Have Fears of Terrorism in 2016 Made the World Crazy?

Heh.

I don't think so. Populists worldwide are the sane ones. It's the leftist elites who continue to double-down who've gone off the deep end.

At Der Spiegel, "Apocalypse Now: A Year of Crises, Shocks and Fears of Terror":

Ansbach, Munich, Würzburg, Nice, Brussels -- in light of the many horrific news stories, many are asking: What's the matter with 2016?

Has the world gone mad? This question is occupying the minds of many people these days. It feels like the world is out of step, that multiple crises are encroaching upon us and that the distant world of international politics is about to get dangerously personal. How are we supposed to deal with the feeling of living in an era that we no longer seem to understand?

"I'm tired of living in interesting times," a Twitter user wrote several days ago. His words were retweeted more than 1,000 times. Everyday, people on social media ask: What is wrong with 2016? When will it be over? What more does it have in store for us?

This year, international political events have overlapped in an unsettling way. Something seems to be coalescing and brewing, though it's not yet clear what. Each new development seems to come a bit faster than the last. It may have begun with the Arab Spring in 2011, but it also continued with the wars in Libya and Syria and was further exacerbated by the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and the latest terrorist attacks. We are witnessing the destabilization of the world as we've known it since 1989.

When our phones began vibrating a week ago Friday with breaking news alerts about the military coup in Turkey, we were still processing our shock over the terrorist attack in Nice, France. Each shock fades quickly in light of the next one. On Sunday, a Syrian refugee detonated a bomb outside an outdoor concert in Ansbach, Germany. Last Friday, an 18-year-old student shot and killed nine people in Munich, most of them teenagers. And only days before that, a 17-year-old asylum-seeker in Würzburg attacked a group of Chinese tourists with an ax.

It was only a month ago that a majority of British voters decided to leave the European Union. The United States is shaken by racial unrest, the massacre in Orlando -- and the rise of the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

With that, 2016 was really only the worst year since 2015, the year of the great refugee crisis. And 2015 was only the worst year since 2014, the year of the war in Ukraine.

We are living in an age of shocks and crises that could well be traumatizing in their rapid succession and concentration, since it's not yet clear whether they're only a temporary jolt or the beginning of a trend with no end in sight. Of course, the sheer number of conflicts has remained constant in recent years. But there is much indication that we find ourselves in a new era of global instability. The biggest geopolitical stories of our time are the destabilization in the Middle East, the European security order and the European Union. In addition, there has been a societal shift in many Western countries: Many citizens are angry at the elites, because they see themselves as victims of globalization, free trade and migration. This anger has enabled the rise of political movements from the fringe to the mainstream in only a few years: Donald Trump, the Brexit movement, Front National and the Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The classic political camps are dissolving as the battle between the political left and the right is replaced by one between Isolationists and Internationalists.

Every now and then, there are phases in international politics during which more happens in the span of a few weeks than would otherwise happen in decades...

Still more.

ICYMI: Go back and read Douglas Murray's piece, "Europe's Jihad Summer."