Fear and Loathing in Europe
The following text was used for a spoken column at the ICCT’s expert meeting on Freedom from Fear: Answering Terrorism with Public Resilience on 3 October 2011. Fear is a drug, and policies and management tactics combined with politicians who use feelings of insecurity and plead loudly for ever harder measures to resolve fear, are nothing less than socially accepted models to achieve ritualistic highs and illusions of safety that in the end do nothing except than cultivate that fear.