In Vic, in the 1990s, there were already some neo-Nazi groups. I watched them from afar, and I remember how they provoked an almost instinctive, visceral fear in me. morophiliaThe uprising against the Republic, in fact, could not have taken place without the numerous troops recruited in the Rif. But if there is one thing that characterizes these postmodern fascists, it is their ability to defend contradictory values. They no longer declare themselves anti-Semitic, but if the phenomenon of immigration did not exist, where would these nostalgic people, who were already walking with firefighters And tight pants presented themselves as reactionary anti-system rebels? What the surveys tell us about the shift towards the extreme right among youth is a continuation of those gangs of skinheads, only with a massive reach thanks to the radiating power of digital media. Encouraging people to go out and "hunt the Moor" is nothing new, and one only needs to review the newspaper archives to discover cases such as El Ejido and Ca n'Anglada and other episodes of racist violence directed at the "other" par excellence.
In this case, we should avoid falling into the sugarcoating of messages from far-right groups claiming to be against immigration or undocumented immigrants or calling them xenophobic. Not even the word racism It suits them well because, in fact, in Spain (and Catalonia), what we're talking about is an atavistic and deep hatred based on a very solid construction in the collective imagination that comes from afar. While it's true that Franco achieved a strange hybridization by organizing a crusade carried out by a significant number of Muslim soldiers against the supposedly common enemy—the red and atheist one—(although we must remember that many of the Moors he brought to the dictator accompanied him because their families were literally dying of hunger), if we went back to 100%. morophobia Hispanic situated exactly in the colonial war that began in 1909 and ended in 1925 in the so-called "Landing of Alhucemas" (and which it seems that some military still wanted to commemorate this September) and the establishment of a protectorate is in the colonial conquest where it is forged, through the astute image, which still oozes through the cracks through which our collective subconscious emerges. The image of the North African in SpainI must say that looking at the illustrations in the volume, many of which were published in newspapers and magazines from the time of the Penetration, is so nauseating that I've never been able to look at them all.
The events in Torre Pacheco these days are not about xenophobia or rejection of immigrants, and they do not stem from a lack of understanding of the hated subject, but rather the opposite: hatred of the "other" with whom one has had the most contact and conflicts. It is also a reflection of how the construction of national identity is, by definition, a radical separation from this element considered radically opposed and which embodies all the evils that one does not want to see in one's own society. That is why this specific racism, the morophobia, is perfect for a populist party like Vox, which thrives when it's able to stir up hatred against a recognizable figure, articulated through layers of waste and stereotypes. It doesn't matter that, in this case, the racists can easily pass for North Africans, because it's the image of the foreign enemy who has illegally and treacherously entered Spanish territory that excites the sadistic impulses of the lynchers; it's the need to cleanse a society whose corruption is attributed to these foreigners of impure elements.
