The Don Pelayos of Twitter: the spread of far-right hoaxes
Editors Note: Article republished from Nuevo Rumbo, organ of the Communist Party of the Workers of Spain. We would like the reader to approach the following article with an understanding of the extreme views which have been surfacing on social media, notably, Twitter. Since coming under the ownership of the reactionary billionaire Elon Musk, our "For You" pages have been flooded with conspiracy theories, far-right hoaxes, and other racist or xenophobic non-sense. This is not a coincidence and does not originate from the head of a single capitalist. As mentioned in the article, it is the reflection of the sharpening of imperialist contradictions, of the political positions developed as a result of the economic base. The failure of the "liberal" and social democratic management methods has paved the way for the most reactionary options to appear as a way out for the workers and people.
In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington stated that, in the post-Cold War context, the main sources of conflict in the world were no longer political or economic, but civilizational. With the dissolution of the USSR, a world was emerging in which cultural and religious foundations would provoke clashes between civilizations.
The theory was untenable and was quickly subjected to criticism; it was a hodgepodge in which countries were grouped into various blocks that formed supposed civilizing projects. Its falsity prevented it from explaining international dialectics, so its application quickly passed into the realm of pure propaganda. In addition to being an idealistic theory, since it explains the course of history based on the ideological and cultural superstructure, it had the function of hiding the impossibility of separating the economic base from the internal and external politics of each country.
By covering up the continuity between economics and foreign policy, that is, between capitalism and inter-imperialist struggles, it is hidden that the clashes and alliances between countries are due to the defence of their respective capitals by States and inter-state alliances. For this reason, the theory of The Clash of Civilizations and the Reconfiguration of the World Order, despite its explanatory uselessness, remained in force, since it tacitly fulfils the same function in today's imperialism: legitimising the foreign and domestic policy of monopoly capital.
In foreign policy, it is used to justify the genocide of entire peoples, as is the case of Palestine. The imperialist interests defended by Zionism are exonerated as a defence of democracy and tolerance. Israel belongs, in its words, to the West, and constitutes the first line of defence of free societies against "Islamic barbarism". Unfortunately, we are very accustomed to this criminal rhetoric of democracy and freedom used by the Atlantic Alliance.
As we have noted, it is also used to influence domestic politics. Specifically, it is used to divide the country's workers between natives and foreigners. According to its defenders, in their terms, migratory flows are equivalent to the invasion of barbarian civilizations that want to wipe out the "civilized European peoples," proclaiming regressive political forms, such as a supposed caliphate that would restore Al-Andalus. "They are coming for us, they want to end our world," some influencers often shout into the webcam in their room . As the level of delirium is difficult to sustain, a lot of ideological rubbish is required to generate those alienated mentalities destined to become the Don Pelayos of Twitter (X). In their heads, they believe they are living a kind of Reconquista or are the reincarnation of the Knight Templar in the Crusade against Islam.
But, beyond psychological explanations, alienation has material conditions. Any Twitter user, for some time now, will have noticed that their timeline , the “for you” section, is a mess of racist nonsense that compete to outdo each other. Social networks, far from being a reflection of the citizenry, catalyze and amplify political positions developed in accordance with changes in the economic base. Therefore, faced with the sharpening of imperialist contradictions, the decline of classist positions and the social democratic management of capital, the reactionary option appears plausible, which tries to win followers for its cause.
All sorts of extravagances are multiplying, favoured by algorithms designed for this purpose, which have become naturalised and converted into the ideology of the most declassed sectors. Only in this way can we understand categorical statements such as that Sharia is a reality in many municipalities in Spain, being above state legislation; the assertion that hordes of jackals are crossing Africa to invade us and that, in 2050 or before, we will be an Islamic country; that it is impossible to leave home without being stabbed by an immigrant; or that the veil is fashionable among teenagers…
Other tweets openly complain about how unpleasant it is for them to have so many Moors, blacks and Latinos in the Metro: “they smell bad,” they say. The use of fabrication is a constant in their posts. For example, a boy said in a thread that, out of three times he left home in a week, he was assaulted by Moroccans on all three occasions. What a coincidence…
But for xenophobia to gain strength, the hoax and the fabrication have to be peppered with victimhood. A few tears and the fake will be more credible: “racists are discriminated against,” they whine. Twitter (the same one that promotes their publications with its algorithms) censors them and they have had to invent a newspeak to avoid persecution. Therefore, to refer to immigrants in a derogatory tone, they use epithets such as “anchovies,” “panchitos,” “younglanders,” etc.
It should be noted that the systematic assembly of nonsense could not be carried out without the collaboration of the parties of capital, from the left wing to the right wing, since they use the lowest passions to win over their voters. While the left wing uses the fear of the extreme right to legitimize itself as a governing party in the eyes of its electorate, implementing policies that favor capital ("with the right you would be worse off," they say), the extreme right and fascism use hatred of foreign workers to expand their discourse. Their method is simple: by resorting to hoaxes and fallacies, they present a situation where our daily life would be threatened by immigrants, so it is necessary to "defend ourselves" from them, whom they dehumanize and turn into pathogens that would come to destroy the foundations of our civilization.
You will never see them criticising the way in which immigrant workers are brutally exploited. Nor, when they refer to rates of theft and robbery, will they introduce variables such as poverty and exclusion from the productive system into the analysis. They will simply point out, in the form of videos uploaded to the web, that we are suffering an invasion to which “the Spanish” must respond in order not to be annihilated. The false dichotomy of invasion/survival brings out the most visceral passions. Meanwhile, the bosses laugh and continue to accumulate profits by exploiting natives and foreigners.
In the case of the United Kingdom, last summer a series of attacks against Muslim immigrants began, promoted by the media cavern when they spread the lie that the murderer of three girls in a dance school was a Muslim immigrant. For the reactionary mob, all Muslim immigrants automatically became targets for pogrom. Some said that the murderer had arrived by boat across the English Channel and was an asylum seeker.
Similarly, the murder of an eleven-year-old boy in Mocejón last August, while he was playing in a park, was infamously exploited by the far right to claim that the killer was a jihadist, in order to target Muslim immigrants. It was later confirmed that the killer of the girls in the United Kingdom was a British minor and that of the boy from Mocejón, a 20-year-old Spaniard.
However, it is absurd to place the focus of the debate on the birthplace of those convicted of crimes in Spain. The explosion of hoaxes that associate immigration with crime has no real correlation; it is a discourse that seeks to disunite native and foreign workers, pitting them against each other so that the employers can exploit them more and better. On the part of capital, the aim is to disorganise the ranks of workers so that they cannot oppose a common classist force that allows the working class to win rights in the workplace. And for this disorganisation, there is nothing better than racism and xenophobia. For this reason, the ¡No pasarán! of our times can only be effective with class unity in the workplace to combat the exploiters.