Can we say ‘invasion’ now? What other word is there for the rough intrusion of tens of thousands of young men into the sovereign territory of a foreign nation? Surely not even the sappiest leftist in his tattered keffiyeh and ‘Refugees Welcome’ t-shirt would describe the thuggish gatecrashing of an independent nation as ‘asylum seeking’? That might be the one and only upside to the extraordinary events in Ceuta yesterday: the death, at last, of euphemism. The impossibility of any longer dressing up the West’s suicidal abandonment of its borders as ‘kindness’.

The scenes from the Spanish enclave at the tip of North Africa are staggering. An estimated 49,000 people, mostly Moroccans, mostly men, gleefully intruded upon the territory of the Spanish kingdom. That’s around the same number of people who illegally sail to Britain in a year. They scaled border gates and overwhelmed those charged with protecting Spanish lands. Viral clips show men punching the air as they swarm the enclave, clearly thrilled with their incursion into a sovereign state. Even the Spanish press is feeling the death of euphemism. ‘Ceuta, invaded’, says the front page of ABC, a newspaper of record, alongside an image of thousands of men streaming along Ceuta’s beach.

The mass storming of Ceuta has focused the minds even of Spain’s fatally apathetic ruling class. All of Ceuta’s parties, both right and left, have called on Madrid to send in the army to reinforce the border with Morocco. Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez promised an ‘immediate response’. Yet even if the Spanish manage to tame this searing crisis of sovereign rule – and that’s a big ‘if’ – the lessons of it should reverberate not only across Spain but all of Europe. For the fall of Ceuta exposes the lethal strain in globalism. It speaks – screams in fact – to the chaotic trashing of sovereignty, democracy and our very way of life that globalism and its gold-collared acolytes have brought about.

The storming of Ceuta shatters the falsehoods of the left. For years, ‘progressives’ gaslit the public, insisting that the men illegally crossing our borders are ‘vulnerable people’ who are ‘seeking asylum’. Like Big Brother, they expected us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears and accept that these swaggering blokes from Eritrea or Afghanistan are the wretched of the Earth requiring our love and care and four-star hotels. Ceuta dismantles that lie. The whole world can see there are virtually no women and children in those mobs. The whole world knows Morocco is not ravaged by war or hunger. From now on, every utterance of the phrase ‘asylum seeker’ should invoke noisy, angry scepticism.

The Ceuta crisis also confirms that the moral cowardice of the modern state is like a red rag to hostile actors. It is undeniable that Pedro Sánchez’s lunatic granting of asylum to illegal immigrants emboldened these Moroccan men to pour into soft-touch Spain. In January this year, Sánchez bypassed parliament and issued a royal decree to regularise virtually all ‘undocumented migrants’ on Spanish territory. Almost 1.2million illegal arrivals applied for this regularised status that would grant them the right to reside in Spain, to work there and to enjoy unfettered access to healthcare and education.

Sánchez’s monarchical creation of close to a million neo-‘Spaniards’ was an act of lethal folly. In throwing open residency rights and access to public services to foreigners who had come illegally, he stripped Spanishness itself of meaning. Anyone, from anywhere, can have what you have – that, at root, was the imperious diktat he issued to the people of Spain. And he shone a massive green light to outsiders to try their luck with his spineless regime. Hence, Ceuta – 50,000 North Africans accepting his witless, brainless invitation to foreigners to come and take the piss out of Spain.

The Ceuta crisis is the rotten product of the death cult of globalism. A toxic combination of institutional paralysis and ideological capture by the globalist delusion has meant our leaders have wilfully abandoned the first duty of the state: to protect its territory from external actors. The spirit of resignation over the crisis at our borders is staggering and depressing. In Spain, Britain, France, Germany, the cry goes out: there is nothing we can do to stem the arrival every day of scores of men from foreign countries. The fatalism is breathtaking. There is no comparable moment in history, outside of war, when nation states have so supinely surrendered their territory to foreign actors.

In Britain, too, the hard-won sovereignty of our nation has been sacrificed at the altar of globalism. Over the past seven days, 1,487 people, primarily men, have arrived illegally in small boats. And what is our new PM Andy Burnham doing? Eating pork scratchings and wanging on about The Smiths. This is not normal. Every leader in British history, every one of our ancestors, would have considered this a horrific state of affairs that throttled the dignity of the nation and the security of its people. And yet we’re told to see it as normal, or at least unavoidable: part and parcel of life in a globalised world. Resisting the perilous apathy of our rulers, their lethal inertia on the sovereign integrity of the nation, is the most pressing task of our time.

For make no mistake – our rulers’ abandonment of our borders is a direct attack on us. They’re essentially saying there is nothing about the Spanish way of life or the British way of life that is worth defending. Your country, your communities, your history, your citizenship, your welfare state – it is all so spectacularly worthless that it isn’t even worth putting a fence around it to protect it from people from foreign lands. What the globalist elites depict as kindness to foreigners is in truth a savage assault on the rights and dignity of citizens. Enough is enough. Stop the boats. Fortify the borders. Save nationhood from these nihilists disguised as altruists.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.