A woman in hoodie with her hood up walked onto the platform of the train station in Hamburg. This occurred last Friday around six in the evening, after working hours, when there were many passengers on the platform. She pulled out a knife and began stabbing them one by one. She reached the number seventeen (17!). Four of them, a 24-year-old man, and three women (24, 52, 85) sustained life-threatening injuries in the process.
This is not a story about terrorism, nor about its media treatment, or about state and media cover-ups. Although there would be valid reasons for that theory in this case. For instance, how is it that the German police ruled out terrorist motives (which are generally a cover for concealing Islamist motives) before any investigation, attributing them to the mental illness of the woman with the knife and emphasizing that she is German? Only later did they report that they are still investigating whether the woman acted alone. Since when do mental illnesses exclude political or terrorist motivations for attacks? Why is it that for most media, the woman is first identified as German, then as a German citizen, while for the British Telegraph she is of Caucasian descent? And how can one trust communication (state and media) that first presents a conclusion and then establishes the facts? But that is not the topic this time.
The extinction of the existential instinct
The topic is actually European defense. And the main question is: how is it possible that a woman, who is neither Arnold Schwarzenegger from ‘Terminator’ nor Bata Živojinović from Yugoslav partisan films, equipped only with a knife, unimpeded by anyone, stabs seventeen Germans on a train platform? She would have certainly stabbed more if it weren’t for the fact that it was an area under special police surveillance, and the police, hearing the cries, quickly ran over and subdued her.
According to available information, before the police arrived, none of the passengers attempted to confront or stop her. And how many of them in the immediate vicinity had at least a bag with a laptop?! But no, they helplessly cried out, waiting for the police to save them or alternatively – for the woman killer to stab them. This is a picture of the mental state of today’s European defense capacity, staged in the heart of Europe.
I am convinced that in Finland, which takes care of its defense and which, unlike Germany and most other countries in the European center, has not abandoned regular military service, such a scenario could not happen. I want to hope that it could not happen at the Zagreb train station either, although since 2008, when Croatia received its NATO invitation, there are no new generations that have undergone basic military training. But I believe, perhaps naively, that on our European periphery, the fundamental existential instinct for self-defense and self-preservation has not yet completely gone extinct, as it has in the heart of Europe.
