On the morning of Sunday, August 18th, an 11-year-old boy called Mateo was stabbed to death while playing football with his friends in Mocejón, a village about half an hour from us on the way to Toledo.
What followed was depressingly familiar.
Online comment sections filled with demands to know the nationality of the attacker and conspiracy theories as to why the suspect’s nationality wasn’t made known immediately. What we call “bulos” (fake news) proliferated rapidly.
By Monday, it was announced that a young Spanish man had been detained and so the speculation changed to the “origins” of the suspect.
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A family member of the victim made a statement to the effect that the investigation should be respected and that the family did not wish any group to be targeted based on their nationality, ethnicity or religion. He then became the subject of an online witch-hunt and threats.
This sequence of events may seem familiar to anyone who followed the knife attack and subsequent riots in Dublin last year and, more recently, the violent reactions to the murders in Southport in England.
Thankfully, there have been no riots, but the question arises if that is the inevitable outcome.
The rise of the far right in Spain over the past 10 years has been very disconcerting.
As someone who studied history, it never really occurred to me that fascism would be something I would have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. But, with teenagers, especially boys, consuming more and more online far-right propaganda, schools have become, if not the front-line, a place where online rhetoric meets the real world.
The Spanish context is, of course, very different to the Irish one.
Fascism ruled this country for the best part of 40 years and many would argue that it never went away.
The rise of the neo-fascist political party, Vox, fuelled by the nationalistic response to the independence movement in Catalonia, coincided with the increase in far-right activity online but did not come from a vacuum.
The conservative PP party had for years been an umbrella group for all sorts of conservative and right-wing folks within a two-party political system. But, as this two-party system came apart, the more radical elements became more visible.
The playbook that we are seeing now, however, seems to be less fundamentally Spanish and rather more international.
Even in a different language, the vocabulary is familiar, albeit with the same goal of dehumanisation. Substitute “progre” (progressive) for woke and it could be the US, the UK or Ireland. Migrants are othered, they are “invaders”, especially unaccompanied minors who are referred to as “MENAs!” and positioned as one of the lethal dangers to society. People from the Middle East and North Africa are called MENAs here.
Following the murder in Mocejón, well-known politicians, agitators and social-media figures shared conspiracy theories and pointed to a hotel in the area that was housing 50 migrants and speculated that the attacker was a “MENA” and/or of North African origin.
Thankfully, as in the UK in recent weeks, there has been something of a positive reaction, the local people don’t seem to have taken the bait and the government delegate for Castilla La Mancha has announced that there will be an investigation into potential online hate crimes.
As a teacher, I have seen the way young men, in particular, have been increasingly consuming xenophobic, misogynistic and jingoistic rhetoric online. “Othering” of minority groups, the demonisation of feminism and flag-waving nationalism gets mainstream validation and plays well with a lot of people.
Under the new education law, we as teachers have more scope to address critical thinking, and so we can talk about things such as confirmation bias. However, when part of the discourse online is that education is set up to indoctrinate children into such “progre” ideologies, for those who are under the influence of more conservative social structures and online influencers, discussing this may just confirm the very bias of these conspiracy theories.
My daughter was born in Toledo in March. Her parents are Irish and Colombian. She is Spanish. She is what some people call a third culture kid.
I am sure that, at some point, her Spanishness will be questioned by someone who wants to make her feel less, exclude her or just put her down.
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Her mother likes to joke that her father is a “first class” immigrant – in other words, white and European, and so “one of the good ones”.
It’s certainly true that I have had to deal with fewer instances of prejudice than her mother, despite her Spanish citizenship.
I hope that things change and our daughter will not have to deal with prejudice and hate, but, right now, despite the horrendous attack in our neighbouring village, I am more worried about the effect online hate and neo-fascism is having than the spectre of the dangerous “other”.
- Two years ago, Eoghan Ryan moved from Madrid to a village in La Sagra, a county in the province of Toledo, Castilla La Mancha. He is a secondary school teacher who has worked in the Madrid system for 10 years. He lives with his wife and daughter.
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