The terrifying simplicity of the Berlin attack

Shortly after a semi-trailer packed with steel sped through an outdoor Christmas market in Berlin on Monday, killing 12 and injuring dozens more, Germany’s chancellor expressed a concern likely shared by many Germans. “We don’t want to live paralyzed by fear of evil,” Angela Merkel said. The fear, in this case, arose from terrorism in one of its crudest forms: a truck, a driver, and a crowd of people. An assailant had weaponized everyday life in a country of 80 million people, 44 million cars, and countless public squares. The plan involved some level of sophistication: The attacker may have researched vulnerable venues ahead of the incident, and seems to have used a gun to kill the original driver of the truck. But the nasty truth about violence so basic—requiring no training, weapons, or collaboration with a terrorist group, nothing more than access to a vehicle and the ability to drive it—is that it is extremely difficult to prevent. The less complex the terrorist plot, the harder it is to thwart.

The type of terrorism on display in Berlin leaves societies with three choices: 1) Try to secure public spaces by heavily fortifying them, thus transforming people’s way of life; 2) Try to stop would-be attackers by dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance and investigatory powers, thus increasing the state’s intrusions into people’s lives; or 3) Try to minimize the frequency and lethality of terrorism, while learning to live with the threat of attacks and to be resilient when they inevitably occur.