by Poppy Sowerby, UnHerd
Low-level dread persists
Eight years ago today, a white van mounted the pavement in London Bridge. It first struck three people before launching Xavier Thomas into the Thames. Next Chrissy Archibald was trapped under the van, briefly freed then run over. Nearby, tourists mooched about Borough Market admiring glossy chocolate strawberries and Sussex cheeses, craning their necks to look at the Shard. Here, the van crashed; Sara Zelenak and James McMullan were stabbed to death. The attackers ran down the steps leading to Boro Bistro; a waiter there, Alexandre Pigeard, was their next target. Sébastien Bélanger was cornered and knifed; so was Kirsty Boden, a nurse who had rushed to help Pigeard. Ignacio Echeverria swung his skateboard at one attacker; he would be the final victim.
That attack stands out as among the most brutal of the 2010s, a decade which saw Isis reach the height of its powers, and in which terrorism came to seem routine, inevitable and all the more horrifying for it. The perpetrator of that era was reliably one of two archetypes: an Isis jihadist or a white supremacist. The immediate context of London Bridge shows this: less than two weeks before the massacre, 22 people had died in an attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, stuffed to the gills with excited little girls. Two weeks after it, a far-Right extremist would ram Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park, killing one. Other attacks that year took place in Westminster, Stockholm, Barcelona and St Petersburg.