70,000 people illegally swimming from Morocco to Ceuta would surely raise all alarms in Europe. The “territorial integrity” of an EU member state has been violated, the safety and security of European borders compromised, the invasion of Europe by Islamists continues, European culture is at risk. Except it was not.
Most of the 70,000 people who crossed starting around August 30th had returned, many of them voluntarily, to Morocco by September 4th. Most of them were just taking a chance. Among them were people legitimately fleeing dire circumstances. That, along with the more than 140 people who died, are the real tragedies, but unfortunately not ones that surprise or grab headlines anymore.
However, 70,000 people crossing illegally in a few days from Morocco to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Africa of 80,000 inhabitants, is still quite an event—one that could not have happened without the connivance, and perhaps the participation, of the Moroccan authorities. The question, of course, is for what purpose.
I refer to Conor and Nick articles in which they evaluate many of the possibilities. There are some triggers—for example, Spain agreeing to import more gas directly from Algeria to Almería, bypassing the Moroccan gas pipeline. And there are also some contributing factors, like Spain’s recent mass regularization of migrants and the Spanish Supreme Court determining that “hot returns” are not legal if the migrant crossed by sea.
It is possible that the crisis was encouraged by Moroccan authorities in order to punish Spain for its relationship with Algeria, and that Israel and the U.S. spun it because they have their own known grievances. Something similar happened in 2021. However, I doubt that it was just that. There is a possible explanation that holds more weight for me, and it does not contradict the former. I first encountered it from a Spanish YouTube political commentator, Rubén Gisbert, about whom I have mixed feelings.
Following Spain winning the World Cup tournament, Trump said that there was “no tension” with Spain, which was a marked rhetorical shift from previous comments about the country. The Spanish government has been shy about blaming Morocco for the crisis and, allegedly, it has asked other European countries to refrain from doing so, despite sending a letter to the European Commission complaining about the response and lack of support from member states. In fact, Brussels has not thrown its weight behind Spain, which gives Morocco little room to obtain concessions.
What has been put on the table and discussed is that the European Union needs to get more involved in order to protect the southern border. Some suggest that it should be militarized, which would put in under NATO influence. Putting Ceuta and its territorial waters under NATO defense, though officially Spain would hold sovereignty, would mean giving NATO control over the Gibraltar Strait.
The Strait is a strategic chokepoint. With the Suez Canal compromised because of the Houthis in the Red Sea, it becomes an even more important maritime route, especially for Israel, which is becoming isolated by land. For the U.S., it could be another way of applying pressure on China, which counts the Strait as a main point of entry to the Mediterranean basin, given the issues in the Red Sea.
I think this is plausible and more probable, at least in the short and medium term, than the theory proposing that Morocco is preparing to stake its claim over the two Spanish African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla with the support of the U.S. and Israel. There are grounds to uphold that view, such as comments by Israeli politicians and think tanks as well as the U.S. administration; however, I don’t think Morocco is prepared for the conflict that it would create, nor is it in the interest of the European Union.
The crossing of thousands of people creates the necessary friction without an overt military conflict in order to justify “strengthening” the border and territorial waters—since the migrants crossed by sea—which in turn justifies a greater military presence and a mediator role between Spain and Morocco. The discourse of an invasion, of the dangers of migrants flooding the EU, of Islamists breaking the culture—that’s the necessary psyop to keep people from paying attention to what is actually going on.
And the right, far-right, and neofascists in Spain completely fell for it. The language they used was that of an “act of war,” as Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right party VOX, put it, and it was time to “suffer for our homeland,” as some of the neofascists were wont to say. Others, such as the political scammer Alvise—and I say scammer because shortly after gaining notoriety, he was discredited after being revealed to have taken bribes—and the agitator Vito Quiles, said they were going to show up with thousands of people to “defend their country.”
The truth is, all of them arrived at least two days too late, when the brunt of the crisis was already passing. And all of them were scorned, laughed at, heckled, and finally thrown out of the city by its native population. “You’re coming here to sow hate,” “racists and Islamophobes out,” and “Ceuta united” were some of the slogans that were chanted at them. The far-right agitators promised to organize massive protests to which almost no one showed up, other than local residents to rebuke them. The neofascist group Núcleo Nacional had to be escorted by the police back to the boat.
It is arguable that it was all to be expected. Around 50% of the native population of Ceuta are Muslims, and many of them are ethnically very similar to those living on the other side of the border. The far-right was going to come, and the far-right was going to be escorted out. They would, in the meantime, continue exacerbating the anti-migration and Islamophobic discourse in Europe, which was part of the psyop to justify “strengthening the border.”
But what the Spanish far-right has found out in Ceuta is the reality they, and their collegues in Europe, don’t want to accept. The world has changed since the times of Franco, Mussolini, or Hitler. As one of the neofascists from Núcleo Nacional put it in an interview: “We’ve realized this is different,” he stated, as if having a revelation, “the police names here are Mohammed and Abdellah.”
The demographic substrate of Europe has changed. The religious or non-religious nature of Europeans has changed. The cultural milieu has changed. The nature of the change is not what I’m trying to analyze here. There have been benefits as well as losses. But it has changed. And it is that change that the far-right and neofascists cannot deal with. But you can’t reverse it for the simple fact that you can’t go back in time.
They want to reverse it because they believe life was better before. Perhaps it was true for their fathers or grandfathers. They could own a house or two and have a month of holiday a year by the beach. But it was mostly because they lived in a time in which the Western world was at the center of the American Empire and extracted its dividends from the rest. The logic of the capital owned by the transnational Western elite was still taking profits from other countries.
Once that was not possible anymore, it turned on itself. It began extracting higher rents from its own population. Wealth concentration grew. Inequality grew. The middle class began to disappear. And they, the frustrated Western middle class, are the mass of the far-right’s support in Europe. They have chosen (or have been directed) to blame the immigrants and the Muslims because they cannot change the system, the financial system. Notwithstanding legitimate issues, they function as a scapegoat.
If we take the Ceuta case as an example, in which the far-right and neofascists have played exactly the part that they were expected to play in order to uphold the interests of the elite in this most probable psyop, we could also extrapolate to say that they are also playing their part in a bigger Western narrative. One that blames immigrants and Muslims for their worsening living conditions—albeit ones that are better than those of most people on the planet—instead of looking at the real reason: a systemic transfer of wealth to the elites that have turned on them to maintain the status quo.
Slavoj Žižek succinctly defined this mechanism in a 2009 article in the publication The Point. In the text titled “Two Modes of Ideological Mystification,” he says:
“The second concerns the false identification of the antagonism and the enemy: class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews [swap here ‘Jews’ for immigrant/Muslim], so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the “Jewish plot.” [swap here for ‘great replacement theory’ or ‘Islamic invasion’] (…) When the subject says “Jews [immigrants/Muslims] are the cause of our misery,” he really means “big capital is the cause of our misery.””
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