The massive influx of roughly 80,000 migrants into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco—which started on July 30, and was effectively aided and abetted by the Kingdom of Morocco—is over, at least for now. It was immediately triggered by three key factors. First, an Arab-language social media frenzy followed the Spanish Supreme Court ruling on June 29 that barred the summary deportation of migrants arriving to Spanish territory by sea.

Contrary to legal precedent, or common sense, the court found that summary return could only apply to people attempting to breach the physical barriers of the land perimeters of Ceuta and Melilla, such as border fences, but not to those swimming around them. Social media influencers unsurprisingly took this to mean that Spain is ripe for invasion. Viral videos and online groups shared maps, instructions, and tips about buying diving gear to swim around the coastal breakwaters.

The impression that Spain is a soft target was reinforced by the Socialist government in Madrid, which approved last January an extraordinary migrant amnesty scheme to grant legal status to an estimated 500,000 illegals. Spearheaded by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the plan—deliberately misnamed regularization to conceal its true nature—ran counter to stricter EU migration trends and opened the floodgates for eventually granting amnesty to more than 1 million illegals. In a letter to the European Commission, 22 European Union heads of government described Spain’s regularization decision as a major “pull factor” leading to the Ceuta border crisis.

The scale of the surge and delayed intervention by Moroccan border forces mirrored a previous Morocco-Spain border incident in 2021, although this time it was staged on a vastly greater scale. It is likely that the government in Rabat deliberately abandoned border security to exert political pressure on Spain in the aftermath of a state visit by Sánchez to Algeria, Morocco’s regional rival.

Ceuta and Melilla are two autonomous cities of Spain located on the north coast of Africa. They form part of the European Union‘s only external land border in Africa. Morocco claims sovereignty over both cities, on the spurious grounds that they are the only European enclaves on the African continent, although they have formed an integral part of Spain’s national territory for more than 500 years. A 2024 survey found that 35 percent of Moroccans (of a population of 39 million) wanted to emigrate from the country. It can be safely assumed that the percentage is far greater elsewhere in the region, along the overwhelmingly Muslim regions of the Maghreb and in the poverty-stricken Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa.

Prime Minister Sánchez belatedly and unconvincingly described the invasion as an “attack” and a “violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.” In view of his track record, his promise that the state would use every available means to restore control of the border should not be trusted. At the same time, tellingly, he lashed out at those who blamed his massive legalization program for the invasion. One of them is Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the right-of-center president of the autonomous Community of Madrid, who wrote that “Sánchez allows Spain to be invaded through Ceuta.” Critics insist that the government had been warned by Spanish intelligence services of the coming crisis but failed to act.

The essence of the problem is that Europe is subjected to an Islamic invasion. All other causes quoted by the bien-pensants are secondary. Hilaire Belloc, in his 1938 book, The Great Heresies, presciently wondered, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake the dominion of the Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?”

This has happened, as a result of the same traits of decrepitude which are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, and Scandinavia. They include both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones:

• Elite hostility to all forms of solidarity within the majority population, based on common ancestry and traditional culture of the indigenous European nations;
  
• Rampant Muslim immigration, which is presented as inevitable and even desirable;
  
• Demographic decline, unparalleled in history, and population replacement;
  
• Legal imposition of “diversity” and criminalization of the nebulous “hate speech”;
  
• Demonizing and criminalizing of any opposition to any of the above

De-Christianization is the key to this program. The result is that in today’s Western Europe more people pray in mosques on Fridays than in churches on Sundays. Loss of faith creates unhappy, neurotic, and addictive people. It makes millions of Europeans quietly miserable and prone to every excess, every abuse that resolves nothing and demands nothing but more of the same. It produces the “Stockholm Syndrome” among Euro-converts to Islam who are thirsting for meaning, or else who are doomed to live in enclaves engulfed by the Muslim immigrant deluge.

The elites trust that a deprived mass culture and mass indoctrination in state schools will neutralize any lingering sense of historical and cultural continuity of real Europeans. The loss of a sense of place and history experienced by millions of them, whether they are aware of that loss or not, follows the emergence of a transnational hyper-state in Europe that is increasingly totalitarian. It has enabled the would-be revolutionaries of 1968 to move beyond the Gramscian “long march” to a budding superstate of their very own.

The results are grim. Edward Gibbon could just as well have been writing of today’s Marseilles or Rotterdam when he wrote of late imperial Rome in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Its inhabitants were sinking “into a vile and wretched populace, which must, in a few generations, have been totally extinguished, if it had not been constantly recruited by the manumission of slaves and the influx of strangers.” The revolutionary character of the project is revealed in the mantra of race, gender, and sexuality, now elevated to the status of the postmodern philosopher’s stone. It is the force that moves the linear historical process forward towards the grand Gleichschaltung (total control)of nations, races, and cultures that will mark the end of history. Race, gender, and sexuality have replaced the proletariat as both the oppressed underclass (hence the cult of the nonwhite, non-male, non-heterosexual victimhood), and as the historically preordained agent of revolutionary change, based on a wholly metaphysical concept of victimhood.

An array of associated special-rights claims have worked such wonders for Islam. Those claims are invariably based on the alleged victim’s “otherness” vis-à-vis the white oppressor. Native-born Europeans, in this insane but all-pervasive paradigm, are guilty of oppression by their very existence.

On the present trajectory, within a century there will be no “Europeans.” “Child-free” is used as a legitimate lifestyle term, on par with “fat-free” and “drug-free.” But whereas the threat of extinction of an exotic tribal group in New Guinea or Amazonia—let alone a species of spotted owl or sperm whale—would cause elite alarm and prompt activism, it is deemed inherently racist to mention the fact that real native Europeans are now, literally, an endangered species. Only a society gone mad can unblinkingly be told that Islam is good and tolerant, that “we” (the West) have been nasty and unkind to it over the centuries—“remember the Crusades!”—and that terrorism needs to be understood, and cured, independently of Islam’s teaching and practice.

At the root of the European malaise is the notion that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited them for generations and built their institutions, but to whomever happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment. One is not supposed to give any regard to his culture, attitude, or intentions. A further malevolent fallacy is the dictum that we should not feel a special bond for any particular country, nation, or culture, but transfer our preferences to  “humanity,” equally.

Such notions have been internalized by the Western elite class to the point that they actively help Islamic invasion. In reality, there has never been and there will be no grand synthesis, no civilizational cross-fertilization, between Europe and Islam. The issue is only, as Lenin put it, кто-кого (“Who will beat whom”). As things stand now, the outcome appears almost fatally preordained. The tradition of a peasantry ruled by its “betters” has been turned on its head: in Europe most nations want to defend themselves—the citizens of Ceuta did this by closing all shops and bars (and being attacked by the leftist media for such insensitivity)—but they are hamstrung by a ruling class composed of neo-Marxists, guilt-ridden self-haters, and appeasers.

Pedro Sánchez fits that description to a tee. The hold of people like Sánchez on the political power, media, and legal systems of Europe is undemocratic, unnatural, and obscene. They want their subjects to share their death wish, to self-annihilate as peoples with a historical memory and a cultural identity. They want to make room for their vision of post-human, monistic anti-Europe, initially spearheaded and ultimately ruled by the Islamic fifth column.

This crime can and must be stopped. If Europe is to survive, Sánchez and those like him need to be unmasked for what they are—traitors to their nations and their culture—and replaced by patriots aware of the threat and prepared to contemplate the cure, no matter how painfully radical (and even odious to some sensitive souls) it may be in the final act. If Europe is to survive, Sánchez & Co. must be replaced by people ready and willing to subject the issues of immigration, identity, and self-preservation to the test of popular will and the natural instinct for survival. Europe needs leaders unhindered by the death cult of “European values” promoted by the EU and its local minions.

America’s leaders, too, need to view the tragedy of what is happening to Europe in the context of a common civilization which is threatened by a common enemy. Temporary squabbles over things like Spain’s attitude to the Iran war, must not blur the broader picture. To wit, a recent U.S. House Appropriations Committee report for a 2027 funding bill casually described Ceuta and Melilla as being “located in Moroccan territory,” which is a scandalous lie. They “remain the subject of Morocco’s longstanding claim” indeed, but with far less legal, historical, demographic, or moral justification than some hardcore Mexican reconquistadores’ claim to Texas, Arizona, or California.