We all thought that 2015 would be remembered as the year of records. Record temperatures, records on the Stock Exchange, record levels of carbon emission, record number of whiny polar bears adrift on shrinking icebergs, record numbers of well brought-up French kids joining up for jihad in Syria. Well, we were all wrong. The year 2015 will end up being simply the year before 2016. That's all. For 2016 will be the actual year of records. Don't take my word for it, this is what an anti-terrorism expert told the Journal du Dimanche : "There is a horrible pessimism in the profession about 2016. One year from now, we might end up telling ourselves that 2015 was only a rehearsal, a kind of operational systems-check." That's right. The experts are pretty definite. The worst horrors are ahead of us. According to them, the 2015 attacks were what a Sunday drive is to a Grand Prix race - absolute amateur-hour.

2016 will be the year of professionals.

Instead of hiring keen but airheaded interns, Daesh will turn to the high-mileage pros, "the kinda guys who know their stuff" as one anti-terrorist specialist put it. Next time, no careless phone calls, no passports left behind, no cut-price explosive belts built from DIY store bric-a-brac and no random Kalashnikov rounds ending up in the shooter's own foot. Out go the cut-rate, moonlighting know-nothings. In come the high-class, top-flight purveyors of high-quality carnage. Daesh will have no shortage of takers. Having lost a third of its territory, it will have to do something with all those extra guys who suddenly have time on their hands. Europe will be the solution. Europe, which has got to be the best market going for a terrorism start-up.

Despite these threats, the great people of France cry out loud and strong that they will not be intimidated by these executioners. Because, as we all know, terrorists will NOT change our way of life. Like every year, we will go see a lawyer and update our will. Nobody can stop us doing that. If I get killed in 2016, I will leave my car to the random body-shop of my choice. I'll bequeath my collection of Osmond records to wild geese, my used toothbrushes to Pygmies suffering from scurvy, and perhaps my rather debatable underwear to the legless cripples of Kolkata. I'll leave my personal billion euros out of Charlie Hebdo's multiple billions to Robin Hood so that he can buy Body Shop skin-creams for the lepers of the Sherwood Forest (they never get much press sympathy, those guys). I will pass on my Hara-Kiri collection to the rector of the Paris Mosque so that he can see unveiled women and my Charlie Hebdo collection to the hierarchy of the Vatican so that every weary Cardinal and Archbishop may guiltlessly follow church tradition by surreptitiously looking at cocks.

Still, the attacks have changed things. Professional harbingers of nationalist and ethnic doom like Zemmour were made redundant by reality. Those trying to depress the French by banging the drum about how their beloved country was declining because general De Gaulle has gone and because they could no longer buy their comic books with old-money francs instead of euros, those people now look ridiculous beside the sermons of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Their gloomy predictions on the state of France now seem laughable when you see what we have already suffered and what is yet, perhaps, to come. Compared with the 130 killed on one night last November, the adoption of the euro doesn't seem quite the threat it was. The amputees of 2015 care about it just about as much as they care about yesterday's bandage or dressing. When your blood runs in the good sense, when it circulates freely through your body, even with some parts missing, you do not complain, you just make the most of that despite-everything circulation. You make the best of every second of your life. Nothing else really matters.

https://charliehebdo.fr/en/edito/2015-the-year-of-the-run-up/