A commentary in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/world/europe/a-berlin-square-where-the-prewar-postwar-and-modern-eras-coexist.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
If you look at the map of the truck’s path found at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/19/world/europe/berlin-truck-christmas-market.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
you will find some added irony which the commentary above fails to mention.
The truck driver’s attack on the Christmas market was perpetrated on a street
named after the leading figure of the German Enlightenment; the man who wrote
over 200 years ago on the terrorists' false conception of human nature and
history — the view that the human race is either deteriorating or regressing:
"A process of deterioration in the human race cannot go on indefinitely, for
mankind would wear itself out after a certain point had been reached.
Consequently when enormities go on piling up and up and the evils they produce
continue to increase, [one holding such a view would say]: It can't get much
worse now. It seems that the day of judgement is at hand, and the pious zealot
already dreams of the rebirth of everything and of a world created anew after
the present world has been destroyed by fire.”
- Immanuel Kant, in THE CONTEST OF THE FACULTIES (DER STREIT DER FAKULTÄTEN),
1798: "A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: 'Is the Human Race Continually
Improving'" [translation — H.B. Nisbett].
Chris Bruce, in
Kiel, Germany
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