swept them, imparts nothing new about their squalid ideology. The Islamists of Barcelona, by contrast, are the by-products of a more recently formed and expanding nebula, the course of which no one can predict or fix. In just two decades (including, of course, the Twin Towers in New York) we have had thousands, of deaths all over the world—and a black book that, from Pakistan to the Philippines, from the African deserts to European suburbs and great American cities, shows no sign of closing.
5. And finally, the fifth difference. The Charlottesville attack was clearly and unequivocally condemned around the world. In the United States, the resurgence of Nazism behind the attack collided with a solid wall of the press, Congress, and public opinion—in short, with a democracy that mounted a fierce resistance to the proponents of America First and the monsters they spawn. After the horror of Barcelona, on the other hand, reactions in Catalonia, Spain, the rest of Europe and the world were far too vague, muted, confused, and sometimes even obscene: Are we dealing with fascism, commentators asked, or something other than fascism? Is this Islam or not Islam? Did the killers of seven-year-old Julian Cadman (whose name has just been added to the gruesome ledger) have a difficult childhood? Did they come from underprivileged backgrounds? Is this a psychiatric matter? Was it not our Islamophobia that ultimately radicalized the killers?
The lesson here is that we must beware of false symmetries, even (especially!) when the darkness of the time plays tricks with our perception and serves apparent similarities up to us on a platter.
The idea that the cowls of the Ku Klux Klan, its torches and lynchings, continue to tempt a non-negligible and possibly growing fringe in the United States is fearsome, no doubt about it. Unprecedented, too, is the stupefaction engendered by an American president refusing even to name the crime and the criminals, let alone to condemn them, thereby fraying still further the foundational compact of contemporary America. And humanity has a duty—this goes without saying—to confront with equal determination both heads of the beast. But the fact remains that, in the United States as in Europe, it is necrophiliac Islamo-fascism, as shown in Barcelona, that holds life, death, and the future in its grasp.
