Terror Then and Now

Three glittering European cities illustrate the thin line between normality and chaos

Cathy Young from the November 2006 issue

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Returning through Brussels, my parents and I faced new regulations under which no carry-on luggage was allowed on U.S.-bound flights, except for a laptop with no other items in the case and a few essentials in a clear plastic bag. Even the chocolates I had picked up at the duty-free shop at the airport had to be checked at the gate. Back in New York, items that had spilled out of carry-on bags clearly not suited to withstand baggage handling—a pair of sandals, a notebook, what looked like a sandwich in a paper wrap—drifted along on the conveyor belt to nervous laughs from the passengers.

I remembered a comment made a few years ago by the curmudgeonly Arnold Beichman, a scholar and Hoover Institution fellow whom I had gotten to know on my first trip to Prague in 1990. He admitted to a certain nostalgia for the Cold War, at the height of which we did not have to remove our shoes and belts when boarding a plane. Is this a more dangerous world, or a more paranoid one? Or both? None of the "security" measures I saw at the airport inspired a true sense of security, or of anything beyond the appearance of doing something.

But whether or not the London bombing plot had much of a chance of succeeding, the danger is real, and terror could destroy a society just as surely as conventional war. The lessons from Europe's past—the thin line between normality and chaos, the deadliness of totalitarian ideology, the danger of democracies losing sight of their own values while battling an evil empire—remain all too relevant, and the lessons of history offer no easy answers for today.