This was the year that fear nearly won. We can’t let it
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Version 0 of 1. Fear almost won this year, didn’t it? And that was before terrorists attacked Paris for the second time, taking 130 lives and devastating far more. This was capital T terrorism, set to do exactly as the word implies. And it did, because an atrocity is not a singular act, but the first of many tumbling dominoes. Terror tumbles on top of freedom. Freedom tumbles on top of trust, trust tumbles on top of diversity, all of which spark an acute hatred of the other, and, by that point, any other will do. Even if it’s a kid building a clock as a project, or a bunch of Sikh bros kept out of an American football stadium just for wanting to keep their hair to themselves. Fear of terror does that – it erases the line between the scary and the ridiculous, so that it seems as if we’re all living in a slapstick. And that was before Donald Trump and his combover. Related: Booker winner Marlon James: ‘I was the nerd, I wasn’t into sports, assumed gay’ Fear allows you to hold two diametrically opposite views. In such a state, it makes perfect sense that many can still view President Obama as both a fringe Christian and a Muslim. That Mexicans can at once be stealing all the jobs, yet also be lying, lazy and unemployed, taking handouts. Fear can make a black man running away from a cop still appear to be a threat to this cop’s life. Fear can make us suspect men, women and children of the very kind of attacks they are fleeing. Fear of Mexicans raping American women. Fear of black people insisting their lives matter. Fear of “Muslim-looking” people boarding a plane (but no corresponding fear of white men entering a school). Fear of women and men trying to save their children, even if that means trusting a boat meant for 20 carrying 200. Fears that dead children washing up on shore just mean more live ones are coming. With bombs attached. Add some fuel to that spark and you have the Trump campaign exploding in America’s face, while Putin calls him a soul brother. And because the fear of the world repeating itself was never more pronounced than in this year, the idea of Trump and Putin in some sort of allegiance does smack of Hitler patting Mussolini on the back – though I’m sure neither wants to be the Mussolini in that photo op. But that analogy, and all those Trump-is-a-Nazi, Putin-is-a-fascist arguments only play on our fears. And it gives them a power that neither the blowhard nor the thug deserves. Witness Marine Le Pen, who only a month ago was riding a political juggernaut powered by fright. She won an early battle, then lost the war. But give her this, she did learn a crucial tactic from the very terrorists she claimed to have nothing in common with, by posting on Twitter a photo of beheaded journalist James Foley. Her ambitions may have been different, but her desired outcome was the same: horrifying a public already shellshocked by atrocity, all the better to have them do the unthinkable, such as refusing people entry at our borders – presumably to watch more babies die at sea. Fear compounds fear, and suddenly, yet inevitably, we enter a new reality. One where we choose protection over freedom without even realising that we have done so. A few years after 9/11, at an anniversary book-reading in New York, a woman in the audience, on hearing that Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell was now surrounded by armed guards, said she was prepared to pay that price if it meant protecting the bell. It took two Africans in the audience to point out where that kind of thinking inevitably leads. That by choosing protection over freedom, you are giving a few people the power to decide what the rest of us need protection from. One day that might be you. Armaan Singh Sarai, a student in Arlington, Texas with a heart condition, was detained for three days just because a bully told the teacher he had a bomb in his backpack. And it’s not just terrorists using the threat of fear, or fearmongers using the threat of terrorists. The journalist Anita Sarkeesian continues to receive rape and death threats, just for calling out the misogynerds of gamergate. Police in the US continue to view unarmed black men as a lethal threat, but a mass murdering anti-abortion activist less so. Fear works. Sometimes. And if you are Trump, Putin, Le Pen or any Republican candidate, your future is riding on the hope that fear will work this time. But not so fast. Paris has refused to stop being Paris, just as Madrid had refused to stop being Madrid, London had refused to stop being London and New York had refused to stop being New York. In 1976, when gunmen stormed Bob Marley’s house and almost murdered him to stop him from playing at a peace concert, he did it anyway. Marley knew that, despite surviving the attempt, had he not performed, the killers would have done exactly what they set out to do. An attack breeds fear of an attack, and that fear can cause far more insidious damage than just the attack itself. Which is the point. Which is why, despite the terrible example set by scores of politicians this year, the best example might also be a few politicians who chose to do something else. Justin Trudeau in Canada and Angela Merkel. Trudeau in particular, because his government’s gesture to welcome refugees was post-Paris. It’s too early to say if he will be a great prime minister, but one thing he has demonstrated is that the idea that love must always defeat fear, especially at the end of this most turbulent of years, is one whose time has come. • Marlon James is the author of A Brief History Of Seven Killings, which won this year’s Man Booker prize and is now available in a limited edition hardback, £20. |