Imagine a young person in Ceuta, standing on the hot sands of Benítez beach with, Spanish flag wrapped around their shoulders, watching a group of tired, frightened migrants climb out of the water. Around them, other young men are shouting, blocking the path of Red Cross workers who are trying to deliver humanitarian aid, and soon someone sets fire to the few ragged belongings that the newcomers have brought with them. It is easy to look at photographs like these and dismiss everyone in them as monsters, racists, xenophobes. But that would be too comfortable, because the truth is far more disturbing: these youths probably do not see themselves as hateful at all. They see themselves as patriots, as saviors of their homeland, as people willing todo the dirty work that politicians refuse to do. They have swallowed a story in which they are the heroes, and the ragged people on the beach are the villains — not human beings fleeing horror, but an invading army sent to destroy their country. That is why the images are not a coincidence, as the original commentary argues. They are the predictable result of a chaotic government response, years of anti-immigrant propaganda, and a digital ecosystem that has learned how to turn fear into violence, one meme at a time.
The story begins with a failure of governance. Spain has never had a consistent, humane, intelligent migration policy, andhen crisis strikes, the response is always improvisation, blame-shifting,and cruelty dressed up as pragmatism. In the days before the images from Ceuta, word spread across social media—especially through WhatsApp audios and fringe Twitter accounts—that there was a window of opportunity, a legal loophole, a Supreme Court ruling saying that if you swam hard enough, you could enter Ceuta without being expelled. It was a lie, or at best a grossly misleading simplification, but it did its damage: hundreds of people, many of them children, many of them exhausted and desperate, believed it. They came to the coast, they threw themselves into the water, and they arrived on Spanish soil expecting protection. Instead, they found chaos: police pulling them from beaches, local residents forming hostile crowds, politicians arguing over whose fault it was while the people sat in the sun with no water, no shelter, no plan. It is important to be honest here: the Spanish government it is not innocent. Its mismanagement was not an accident of nature; it was a choice. It chose to treat migration as a security problem rather than a humanitarian one, it chose to negotiate with fear rather than alleviate it, and it chose to let political advantage come before human dignity. The article rightly says that this reality does not remove even a gram of responsibility from the Spanish government for the disastrous management of the migratory crisis—first humanitarian, now social and political. But it also insists, just as rightly, that we cannot ignore who is pulling the strings in the shadows, because Ceuta is not just a local story about a border town in North Africa. It is a theater for global ideological warfare.
The far-right has learned a powerful lesson in recent years: language is everything. When you call migrants “invaders, ” you do something far more dangerous than name-calling: you strip them of their humanity. You turn them into abstractions, into symbols of threat, into enemies whose existence justifiesany violence in response. That is exactly what Javier Celay, a PP deputy for Ceuta, did when he told reporters that “the scenes of violence position the invaders who entered irregularly as victims, when the victims are the Ceutans.” Listen to that sentence closely. Violence is not condemned in itself, it is only a problem because it happens to make the wrong people look bad. He was not saying “stop attacking migrants”; he was saying“your violence is counterproductive, because it makes you look like the aggressor.” It is a perfect example of how political elites can launder hatred into reasonableness, and how ordinary people can absorb it without ever feeling they have become bigots. The young Ceutans in those images are not acting out of cruelty for its own sake; they are acting out of a twisted love for their own community, a love that has been poisoned by people who taught them that compassion for strangers is treason. And they were not expressing some spontaneous popular anger, either. They were performing a script written by a transnational network of far-right influencers, bots, and foreign intelligence services, all working to destabilize the European Union from within.
That script is written in algorithms. The original article notes something astonishing: between July 27 and August 10, around 40% of the conversation on X—Twitter—about the Ceuta crisis was in English, not Spanish, not Arabic. Why would thousands of English-speaking accounts, many of them far removed from the Mediterranean, suddenly care about a small Spanish enclave in North Africa? Because it was a useful story. It fit the global far-right narrative of a“civilizational threat,” of open borders destroyingthe West, of weak liberal elites betraying their people. Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, amplified that narrative with posts about Ceuta that reached an estimated 724 million views in eleven days. That is not a spontaneous expression of public opinion; that is an engineered information operation. And it did not stop at the border: the same networks that pushed fear also pushed disinformation about the Spanish government, about the European Union, about migration as a whole, aiming to divide Europeans and make them turn on each other. The original commentary draws our attention to another inconvenient truth: Moscow has been delighted to fuelthese fires. Russia wants a weak, fragmented Europe, a Europe too busy fighting itself to stand up to Russian aggression, too suspicious of its neighbors to build solidarity. Every act of hate in Ceuta is a gift to the Kremlin. Every Spanish politician who uses migrants as electoral weapons is doing Putin’s work, whether they know it or not. And the same is true of the United States, which increasingly prefers to negotiate with individual European states rather than with a united European bloc. The European Union, and the model of open, democratic, cooperative coexistence it represents, stands in the crosshairs of both authoritarian rivals and populist sympathizers within its own borders. Ceuta is not a footnote to European politics; it is the sharp edge of a much larger attack on the idea of Europe itself.
We must not, however, commit the opposite sin of ignoring Spanish and European culpability in favor of a convenient geopolitical conspiracy theory. The article insists, and must insist, that right now, Washington is one of Morocco’s main partners, and that Morocco has learned to use Ceuta and Melilla as a tool to blackmail Spain and the European Union. This is not a secret; it is diplomatic reality. Whenever Morocco feels neglected, or wants concessions on fishing rights, or trade deals, or recognition of its claims over Western Sahara, it can turn the tap of migration on or off. It can unleash a thousand desperate people at the borders and then stand back and watch Europe panic. This puts Spain in an almost impossible position: it is simultaneously caught between its own colonial history, its need for Moroccan cooperation, its obligation to protect human rights, andthe pressure of a domestic electorate inflamed by populist rhetoric. But impossible positions do not excuse inhumane responses. Spain has done desperate things in recent years to avoid looking weak: it has built walls, it has pushed people back at the border, it has outsourced its dirty work to Moroccan security forces, it has looked the other way while violence happened in its name. Each of those choices has made the next crisis more violent, because desperation learns from precedent: migrants learn that barriers are met with force, and border towns learn that migrants are met with hatred. The people on both sides of that fence are being used. The migrants are used as pawns in a geopolitical chess game; the Ceutan youths are used as foot soldiers in a cultural war. Their true interests—peace, safety, a future for their children, a community where neighbors help each other—are identical, but they have been convinced they are enemies. To humanize this situation means refuse to accept that framing. It means look at the young man with the flag and see not a Nazi but a frightened boy who has been taught to fear. It means look at the mother from Sudan and see not an invader but a person who walked for years, who risked drowning, who did all of it because staying home meant death. It means recognize that both of them deserve better than what their leaders are offering them: better leadership, better information, better policies, better visions of the future.
What would a humane response actually look like? It would start by telling the truth: that migration is not a sudden invasion but a permanent feature of a deeply unequal world, and that closing your heart does not make it go away. It would mean fixing the absurd asylum system that forces people to risk their lives instead of offering safe legal pathways. It would mean recognizing the economic and demographic realities that Europe actually needs newcomers, even as it fears them. It would mean treating border towns like Ceuta not as fortresses under siege but as communities deserving investment, infrastructure, opportunity, so that their residents do not feel abandoned by the rest of Europe. It would mean holding social media platforms accountable for amplifying hate, and refraining our ownaddiction to outrage, because every time we share an inflammatory post, we are helping the people who want to destroy the European project. And it would mean ending the hypocrisy of European governments that claim to defend human rights while funding border walls and paying authoritarian regimes to do their dirty work. The article’s final point is not a call to surrender to openness or to tough borders, but a call to clarity: we are in the middle of a war for the soul of Europe, and the weapons being used against us are our own fears. The far-right, Russia, those who want to see Europe dismantled, do not need to send armies do do their destructive work; they just need to convince ordinary people that their neighbor is an enemy, that compassion is weakness, that violence is patriotism. The scenes on Benítez beach are not the beginning of the story nor the end. They are a symptom of a deeper disease, a disease of political cowardice, digital manipulation, and moral amnesia. But diseases can be cured. It will take courage from politicians who choose humanity over electoral calculation. It will take vigilance from citizens who refuse to be played. And it will take mercy from all of us—themercy to recognize ourselves in the strangers on the shore, and in the frightened young people waving flags. Because if we can do that, we can stop the cycle of dehumanization that turns neighbors into enemies. And if we can stop that, we might still save the Europe that both the migrants and the Ceutans, in their different ways, are desperately hoping for.