Jumella and the boiled frog syndrome
If a frog is placed in boiling water, it will immediately jump out to save itself. However, if it is placed in cold water and the temperature is gradually increased, the frog will not perceive the danger and will be boiled to death without attempting to escape. This phenomenon, known as "boiled frog syndrome," describes a process of gradual adaptation to change that can have tragic and irreversible consequences. It is a strategy commonly used to explain various social and political phenomena, including the rise of Nazism and its tragic outcome in the form of genocide. It is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that Hitler would have gained the support of German citizens if he had run in the 1933 elections with a political platform that included his plan to exterminate Jews, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other minorities through a sophisticated system of extermination camps and Cameroons. Such a policy would not have found support among the German public. No one, not even those most convinced of the superiority of the Aryan race, would probably have supported a party that upheld such barbarity in its political ideology.
However, Hitler managed to convince a large majority of Germans through the "boiled frog" strategy. He began with boycotts of Jewish businesses and the exclusion of Jews from some professions. He then banned marriages between Jews and Aryans, burned synagogues, and finally, the process culminated in the mass shipment of Jews to concentration camps and, finally, to extermination camps. And it seemed normal. The conclusion of a logical and irrefutable process.
It's certainly not an unknown strategy for the international far right. In the United States, the process of dehumanizing the "different" is at an advanced stage. Popular—and therefore illegal—patrols are being organized by order of the president to detain and deport suspected migrants, using moving trucks. The president even applauds a television ad boasting of genetic supremacy. It's likely that if Trump had included these measures in the Republican Party's platform in 2016, he would have hardly made it to the US presidency. However, a decade later, after implementing other measures against migrants, all this seems acceptable. It's one more degree of heat, and it's still bearable.
Vox appears to be employing this same tactic by using certain Murcian towns as a testing ground. After a Vox representative called for the expulsion of eight million migrants and after hordes of violent individuals organized to beat up young migrants in Torre Pacheco, the Jumella City Council approved regulations prohibiting the use of public facilities, especially sports centers, exclusively for Islamic communities, which in practice is detrimental. The (supposed) reason given to justify this measure is that these are foreign "celebrations" and that it is necessary to defend Spain's identity. Defend it, as Vox points out, against the plague of migrants and the contagion of foreign cultures. Again, it's one degree warmer, and it can still be tolerated.
But if this worsening of the persecution of those who are different weren't enough, another factor must be added that makes it even more worrying: the support of the party that will likely govern Spain in the coming years, which not only remains impassive in the face of the hardening of the discourse and measures proposed by Vox, but now embraces them as its own. What would have scandalized any democrat yesterday—bans targeting minorities, civil patrols fueled by hate speech, exclusions disguised as "identity defense"—now provokes barely a gesture of disgust, but rather a justification. The temperature has risen another degree, and it still holds firm. This tolerance to ideological heat is precisely what allows the process to move forward, step by step, without major setbacks.
But we are increasingly approaching boiling point, and eventual responsibility falls not only on those who promote these policies, but also on those who condone them with their silence, passivity, or self-serving electoral complicity. History has shown that the trivialization of evil doesn't require monsters, but rather social and political environments that look the other way. As Burke said, evil triumphs when good people do nothing. That's why,that the central government has challenged the municipal agreement It's a step in the right direction. But we must remember that the boiled frog syndrome is not a simple rhetorical exercise, but an ethical imperative: we still have time to act. If we ignore small, gradual changes, we will end up unwittingly adapting to calamitous and irreversible situations, until it's too late to take action. It's not a question of being alarmist, but of remembering the past and being aware that democracies don't collapse suddenly, but rather erode slowly.
