One of the most effective political and media strategies is to create a phobic climate, one that assimilates different things and phenomena and lumps them together. They made a series about the Satanist phobia that gripped us in the 1980s and 1990s (Hysteria!, on SkyShowtime), which can serve as a more or less ironic description of what always happens in these cases, now not against Satanists, but against immigrants. It's about, first of all, locating an evil and then blaming it on certain people, seen from an abstract generality. Everything we don't like can be their fault, because in the end, they're just a scapegoat, although there may be cases of crime and violence, which the phobia will multiply and magnify, contributing to turning them into a paradigm that, however, only exists in the convinced mind of someone already filled with hatred or fear.
In a world of uncertainty, these dark passions simplify things and make them more understandable. They also seem to give life a purpose, a crusade to return to lost essences. However, the cognitive bias is clear: everything that confirms what we want to believe is taken into account, while what isn't even perceived is either seen or highlighted. Ideology acts as a magnet only for the metal of interest. We might think that youth idolizes the devil, or that the immigrant is the shielded devil, and only because they have a different faith or a hunger driven by an economic system that gives them the crumbs. And above all, because it serves as a strategy of concealment; while we talk about the immigrant, we don't talk about the corruption of the bigwigs, and you can pin the deceased immigrant on the blame for stealing the crumbs, while you don't talk about who made such bad bread, or who got the biggest slices. Hate speech always hides various forms of corruption, especially on the part of those who spread it the most or those who take advantage of rough seas to fill their pockets. During the Rajoy administration, the police sang "to fear them"looking at the Catalans; now we know that their finance minister, meanwhile, was fraudulently lining his pockets.
That said, it's important to remember the obvious fact that all countries regulate immigration, and that it's not possible to accommodate two or three million more people in a few years in certain territories, especially if one doesn't want to pay an excessively high price in acculturation. Now that there's talk of special funding for Catalonia, the same newspapers that criticize the rhetoric against immigrants are fuelling the reluctance toward Catalans, accusing them of being unsupportive, when here all they're asking for is justice, or having the necessary resources to, among other things, be able to do something to prevent immigration from overwhelming us. Thinking of others as a whole, proceeding in groups, and lumping different people together under a certain rhetoric is always dangerous, unjust, and at the same time ideologically effective. It's a form of fascism, but a transversal one.
