From the 'therians' to Iran, via Berlin

Providence has decreed that the celebrations surrounding Balearic Islands Day coincide with the start of this major tourism fair, ITB Berlin. What a stressful situation for our authorities, their hearts and schedules jammed with folkloric activities here and there. Here, speeches about curbing immigration. There, speeches about encouraging all the Germans who want to or can to sell.

Look, if we have to go to these fairs, we'll go. What I don't agree with is that these events could become a bubble, detached from everything that's happening, as if tourism were immune to the global instability that Trump and Netanyahu are sowing. The Balearic Islands, aside from celebrating tourism, don't have a 'Plan B,' and we go to this fair to reiterate a 'Plan A,' even though global uncertainties are one of the most vulnerable elements of our main economic strength, which today is tourism. If ITB Berlin can't dedicate even five minutes to doing anything beyond making empty pronouncements about tourism being and always being strong, then it's not worth going to Berlin. Because when things happen, which they already are, there will be nothing but tears. And Berlin, a missed opportunity.

Berlin, by the way, is the capital of Germany, one of the countries that, just as it aligned itself with genocidal Israel to atone for the sins of the Holocaust, is now aligning itself with Trump and Netanyahu to join them in the unjustified attack on Iran, which we know how it started, but we don't know how it started, but we don't know how it started, but we don't know how it started. Or maybe we do, because just as we don't value the lives of Iranians, Palestinians, and African immigrants very much, we do value, on the other hand, the extra euros we already have to pay thanks to the destabilization of the so-called Middle East. With Germany on the verge of recession, if Germans have to pay more for gas and gasoline, I imagine tourism will suffer. But these days it was all about photo ops and forced laughter. And deference to Merz, who has demonstrated his deference to Trump and against Spain these past few days, because for many German conservatives, the southern European countries are still 'pigs'Pigs,' as they christened us when we joined the EU.

I'm sure there will also be, as always, some local entrepreneur who will see this disaster, which looks like World War III, as an opportunity to do even more tourism business here… Visit the Balearic Islands, not Dubai, because bombs aren't raining down here! Even 'our' dear hoteliers are quite disoriented, when they aren't outright speaking out against the war… But, of course, I forgot that the president of the hotel federation works for an American investment fund, as Merz did in his day. One of those funds that is buying up hotels in the big chains by the bucketload, in a process of decapitalization and loss of sovereignty that will take its toll on us in a few years, because we will no longer be able to decide anything about what to do and how with tourism.

Days before all this, social media was buzzing about the theriansThese young people, who allegedly identify with other non-human animals, wear masks and act as such. Although their viral spread is also related to who controls the algorithm, as several studies tracing the phenomenon on social media have shown, in the 1970s sociologist Stanley Cohen defined what happened with the therians as 'social panic'. A concept that demonizes a certain minority social group (in this case, so small that I'm sure no one reading this knows of one, of therian) to justify greater social control under the pretext of a societal loss of values. What should generate social panic is not the theriansNor is it Pedro Sánchez, but rather the behavior of economic and political elites who, as the Epstein papers have shown us, have practiced everything from pedophilia to cannibalism right under our noses, and nothing happens. Total impunity... Many Hollywood movies have fallen short compared to what happened with the Epstein case.

We return to the Islands, to realities that aren't so viral, because they don't suit someone. In Formentera, more migrant bodies have appeared on its shores this week. The regime that governs the Balearic Islands isn't interested in talking too much, lest the echo reach the ITB Berlin trade fair. The only thing they want is for neither the dead nor the living to arrive. Perhaps they'll still manage to profit from the ITB, and next year we'll sponsor a worldwide gathering of therians in Mallorca. To reduce seasonality, if international tourism survives Donald J. Trump's global holy war.