Five years ago this week, the Saïd and Chérif Kouachi brothers walked into the offices of the illustrated French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and opened fire with Kalashnikovs. This act itself was brutal and disgusting. And it was also absurd: a massacre of a dozen cartoonists and satirists.
But Western politics has been being transformed by this act, and the year it ushered in, 2015, was the year that the Tories won a surprise majority in Parliament, setting in motion the Brexit referendum of 2016. It was the year of Angela Merkel’s statement “We can do it” — when she offered to welcome 1 million refugees in defiance of the Dublin accords. It was the year Donald Trump took his ride down the escalator and into the presidential race. It was the year in which Abdelhamid Abaaoud used the flow of refugees to travel between Syria and Europe while he masterminded the Bataclan-theater massacre that claimed 131 victims that November. It was after the Bataclan that Ann Coulter said, “They can wait if they like until next November for the actual balloting, but Donald Trump was elected president tonight.” People laughed. But she was right.
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