Europe 2024: New Year, New War Zone
7th January 2024
As a child of the ’80s, I recall with great fondness the Christmases of my youth: full of stinging cold winters and reassuring fireside warmings up; snowball fights and tobogganing; turkey dinners and endless festivities. They provided the perfect segue into the new year, with its accompaniment of bonfires, piping hot jacket potatoes, and mesmerising firework displays. I don’t think it’s naïve to say I cannot recall a single violent episode, save for a very British exhibition of tutting one year, over the lack of queuing etiquette witnessed at the hotdog stand.
I must be mistaken, however, because the festive season no longer looks anything like that. Christmas markets are increasingly facing cancellation, on the pretext of ‘public safety.’ Those that remain are becoming ‘winter’ markets. Choirs and Santas have been replaced with armed guards; presents with metal detectors and concrete bollards, because you never know when those self-driving cars are going to get uppity again, do you?
Meanwhile, New Year’s Eve has become less celebration, more conflagration. Last year’s Europe-wide festivities were particularly un-Christian in this regard. In Germany alone, there was widespread rioting across Berlin, Hamburg, and North Rhine-Westphalia, where several hundred people were arrested. With 41 emergency service personnel injured, clearly it was essential to identify where the aggression was coming from. “Apparently predominantly young men in groups, often with a migration background,” was the furthest the authorities were willing to go.