Torre Pacheco and the breeding of monsters in the West

Two decades ago, the terrible jihadist attack at Madrid’s Atocha train station did not trigger any widespread reprisals against the Muslim community living in Spain, in what amounted to a demonstration of remarkable social maturity. It was a different Spain. It was a different world.

Today, the sociopolitical fabric of much of the West is an immense, highly flammable terrain. One in which a skillfully manipulated real incident, or even simply a well-spread lie coupled with irresponsible political rhetoric, would be enough to ignite major fires. The Torre Pacheco incident is part of a larger scheme inherent to this new world, this new Spain. Let’s connect some dots to see it in its full scope.

Last June, serious racist incidents occurred in Northern Ireland following a sexual assault allegedly committed against a girl by two minors who showed up in court with Romanian translation services. Across the border in the Republic of Ireland, significant xenophobic riots have erupted since 2023 for various reasons, including the conversion of a former industrial plant into a shelter.

Also in June, Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian national, was shot dead in southern France. The French Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office has taken over the investigation of the murder as a racist crime linked to the far right, the first time it has done so since its creation in 2019. The man arrested as the alleged murderer had left an unmistakable racist and Islamophobic trail on social media.

In Italy, a week ago, the police reported investigations into a gang organizing punitive expeditions against migrants. The gang is called Article 52, a reference to the section of the Constitution that includes the idea that “the defense of the homeland is the sacred duty of the citizen.” In May, German police arrested five right-wing extremists planning attacks against migrants.

In the United Kingdom, last summer, there were large-scale xenophobic riots.

The list could go on, but it isn’t necessary. The symptoms are obvious. What’s the cause?

These are the most brutal flare-ups of a reactionary phenomenon incubated in a breeding ground of material and cultural malaise. These have been skillfully explored, understood, and irresponsibly fueled by far-right forces.

It is important to analyze the connection between the material and the cultural factors. Discontent over situations of economic decline or precariousness paves the way for a cultural crusade. The excesses of capitalism that led to the 2008 crisis, the negative consequences of globalization, in terms of job relocation, or of technological revolutions, the difficulty of accessing housing in a globalized world... all of this has contributed to generating discontent among the working classes who, as Christopher Lasch warned in the 1990s, were witnessing an outrageous disconnection from the upper classes. At the same time, the view of migrants as rivals became increasingly entrenched.

Of course, there are wealthy people who vote for the far right. But it is especially on this popular indignation that the cathedral of the cultural and identity war has been built. The indiscriminate and violent backlash against immigrants stems primarily from this. Another variant of the backlash is one that views with suspicion, or even weariness — even to the point of violence — the legitimate and necessary progress of women toward equality.

That longing for another world — a white, sexist world where the head of the family had a stable job, perhaps in a factory, which allowed him to buy a home and more or less support his wife and kids, while the children had the prospect of a better life — is an important part of the issue.

The far right — with its increasingly incendiary rhetoric, whether accusing immigrants of eating pets or advocating for the mass and indiscriminate expulsion of invaders supposedly wiping out an entire culture — bears primary and grave political responsibility for the outbreak of these fires. The legal issue is for the judges to resolve, but the political issue is crystal clear.

This does not mean that progressive forces — political, cultural, in the media — are exempt from blame.

In some cases, they substantially ignored the real problems generated by intense migration processes. The rightful desire to avoid stigmatizing people sometimes led to a misguided instinct: to avoid focusing on certain things, a sort of implicit denial of real problems. And this opened the door to the far right.

In other, more recent cases, the problem lies with an opposite attitude: a hypercorrection that has led to policies that resemble those of the far right and, in some ways, seem to consolidate a xenophobic mood.

Of course, each country has its own circumstances. In Germany and France, the rise of the far right is primarily due to the massive presence of migrants from distant cultures, who do, at times, pose integration problems. In Italy, with a prolonged failure of the political and economic system that has caused persistent stagnation, a widespread sense of regression and pessimism: an “every man for himself” situation.

In Spain, the issue has much to do with the territorial question. Unscrupulous Catalan separatist nationalism fostered the rise of a brutal Spanish nationalism, one that initially clung to the banner of territorial integrity and now advances ruthlessly racist rhetoric.

But the common denominators are extremely strong. The far right is nationalist; and nationalism always hides, behind a cultural cloak, a material interest.

In the two decades since the Atocha attacks, the world has become increasingly tense. It wasn’t an easy time: we were facing ruthless jihadist terrorism and an abusive “war on terror” from the U.S. and its allies. But then came the 2008 crisis, the 2015 wave of Syrian refugees, and amid this mix of material and cultural discontent, nationalist-populist projects began to flourish. Now they are unleashed. They are fueling fires everywhere. In Spain too. And they have a monstrous quality. Individuals who commit crimes are criminals. But ideologies with the potential to burn down peaceful coexistence are monstrous. Everything indicates that they will continue to spread.

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