Belfast is burning, and in its ashes lies the very question that Europe continues to evade: do we want to address the causes, or do we prefer to keep standing guard over the gasoline can?
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Nights of Fire
Something very powerful is happening in Belfast, and it could become the spark that sets all of Europe ablaze.
The Northern Irish city is experiencing its darkest period since the peace that followed the Good Friday Agreement. Groups of protesters, mostly with their faces covered, have blocked the streets with burning barricades, set cars, a bus, and homes ablaze, and hurled stones at police officers. The images and videos circulating on social media paint a picture of a city reduced to terror and ashes, with anger concentrated in the suburbs and among the very young—kids barely in their twenties.
The incident that sparked the protests was a serious crime that occurred in the city’s northern neighborhoods, which quickly became a symbol of social tensions that had been simmering for some time. According to the account reported by Al Jazeera, the suspect is a 30-year-old Sudanese man who arrived in the United Kingdom in 2023 via Paris and Dublin and holds a valid refugee residence permit. He has been charged with attempted murder, carrying a bladed weapon, and making death threats; the victim, a man in his forties, suffered serious injuries to his face and head, losing sight in one eye. The Chief Constable of Northern Ireland, Jon Boutcher, stated that the attacker was not previously known to law enforcement and that, at this stage, the incident is not classified as a terrorist act.
The shift from crime news to street protests was almost instantaneous and took place largely online. This is a pattern already familiar in the West and suggests something that goes beyond “simple” popular mobilization—but we’ll discuss that in a few days. As documented by CBS News, a list of over two dozen addresses presented as the homes of immigrants and their families began circulating on closed networks like WhatsApp; on X, a list of names and contact information attributed to lawyers and law firms specializing in immigration appeared, with a call for “patriots” to do “whatever they see fit.” The police called the dissemination of those addresses “totally unacceptable,” recounting desperate phone calls from families and residents. Northern Ireland health service executives reported that international staff were too intimidated to go to work, and described the case of a nurse chased by masked men as she made her way to Ulster Hospital.
On the political front, First Minister Michelle O’Neill denounced the riots as “nothing but cowardly,” while MP Claire Hanna openly spoke of a “racially motivated pogrom,” with groups of masked men hunting down immigrants door-to-door. On the other side, populist right-wing leaders like Nigel Farage and unionist officials demanded clarification on the attacker’s immigration status, while globally influential figures, from Elon Musk to Tommy Robinson, shared the video and calls to action. Justice Minister Naomi Long summed up the situation by accusing “bad-faith actors” who, prior to the unrest, “would have struggled to find Belfast on a map,” and who deliberately pushed people into the streets.
Chaos that fuels more chaos
Political chaos reigns supreme. No significant stance from political authorities, no major statement from Buckingham Palace, to name one, just as total silence reigns from Western news agencies, which continue to remain silent on the gravity of what is happening.
It would, moreover, be a mistake to view Belfast as an isolated incident. The violence in Northern Ireland is part of a sequence spanning the entire British archipelago: the Ballymena riots of 2025, the riots that followed in the summer of 2024 after the killing of three young girls near Liverpool, and, just one week before the events in Belfast, the clashes in Southampton following the murder of student Henry Nowak. Amnesty International described the previous twelve months as a “shameful year of hate,” with over two thousand racially motivated incidents recorded in Northern Ireland—among the highest levels since 2004.
Academic observers interviewed by the press identify a dual dynamic. On the one hand, the weight of a digital ecosystem that amplifies and politicizes every news story in real time; on the other, a specific local context: the riots flare up in areas marked by long-term economic deprivation, unemployment, and marginalization, where the young men throwing stones today would have been, in another era, the recruitment pool for paramilitary groups. It is the fusion of local historical and ideological processes with the politics of the global radical right that makes the phenomenon explosive and projects it far beyond the borders of Ulster.
And it is here, if you will, that the analysis begins where news reports, by their very nature, stop short of completing. The difficulty in understanding the contradictions linked to immigration—and the fact that their burden falls first and foremost on the working classes and the proletarianized middle classes, the defeated of Western-style neoliberal globalization—leads well-meaning progressivism to “stand guard over the gasoline can” of the liberal bourgeois state, handing out moral licenses without grasping the nature of the exasperation mounting in the suburbs.
The starting point is almost anthropological. Contemporary immigration is not a natural inevitability to be passively accepted, nor a phenomenon comparable to the seasonal migrations of a herd on the savanna or a flock following internal cycles. The human species abandoned Paleolithic nomadism with the Neolithic Revolution, some ten to twelve thousand years ago; in the modern era, nation-states have progressively imposed sedentary life even on traditional nomads—shepherds, hunter-gatherers, and today populations such as the Roma and Sinti—for the sake of administrative control, taxation, and integration. Contemporary humans, in short, are sedentary: the movement of masses of human beings is never a fact of nature, but always the product of historical and political power dynamics.
The liberal radical chic—the one who, by voting liberal or liberal-socialist, convinces himself that “loving one another” is enough for everything to fall into place—is such precisely because, deep down, the social order as it is suits him just fine. He does not imagine another possible world, but conceives of it as identical to the present, with a few minor adjustments. They call themselves revolutionaries without revolution, or reformists without reforms. But reality is harsher.
Those who live by colonialism, die by colonialism
It must be said, beyond individual stances: mass immigration is a problem; it is certainly a legacy of the West’s colonial past, but it is above all a product of the unequal development of capitalism in the Global South. The mechanism is well known: the indebtedness of developing countries through neoliberal logic—and outright usury—drives those states—often governed by ruling classes educated in Western universities, and thus possessing a colonized mindset—to seek massive loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Loans to be repaid with high interest rates, the price of which is privatization, the dismantling of local welfare systems, and growing impoverishment.
Added to this is military interference within the framework of a global conflict to maintain unipolar order against the emergence of new geopolitical actors. Western support for the overthrow of patriotic African and Middle Eastern governments, from 2003 onward, has destabilized entire regions and installed subservient governments, generating the flows that today are pressing against European shores. We cannot promise those masses—who are not predominantly criminals—the fruits of a “paradise that does not exist,” since it is precisely in the West, since the 1980s, that the recipes of deindustrialization, offshoring to the Global South in search of cheap labor, the financialization of the economy, and cuts to social spending have been put into practice.
Immigration is a capitalist phenomenon. Reducing the problem to an exclusively ethnic, religious, or “deep state” issue is a methodological error with enormous consequences.
What is needed, instead, is a structural transformation of relations with the Global South and with all those countries with which there has been a relationship of subordination and dependence for centuries. The migration phenomenon must be treated as a matter of global security and balance, which requires—as long as the European Union exists—a common strategy among all its members, where the first urgent need is to regulate flows in the most appropriate ways, through a serious planning policy, rather than alternating between rhetorical openings and propagandistic closures.
There is likely only one structural direction: to invest directly in the countries of origin of these flows through development cooperation policies agreed upon with local governments. Economic aid and co-development remain today the only fundamental tool for managing migration and curbing the “flight from despair.” It is, not by chance, the approach adopted by Xi Jinping’s People’s China on the African continent, which no one dares to label as “xenophobic.” It is simply political common sense.
In the meantime, citizens—and those who integrate and respect the law—must be given serious assurances of safety in their neighborhoods, those very neighborhoods that neoliberal logic abandons to their own devices, amid cuts to law enforcement and urban decay. From all this, “political correctness” must be eradicated like a dangerous disease, because it is precisely in the name of this ideologization that we have arrived at degenerate migration policies for which we are now paying the consequences.
The fake integration policies of the radical-chic left and the xenophobic propaganda of the right—whether in government or not, which in some cases border on incitement to ethnic civil war—are two sides of the same coin: neither touches the structural level; both merely scratch the surface, the superstructure, leaving intact the economic mechanism that produces, at the source, both the migration flows and the exasperation of those who endure them in working-class neighborhoods. Perhaps this is too “Marxist” a reading, some will say, or perhaps it is simply an attempt to deeply understand a phenomenon that belongs to all of humanity and that has always—not just in recent decades—been experienced as both an advantage and a problem at the same time.
Belfast is burning, and in its ashes lies the very question that Europe continues to evade: do we want to address the causes, or do we prefer to keep standing guard over the gasoline can?
