12 October 2026 AA-MOC statement on Hispanic Heritage Day
Alternativa Antimilitarista-MOC, comprising anti-militarist organisations from various cities across Spain, calls for a response ‘from below’ against the patriotic and warmongering celebrations of 12 October, the National Day. In the face of the growing militarisation of language, borders, bodies and minds, it proposes the defence of the rights to peaceful coexistence, to protest, to migrate, to housing and to public services that guarantee a dignified, safe and violence-free life.
12 October 2026. Following last August’s migration crisis in Ceuta, various media outlets and political figures have employed dehumanising language typical of war to refer to the arrival of unarmed people (“invasion”, “border assault”, “plague”, “pack”, calls for a “hunt” …). That month, the Spanish Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia (OBERAXE) detected a 76 per cent increase in hate speech on social media.
The expansion of the concept of hybrid warfare is nothing more than a new label used to rebrand old geopolitical strategies of interference that are not necessarily military in nature. However, underlying the use of the term lies a profound logic of violence that normalises and perpetuates a state of alert and suspicion within society. This discourse perversely distorts reality, spreading fear of supposed threats and stripping civilians of their humanity to conceptually turn them into ‘weapons’ or combat zones.
These exclusionary narratives are reinforced on 12 October, a day centred on a parade of the Armed Forces as the cornerstone of the state’s supposed security and integrity, and which inherently justifies colonial plunder (commemorating Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas). The celebration reinforces the social perception of migration-related humanitarian crises, such as those in Ceuta or the Canary Islands, as a cultural threat, and polarises relations with other national identities.
True security is not built on weapons or walls that exclude, but by guaranteeing the universal right to protection and physical integrity; a fundamental human need that can only be fully met when border violence is dismantled, legal and safe routes of entry are guaranteed, and the care, peace and inviolable dignity of every life are placed at the heart of policy. If being a patriot entails contempt for differences in ideology, religion, race or country of origin, and indifference to the suffering of fellow citizens who have been left destitute, then it is better to be stateless.
Alternativa Antimilitarista-MOC is a self-managed, assembly-based antimilitarist movement that develops alternatives based on non-violence; it is made up of autonomous groups coordinating at national level and forms part of the War Resisters’ International (WRI).
