Some events look like accidents. But savor the political implications, and you realize they are anything but simple.
Recently, a terrifying refugee wave hit Spain. The epicenter: Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the North African coast.
Spain sits at Europe's southwestern tip. Ceuta, by contrast, is at the northernmost edge of the Maghreb, a Spanish autonomous city that borders Morocco.
On July 30, a massive wave of illegal immigrants swam into Ceuta. Some media put the number at 49,000 in just 24 hours, mostly Moroccans.
Videos of the chaos surfaced online. Some edited the footage to look like a zombie invasion. Trump's close friend Musk reposted one, calling it a joke. But the schadenfreude was unmistakable.
Later, the vast majority were deported back to Morocco. But the incident left at least 67 migrants dead.
Their bodies were pulled from the sea, deflated floats drifting nearby. Most drowned.
This refugee storm was ostensibly triggered by rumors.
The immediate spark: a misinterpreted ruling by the Spanish Supreme Court in early July. The court said illegal immigrants arriving by sea in Ceuta could not be immediately deported. But that was just a procedural provision. It did not mean they could obtain legal status.
The decision was quickly twisted into explosive rumors. Some claimed that simply swimming into Ceuta guaranteed the right to stay in Spain and eventually gain legal status. Others insisted that Spain had opened its borders.
By last week, Instagram and other platforms were flooded with videos and photos of migrants successfully crossing. The images spurred a wave of copycats.
A 16-year-old Moroccan who entered illegally said he took the risk after seeing those very videos on Instagram. It was later confirmed that many of the images were old photos passed off as real, or even AI-generated fakes. Paired with misleading text, they were disguised as footage of successful smuggling into Ceuta. They incited a flood of illegal immigrants to swim into the territory.
The vast majority of the illegal immigrants who stormed the border were Moroccans. Morocco's economic situation is dire: youth unemployment sits at 37%, and 25% of young people are trapped in a triple bind of no education, no employment, and no poverty alleviation. They reacted fiercely to the false messages swirling online, convinced that swimming ashore would grant them residency in Spain.
In the end, the Spanish government quickly brought the situation under control and returned those who had entered illegally to Morocco.
But the incident triggered a major political shock. Far-right Italian Prime Minister Meloni was the first to attack. Her Brothers of Italy party quickly posted footage of illegal immigrants running through the streets of Ceuta, along with a mocking caption: "This is the Sánchez model the Italian left wing likes so much."
Meloni then announced that she would suspend the Schengen Agreement, which allows free movement of people between Italy and Spain, citing security threats.
Italy's move infuriated Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez. The Socialist leader lashed out at some EU countries for attacking Spain during the crisis, playing political calculations instead of providing support.
From Spain's perspective, the influx of refugees had already been brought under control. Ceuta itself is not part of the Schengen Area; its residents were never able to move freely within the EU under the Schengen Agreement. Moroccan illegal immigrants could never have traveled to the European mainland without checks. Italy's action was simply making an issue out of nothing.
The real question: was the surge of illegal immigration in Ceuta an accident, or was it orchestrated behind the scenes? Western far-right forces look like the prime suspects.
Meloni was the first to be questioned. Even the BBC reported that she was simply exploiting the situation, and she knew it very well.
As the BBC notes, Meloni faces elections next year. Her ruling coalition is bleeding support, under fire from a fierce new anti-immigration party.
This was her moment to project strength and claw back votes. She seized it immediately.
Spain has been angering its Western allies. And it's not just its relatively lenient attitude toward immigration.
Prime Minister Sánchez has long maintained friendly relations with China, putting him outside the EU mainstream.
Then there's his flat refusal to hike military spending to 5% of GDP, as Trump demands. That makes him a maverick among EU heavyweights, and it has infuriated Trump.
Back on July 8, Trump met with NATO Secretary General Rutte. He didn't mince words: Spain was hopeless. The US wanted no business with Spain.
He wanted to cut off all trade, even official visits.
After the refugee surge in Ceuta, Trump gleefully weighed in. He described the scenes “looks like an invasion”. He said it was terrible, told people to remember the picture, and warned that “that same thing's going to happen to us if the Republicans don't get elected, except worse, much bigger”.
Trump directly linked the Spain incident to the US election. Highly suspicious.
The geopolitical situation is extremely tense. Spain just got hit by a sudden refugee surge. Most of the migrants have been sent back, but Sánchez is deeply wounded. This may have been premeditated.
The real attack on Spain isn't the refugee wave. It's the far-right forces led by Trump.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
Two national security cases have recently wrapped up in quick succession.
On Thursday (10 September), two members of the "Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union" were sentenced to three years, and three years and two months in prison respectively. Both had pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit secession" under the Hong Kong National Security Law.
Then today (11 September), sentence was passed in the "incitement to subversion" case against the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (the Alliance). Albert Ho Chun-yan, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for five years and two months.
The two defendants who pleaded not guilty, Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, were jailed for seven years and seven years and three months respectively.
The judge made it clear in sentencing why the Alliance case fell into the "serious circumstances" category. The case did not involve violence or any concrete method put forward by the defendants for "ending one-party rule."
But society was in turmoil at the time of the offence.
The defendants' activities continued for a full 14 months after the National Security Law came into force. Those activities were citywide in scope and attracted widespread attention.
The defendants believed that what they advocated might be unlawful, yet persisted regardless. The offending was premeditated.
The trials and tribulations Hong Kong has weathered since the handover amount to one giant political experiment. Every kind of political proposition has been put to the test, and we have seen the results.
Had these cases arisen in the early days after the handover, the verdicts might have read very differently to some.
Two young men aged 25 to 27, jailed for more than three years over a "nation-building union" that looked doomed to fail, might have seemed like the court making a mountain out of a molehill.
The same goes for the Alliance. Had its standing committee members been prosecuted in those early days, some might have felt they were merely chanting slogans to promote democracy. Perfectly harmless, undeserving of arrest and imprisonment.
But after more than two decades of development, we can now see with total clarity what these incendiary political activities can achieve.
From the mass march against Article 23 legislation in 2003, to the illegal Occupy Central movement in 2014, to the all-out riots of 2019, unlawful activities escalated step by step until violent protests spun completely out of control.
The breaking point came on 11 November 2019 with the Ma On Shan incident, in which a man was set on fire. An utterly depraved manifestation of violent lawbreaking.
The perpetrators believed they held the truth in their hands. They doused an unarmed civilian in flammable liquid and set him alight, intending to burn him to death. His only fault was trying to stop rioters vandalizing the MTR station.
Political violence had reached a point of no return, spiraling beyond control.
At the core of the Alliance stood the so-called traditional pan-democrats. They claimed to be promoting democracy in Hong Kong and the country. Yet they turned a blind eye to the street violence they themselves had incited, at times even tacitly condoning it.
One need only look at what was exposed during the trial of Jimmy Lai to see this plainly.
Back then, Lai instructed the senior management of Apple Daily to uphold "no distinction between the peaceful and the valiant".
In other words, they were not to draw a line between themselves and the valiant faction advocating violent struggle. That alone showed that the movement's descent into violence had the backing of big bosses behind the scenes.
And behind these local opposition bosses stood the political forces of the United States and the West.
Take Lee Cheuk-yan, a central figure in the Alliance case.
The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), to which he belonged, relied for years on funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Beginning in 1994, the HKCTU applied every year for grants from the NED-affiliated American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The cumulative total came to HK$13 million.
Here was an organization directly funded by a foreign government, running labor and social movements in Hong Kong. Who could believe it thinks independently?
Piece the whole picture together and the through-line becomes complete. Beginning in the late 1980s, in the closing stages of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the CIA set out to overthrow the entire socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.
China's "June Fourth incident" also occurred against this backdrop.
While China and the United States had not yet fallen out completely, such activities proceeded in the shadows. After the rupture, and especially after Washington launched its trade war against China in 2018, the United States embarked on subversion against China without scruple.
These were not activities to promote the development of democracy in China. They were subversive operations aimed at toppling state power.
Consider this: the CIA today openly recruits spies targeting China. That tells you how grave the situation is.
With the Alliance case tried and sentenced, the legal boundary for such acts of subversion has now been clearly drawn. Do not imagine that chanting a few incendiary slogans or setting up some reactionary organizations is harmless. A single spark can start a prairie fire.
Drawing the legal red line is precisely about nipping these subversive activities in the bud.
Lo Wing-hung
