There was a time, a century ago, when a single assassination, in Sarajevo, unleashed the First World War.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, this week, can unleash even more mayhem. In fact, we may say, it has already done so. It has inflamed spirits, pitted cultures and civilisations against each other and brought an already fraught international situation to the brink of even more tragedies.
It is impossible for anyone to condense and digest all that has been said and written over the past four days. The 'Je suis Charlie' mantra has taken over the world by storm but now it has been turned around, upside down and spawned so many alternative forms which have rendered it unusable.
The massacre in Paris has inflamed an already polarised world especially Europe in which xenophobic fringe parties stand poised to become mainline, anti-Islamic demonstrations (and their opposite demonstrations) are taking place every Monday night in Germany, and countries from The Netherlands to Sweden and back are tightening their asylum policies.
Nevertheless, Europe is still wide open to infiltration. The now killed brothers who allegedly carried out the Hebdo massacre came from an Algerian family long resident in France. Britain in April 2013 faced trouble of its own with the brutal and senseless murder of a soldier for the simple fact that he was a soldier - the killer and his friends were born in Britain of immigrant families. To say nothing of Italy which has long been seeing its population incremented by wave after wave of immigrants, legal or otherwise, Albanians first, then Romanians, now boat people, dumped on its shores by human smugglers acting with impunity and taken in with next to no control.
We are speaking of Europe, a continent, a mix of nations, whose roots and past have always seen successive waves of human movements which in time became integrated and united into a nation state. Some, Belgium springs to mind, are still some way from becoming a real unified nation, even after all these centuries. Italy itself is a palimpsest of ethnic and racial groups and only became one nation a century or so ago. For all the posturing of purist Germany especially in the Nazi period, Germany itself is a mix of races and ethnic origins not just in the far past but in recent years too.
What unified Europe was Christianity, first as a religion, then as a civilisation. This has progressively dwindled especially in the past decades so that today precious little remains of Europe's cultural heritage.
And still wave after wave of immigrants flooded in. In France itself, Algeria's war of independence, so many years ago, flooded the country with pieds-noirs and people of Algerian descent. Marseilles became the largest Arab city in the Mediterranean and there are banlieus around Paris that are no go areas for people with white complexions.
As sometimes happens in the US, policing these areas is very difficult, mistakes and accidents, to say nothing of police brutality, do happen. People on either side of the racial, ethnic or cultural divide become more and more inflamed.
Symbols are easily set up and targeted: it was in France itself that the war on the burqa was declared. But demographics speak a different language: for a dwindling white stock one sees the rapid expansion of the non-national population which in a few years' time may become the majority in many countries. In Brussels itself, the most popular name being given to children is Mohamed.
The situation, in other words, is nearing boiling point. And when spirits already inflamed by the small or big episodes happening every day, and by what is happening in flash-points such as Syria and Iraq, provocations provide the spark that provokes an explosion.
Was the spark the caricatures published by Hebdo? Or was it the attack on the magazine newsroom itself? I have read many pondered and respectable opinions for the former point of view but I also ponder on Oriana Fallaci's prophetic words on the intractability of Muslim believers.
For all the professions of multiculturalism and respect for diversity, it is a bare fact there is no equality of treatment: what is claimed as a right in the West does not seem to have an equal right in the East.
Whatever remains of Christianity in the West has moved through the revolutions called the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, through opposition to the Nazi regimes and to Soviet Union belligerence. The Muslim world did not have to face such internal troubles (though it has other internal troubles to contend with). Human rights, even women rights, struggle to emerge. Even today, countries such as Saudi Arabia have rules unthinkable in the West.
But I have always believed that provocation will have a directly opposite effect: there is nothing that can help the Muslim world move ahead with the times than internal Muslim pressure such as is found in admittedly imperfect worlds as secular Turkey, and the Emirates.
Having said that, freedom of the press is an absolute which the West cannot give up, even at the cost of scurrilous, nay, blasphemous, extremes. That is why, along with my colleagues, I was proud to stand at City Gate and hold aloft the placard 'Je suis Charlie'.
But our main focus should be other than the pleasure of taking sides. Our focus should be the safety and protection of our small country. From what I see, our country still does not understand the risks it is surrounded by, and the clouds getting darker by the day. The recent spat between two so-called Libyan embassies is a dark danger getting more and more ominous. We know there are Libyans from opposing sides all present in Malta and each has its own Maltese supporters and clients. Malta has become, in its small size, what Switzerland was to Nazi Germany in World War II.
To keep our heads requires nerves of steel and a focused nation, which ours is not. The past days have seen the Prime Minister focusing on the spring hunting referendum and the Leader of the Opposition tinkering with Cabinet-making.
All this goes to shock and make our country even more alarmed. The relations with our neighbours to the south have always been problematic: no wonder our forefathers spent so much time, money and effort to create all those mighty systems of fortifications (which it never got to use, but that's another story) from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Every time there were rumours of another Turkish invasion, a new system of bastions was hurriedly run up.
Today, there is no sense of urgency. We do not even know what are we supposed to do. All we know is the unending stream of people coming in and the very lax controls exercised, whether on boat people or otherwise, legal or otherwise.
The weapons we have at hand - police, army and secret service - are pitifully inadequate and badly distributed. This is where under Manuel Mallia things went belly-up for partisan reasons prevailed over national concern. As we saw in France on Friday, there is no substitute for professionalism and being prepared for any eventuality.
The forces should be completely out of partisan control and the nation must be in complete and bipartisan control of its forces of defence. I ask if there is any way getting these forces out of partisan control and getting them to really represent the country as a whole as against one half of it.
Just considering how two sets of Libyans can get us to squabble or sit on the fence, it is completely inconceivable how on earth can we face up to more serious dangers which may lurk in the future.
Going over the many comments to be found on the social media following the Hebdo massacre, I am driven to despair by the many unsubstantiated, ill-thought out, top of the head and worse comments put on boards by people with name and surname added, unable to see how ridiculous, and dangerous, their comments are. Our worst threat does not lie outside us, but inside our heads.
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