Tag Archives: Catalonia

One week in the life of Barcelona

Catalonia, Politics, Spain, ,

Last Monday’s sentencing of Catalan political and civic leaders to years in jail led to a week of protests and riots in Barcelona and other Catalan cities. The week started with the sentences, at around 0930 on Monday. At 1300, I headed down to Plaça Catalunya with two colleagues, to see take part in a demonstration organized by the new, online blockchain-powered protest movement Tsunami Democràtic. Before long we learned that the action itself wasn’t to be a simple demo in Plaça Catalunya, but an occupation of the airport.

“Tots a l’aeroport!”

So we headed up to Gran Via and joined the hundreds of people there, already making their way down towards Plaça Espanya and beyond. We continued to walk down Gran Via as it turned into a motorway – it’s always a strange feeling to walk along the motorway – particularly as part of a spontaneous demonstration. It took about 3 1/2 hours to walk from Plaça Espanya to the airport’s main terminal, by which time we were thousands of protesters. We walked up the closest ramp to the departures area, but stayed back from the heart of the protest, where demonstrators were facing off with a thin line of Mossos attempting to limit the movement of the crowd. While we looked on, this police cordon broke, resulting in a surge of protesters from the left of our field of view, to the right. 

This was followed by the first of several baton charges that we witnessed, and the arrival of more police vans. Around this time, I saw and heard police firing what were probably ‘foam’ pellets, a type of non-lethal crowd suppressant. They can still cause serious injuries.

It was the first time I’ve ever seen protesters fired on, in more than 20 years of participation in demonstrations.

Occupying Barcelona airport

As heavy rain set in, my colleagues and I decided to head back to Terminal 2 and try to get a train back into the city. It was another long walk, this time something of a trudge, with our clothes and shoes wet through. Thousands more protesters were arriving as we left, and some called out to us to stay a bit longer. “You’re the evening shift: we’ve already done our bit”, we called back, and this was met warmly. While many had used cars and the metro to get close to the airport, we had actually walked all the way, and deserved a rest.

Also, we were all a lot older than many of the protesters arriving. The average age can’t have been much more than 18 or 19, and many were basically kids: teenagers of 14, 15. There was a sense of excitement, of exaltation rather than trepidation. After an uproarious response to a brief police maneuver, some lads next to me nudged each other and grinning called out “Come on, let’s get down there!”, before running out into the fray. This, coupled with knowledge of the violent and often far-right BRIMO, meant I was not surprised when more trouble broke out later.

There is a lot of frustration out there. I mean, old fogeys like me are frustrated so imagine how bad it must be for teenagers who’ve grown up in constant economic and political crisis, the only remedy being police sanctioned clubs where marijuana can be more or less legally consumed.

I got home at about 2100, having walked 25 km. The number of protesters at the airport swelled, and finally the police moved to retake the space, triggering some disturbances. The demonstration was officially called off at maybe 2200 or 2300, and I think it took a few more hours to clear the space in front of the airport. In all, 155 flights were cancelled.

Policing context

Monday saw the start of riots and disturbances in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia and Spain. What started as simple protests against the prison sentences became demonstrations against police violence and in support of the right to peaceful assembly, and these then turned into violent confrontations, which have left hundreds injured (including police officers). 4 protesters have lost eyes thanks to police use of rubber ball ammunition. Sunday was the first night in a week without violent altercations.

Actually, the style of policing was presaged by a few events prior to the sentences. Firstly, we had the arrests of 9 CDR activists accused of terrorism by the state. This was another step in the campaign to demonize the CDRs and the whole independence movement as violent or at least potentially violent. Another aim might well be to split the independence movement but I’d say that it has responded pretty much unanimously by rejecting the arrests in disbelief. If there is a split, currently, it lies between the people on the streets and the main political parties (ERC and JxCAT). More on that later.

The next, and perhaps most important foreshadowing of last week’s police violence came from the head of the Guardia Civil in Catalonia, Pedro Garrido. In an almost unthinkable breach of protocol, one of Spain’s most senior security officials plunged head first into politics, giving an openly political speech and warning Catalan independentists that his force would “Do it again”, a macabre echo of Jordi Cuixart’s words about the October 1 2017 referendum. Cuixart had referred to voting. Garrido, presumably to beating the shit out of peaceful protesters.

Last week

In the end, it was the Mossos and the Policía Nacional who handled the brutal repression this week. Much of the time, they appeared to be running amock, completely out of control.

You can view some videos of the week’s violence here: https://catalanrepression.github.io

Friday, we observed a general strike. As an aside, I recently became a union member for the first time, and it’s a great feeling to be part of an organized labor organization. More on that later, too.

I joined one of six ‘marches for liberty’ which converged on Barcelona, and ending with another large demonstration in the city center. Another 15 km walked, in the name of democracy.

As we marched into the city, some neighbors cheered us on from their balconies.

Independence or death

Catalonia, coup, Politics, Spain, , , , , , ,

[Personal note: in an email, a friend mentioned that he was surprised that I hadn’t written more about the current situation in Catalonia. I’ll admit that I too am slightly bemused by this. I can only say that the decline in the blog as a format (not just mine, but in general), which started years and years ago but has now more or less reached its culmination, has coincided more recently with personal events – our daughter is three months old now. So I’ve gone from being one of the few English language bloggers to discuss Catalan independence as an actual possibility worth discussing, to being one of the only political bloggers not to have talked about recent events. In this post, I will try to rectify that.]

How many turning points has this independence movement had? They’re uncountable, I suppose. It began with the Estatut. Or with Arenys de Munt. Or maybe in 1977 when they let Tarradellas back. The 9N ‘consulta’ which definitely wouldn’t happen, then didn’t happen, and if it did it had no consequences. The CUP forcing Mas out and paving the way for a truly committed pro-independence president of Catalonia. Year after year of peaceful mass demonstrations, the biggest series of protests in European history. Intervention in the Generalitat’s finances. The imposition of 16,000 police. A por ellos.

October 1st – #CatalanReferendum

Like many others, I was guarding the local polling station before 6 am. How many times, living in a democracy, do you get to say that? Some of my neighbours had been there all night. The mood was one of tense hope and anticipation. We heard rumours that the Policia Nacional and Guardia Civil were leaving their cruise ships in the port of Barcelona. Would they be coming for us?

Two Mossos arrived and greeted us with a cheerful “Bon dia”. “Bon dia!” they received in cheerful response. Could they go in and have a look around? The ballot boxes hadn’t yet arrived, so they were allowed in for a minute or so. After they left the school, they took up post a short distance from the school gates, watching.

Then a murmur of activity. The ballot boxes! With the two Mossos stationed outside the front gate, the school’s back door was used to smuggle the ballot boxes in. We helped shield one of the guys who brought them as he left through the front entrance with a spare box for another polling station in his hands. A huge round of applause and cheering broke out. The Mossos stayed back.

At 11 am, I went home to make lunch for my family and saw horrendous scenes on the news. We started to receive messages from friends and loved ones, asking if we were OK. One of the schools attacked by the police was in Sabadell, a neighbouring town. In the end, they didn’t come for us. After lunch, I was back at the polling station until it closed. My neighbours marched on the town hall and the mayor lowered the Spanish flag.

The police brutality on October 1st was, I think, one of a series of critical errors on the part of the Spanish government. But I think I can understand why it happened. A state can sometimes calculate that it’s better to have everyone talking about what it succeeded at (breaking heads and fingers), rather than what it failed at.

Intelligence failures

October 1st was, unquestionably, a day of failures for Spain’s security and intelligence services. Most significantly, the Spanish state had previously identified the ballot boxes as its primary target, and yet it failed to capture a single box before it started its raids on the polling stations. What this means is that hundreds of people were involved in a clandestine operation to bring the ballot boxes from storage in Elne, France, to each of the hundreds of polling stations across Catalan territory, and that the Spanish intelligence and security services almost certainly failed to infiltrate this operation. The operation was carefully planned, involved failsafes, need to know data restrictions and even lookouts watching border crossings and major highways.

It’s probably fair to say that this intelligence failure indicates a generalised failure by the Spanish authorities to successfully infiltrate the Catalan independence movement’s core, and those of us who support independence should take some pride in that. There is an outside chance that the operation was infiltrated but that a strategic decision was taken to avoid revealing this fact for some future gain, and so the ballot boxes were left alone. I find it very difficult indeed to accept this hypothesis given that the politically expedient thing would have been to prevent the ballot boxes arriving altogether.

Similarly, the Spanish government seemed to have no prior knowledge of the online Universal Census system set up in the days before the referendum, and designed to allow people to vote in alternative polling stations if theirs was closed by police action.

The king’s speech

One of the founding myths of the Spanish transition is how the current king’s father Juan Carlos saved the fledgling democracy by speaking out against 1981’s Guardia Civil/Army coup attempt. I don’t think many people expected his son to be able to repeat this mythical feat, in the age of the internet, but few predicted that he would do so badly. Felipe’s speech had two main ingredients: an attempt to placate his critics on the right, and carte blanche for the PP government to push forward with draconian measures under the protection of the constitution. He failed to speak to Catalans’ (or other Spaniards’) concerns for the state’s lurch to repressive tactics. The king’s speech signaled the failure of the transition and its pact for autonomy for Spain’s regions and nationalities.

Article 155

Much has been written about the dreaded Article 155 and the powers it might concede to a government that attempts to use it. The thing about Article 155, though, is that it’s a bit like the atomic bomb. Even using it once is a highly risky operation which will have far-reaching and unknowable consequences. Much of the hot air surrounding the PP’s intentions with Article 155 is just that: hot air. The Spanish government knows that actually applying any of the measures they have floated in the press would be next to impossible. It’s a tactic to try to force elections, and insofar as it has convinced committed 3rd-wayers like Santi Vila, it has worked.

But make no mistake: if Catalonia fails to become independent, the constitution will be abused by the PP-PSOE-Ciudadanos coalition in order to make Catalonia pay. Albert Rivera has already called on the central government only to call Catalan parliamentary elections (a power he doesn’t have, but will claim under 155) “when they can guarantee the result”, i.e. when they can be sure that pro-independence parties won’t win again, which they certainly would. The education system, which works very well and categorically does not indoctrinate Catalan children beyond trying to give them the same sense of civic responsibility kids all around Spain are brought up with, will be destroyed. The same goes for TV3 and Catalunya Radio, well-loved and well-balanced broadcasters. This is what awaits Catalonia if 155 is applied. And the PP has already threatened Castilla La Mancha, the Basque Country and Navarra with similar treatment.

Republic (or elections)

No one knows exactly what will happen this evening and tomorrow morning in the Catalan parliament. The assumption is that sometime tomorrow morning, the parliament will vote to approve the lifting of the suspension of the declaration of independence, and that this will be followed by the proclamation of the Catalan Republic. After that, who knows? Elections to form a constituent assembly with the job of drafting the Catalan Constitution are likely, but will they be immediate?

And will there be any international recognition? Israel? Slovenia? The USA? Kurdistan? Kosovo? I’ve always had the feeling that Spain’s true level of international support is weaker than it appears in the media. Its main strength is that it is a state. Catalonia is not. And until it controls its territory, infrastructure and finances, it won’t be. The Catalan Republic might be born on Friday October 27th, but the story won’t end there. That said, we’ve come this far. To pull back now would be far more disastrous.

*Update: And this shows why I don’t like to make predictions. Now, it looks like elections are to be held on December 20th.

*Update 2: I spoke to soon. Here’s my thread covering the events of the day:

Catalonia: the Moral Imperative Spain Can’t Answer

Catalonia, Politics, Spain, ,

The latest trend in El País/the internet/Twitter is to publish innumerable articles ‘debunking’ the ‘myths’ of the independence referendum campaign in Catalonia. And every time one of these is published, there’s a temptation to try to debunk the debunking. Answer it with more facts.

The truth is that these articles are a distraction. It doesn’t matter whether Catalonia has ever been an independent state. It probably was in 1641 but who cares? It’s a red herring. This is a moral question and opponents of the referendum have made no effort to engage with the moral question because they have no arguments.

What’s really important is that it is right and fair that Catalans can vote to decide their political future. None of the opposition arguments, with their revisionism and legalese, their focus on process and judicial decisions, their twisted interpretation of the meaning of democracy, engages with the moral imperative at the heart of this question.

Spain’s strict spending controls give the lie to Catalan autonomy

Capital, Catalonia, Politics, Spain, , ,

One of the most widely repeated myths in the debate about Catalan independence is that ‘Catalonia already enjoys more devolved powers than almost any other region in the world’. We’re frequently told that US states, German landers and other autonomous regions have nowhere near the autonomous powers that Catalonia enjoys. This is less accurate than it immediately seems.

While it’s true that Catalonia and the other autonomous communities in Spain have broad powers and areas of responsibility under the constitution and the statutes of autonomy, they really cannot be compared with, for example, German landers or American states. Vitally, Catalonia has strictly-limited powers over what taxes it collects and when it can levy new taxes. Most attempts to create new taxes have been challenged by the Spanish government, or have been subsequently ‘trumped’ by the government establishing an identical tax at state level, thus making the Catalan tax obsolete.

But it’s the Spanish government’s latest announcement threatening suspension of payments under the Autonomous Liquidity Fund (FLA) which really gives the lie to this claim. The fund itself was already problematic, because rather than helping Spain’s autonomous communities operate in financial markets, it establishes the Spanish state as the source of liquidity loans, which must be repaid with interest. The FLA system establishes almost total state control over autonomous finances and spending, even governing payment priorities, expenditure controls and the final decision over which bills are paid and when. If that sounds like ‘autonomy’ to you, we have a very different understanding of the word.

Now, the Spanish government is taking things a step further by forcing the Generalitat to provide detailed accounting on a weekly basis to ensure that ‘not 1€ is spent on an illegal referendum’. The Spanish government has clearly decided that to use the normal tactic of taking the Generalitat to court post factum in the event of any spending with which it disagrees, won’t work with a referendum that will likely lead to a unilateral declaration of independence. So the decision has been taken to directly intervene (even more than previously), and establish even stricter controls on Generalitat spending with the threat of suspending FLA payments. If that sounds like ‘autonomy’ to you, we have a very different understanding of the word.

It looks like the Spanish government feels that it has played its best hand with this move: not using force or even the courts to defeat the Catalan ‘challenge’, but something that hurts even more: cash. But once again, the bigger picture is being ignored. By removing even the pretence of fiscal autonomy from the Catalan government, the Spanish state is admitting that the whole thing is a façade whose supposed constitutional protections are meaningless in the face of a state hellbent on recentralization. Autonomy for Catalonia is not protected: it’s “by the grace of Madrid, and don’t you forget it”. To win the point, Spain has to lose the moral argument.

El País – from liberal leader to voice of the establishment

'Terror', Capital, Catalonia, Politics, Spain, , , , , , , , , ,

If El País is “co-author of the transición”, what does the state of this newspaper tell us about the state of Spanish democracy? That is has retreated into an increasingly authoritarian, illiberal and limiting structure no longer aimed at liberating a nation but at preserving the status quo, above all else.

When I first moved to Barcelona nearly 15 years ago, El País was still read in progressive Catalan households. Even though it had practically always been close to the sort of ‘Socialismo’ represented by Felipe Gonzalez, El País seemed to stand up to the conservative, even post-Francoist caspa of the Aznar government. Throughout that era, as its readership shared in the boom of the 2000’s, El País seemed to represent a progressive, hopeful agenda for Spain. After 2004’s 11M bombings, El País offered clear analysis and avoided the unforgivable conspiracy theories of El Mundo and other parts of Spain’s conservative press. Zapatero, the most progressive Spanish prime minister to date, helped encapsulate a sense that a certain ‘can do’ Spanish liberalism was dominating, and despite the launch of Público, El País was still there as the leading liberal voice.

The dawning of the crisis meant bad times for Spain, and bad times for El País and its proprietor Grupo Prisa. Despite layoffs, the newspaper struggled with huge debts, many with the banks it was supposed to be investigating. The ones that helped trigger the crisis itself. Now the government proposed critical labor reforms and I, in retrospect late to the game, saw that El País wasn’t in the business of opposing central economic policy. As unions planned first one and then a second general strike, El País published hatchet jobs on their leaders and did its best to undermine turnout. When the Socialist government used Franco-era measures to forcibly militarize all air traffic controllers in the country, El País published lie after lie about the industrial dispute they were involved in. And as Catalonia, without its promised Estatut – which the newspaper had backed, started to look towards self-determination, El País retreated into the sort of dogmatic legalism which still informs its position today.

Grupo Prisa’s CEO, Juan Luis Cebrián, was interviewed the other day in El Mundo by Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo y Peralta-Ramos, the 13th marquise of Casa Fuerte and hotshot at José Maria Aznar’s right-wing Spanish nationalist FAES think tank (she who allegedly broke the law the other day at the trial of Mas et al, but who will doubtless face no penalty). Asked about the Catalan question, Cebrián laid out his position frankly and clearly: “If the king’s brother in law can go to jail, why can’t Artur Mas?” [a curious comparison, given that Iñaki Urdangarin, has been jailed for corruption and embezzlement, while Artur Mas is on trial for permitting a non-binding popular consultation to be held] and “Someone mentions sending in the Guardia Civil. People say ‘no, not the Guardia Civil’, but I say: yes, why not? That’s what the Guardia Civil is for” and “[The government should act so that] the debate isn’t about when they get their independence, but about when they get their autonomy back”.

The interview is fascinating because it helps to explain the decline of El País as a leading liberal voice, the decline of the PSOE as the party of reform, and the end of the Transition Pact, the end of nearly 40 years during which the Catalan bourgeoisie represented by Convergència i Unió could be relied on to maintain the governability of Spain as a whole. The new pact which has replaced the old one is opposed to constitutional reform, which is why it maneuvered to prevent a PSOE-Podemos coalition in the last two elections, and preferred to gift Rajoy reelection than see Pedro Sánchez in charge.

The new pact can be defined by 4 particular policy lines on which its members agree: opposition to reform other than further liberalization of the labor market; the reduction of the concept of democracy to “the rule of law” and not much more; a strict and un-nuanced reading of the constitution; the rejection of the right to self-determination.

Regarding this last point, last month Alfred de Zayas, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, wrote to the Spanish government to raise concerns about its treatment of the Catalan question – the so-called ‘Operación Cataluña’, which involves criminal trials for elected officials, along with other, even murkier tactics. He reminded Spain about the right to self-determination. And he noted that a referendum is a very good way of resolving questions like that currently concerning Catalonia.

El País, once the leading liberal voice in the Spanish language, chose not to report this letter.

2017: the key year for Catalan indpendence

Catalonia, Politics, Spain, ,

Happy new year, everybody!

Based on an analysis of recent polls by pro-independence Vilaweb, there would likely be a 63% turnout in a unilateral independence referendum (i.e. one held without the Spanish government’s permission). The result from such a referendum would be 79% in support of independence.

That would clearly be enough to justify a declaration of independence, to be followed by a process to agree a new constitution for the Catalan republic, and fresh elections. While many Catalans may not have noticed, detailed and serious plans for future independence have been underway for some time. Among other things, the Catalan government has been quietly creating a diplomatic corps from within its staff. Unofficially, the hobbyists working on things like a Catalan constitution, and the changes needed for independence to happen, are being taken much more seriously. I’ve attended some interesting debates.

Meanwhile, while we have seen the Spanish state using some of the tools at its disposal to try to derail the independence process (constitutional court rulings, probably funding groups like SCC*, the Pujol accusations, banning judges, diplomatic pressure, criminal cases brought against elected officials, and now formal accusations of incitement to sedition), we have yet to see the state bring out its big guns. Those include: banning political parties (Anna Gabriel thinks there’s a chance of this happening to the CUP); jailing elected officials (Mas/Forcadell); and intervening directly in Catalonia’s autonomy (appointing Josep Enric Millo as caretaker president).

I think it’s fair to say that things must come to a head in 2017. Failing to at least announce a referendum this year (and really, it needs to be held this year), will cause confidence in the process to decline. So all eyes are now on the llei de transitorietat jurídica, the law which will establish legal and judicial continuity should Catalans vote to become independent. This law is, in essence, a de facto declaration of independence and the moment it is approved by the Catalan parliament will likely be the ‘train crash’ moment we’ve been predicting for the last few years.

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* Is it just me, or is Societat Civil Catalana on its last legs? They’ve changed leader, again, and their former supporters are now involved in a competing gravy train think tank. If I’m right, we’ll see SCC lose this year’s court case and wind up its activities sometime next year.

Revisionist history: Catalan under the dictatorship

Catalonia, Politics, Spain, , , ,

“I never physically beat anybody and you can see film footage showing me not beating anybody!”
Peter Cook, Why Bother? “Prisoner of War”

Proving a negative can be rather tricky. As we all know, an absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence and so as epistemology shows us, anyone who states that x categorically does (or did) not exist holds the burden of proof.

The legend of how the Catalan language was treated during Franco’s dictatorship comes in two forms. The first and more widely subscribed to says that Catalan was effectively outlawed from public life, that people speaking Catalan in reception rooms and shops were often told that they should “Háblame en cristiano!”, and that it was only with the death of Franco and restoration of democracy that Catalan could be heard once again in the streets of Catalan towns and villages. The second, more recent version – we may call it a revisionist version because it is most certainly at odds with the first, received version – says that Catalan wasn’t repressed during the dictatorship at all. That books were published in Catalan, kids could speak Catalan in the school playground, official business was conducted in Catalan, that the Catalan language was valued and that the received wisdom of the first version was imposed after the restoration of democracy as part of Pujol’s infernal nation-building operation.

Proponents of both versions of this history bear the burden of proof, and both versions have some tricky questions that they need to answer. The question for me, as an outsider, is which version has the most convincing evidence.

It is clearly not enough to say simply that Catalan was outlawed during Franco’s dictatorship. This must be proven with facts. And there are facts that lend support to that claim. Throughout the dictatorship, but particularly in the early years, laws and regulations were established to reduce the presence of Catalan in public life almost to zero. It was no longer taught in schools. Civil servants were prevented from speaking Catalan at any time (whether in public buildings or not), under pain of instant dismissal. The Civil Governor of Barcelona asked the publishers of a Catalan language magazine “Do you really think we fought the war so that Catalan could return to public use?”. Telegrams couldn’t be sent in Catalan. A friend of mine was slapped in the face any time he and his friends spoke in Catalan in their Barcelona schoolyard. Kids had to be given Spanish language names (probably the source of the ‘Arturo Mas’ legend). People were fined for speaking Catalan on the telephone. Streets and squares were renamed in Spanish in every Catalan city, town and village.

But at the same time, other things happened. In the 1960s especially, Catalan culture started to grow in official acceptance. Children’s magazines were published in Catalan from 1961. They were even legal from 1968 onwards. Prizes were given for Catalan language books. Radio stations started to broadcast cultural or folkloric programmes in Catalan. Some schools (mainly either for the Catalan alta burgesia, or in distant villages) started to teach some Catalan language classes.

When you look at the evidence, it seems fair to say that in the early years of the dictatorship, there was widespread official repression of practically all use of the Catalan language in public life but that after a couple of decades in power, the regime rowed back somewhat from its initial position. Expression in Catalan never seems to have been wholly free under the dictatorship – but then it wasn’t really free in Spanish either. At the same time, there seems to have been a tacit message in the regime’s softening position on the language: that you may speak this language by the grace of our goodwill, and only for the purposes of cultural and folkloric expressions.

Of course, Catalan’s use never completely died out in the home which is why you’ll find plenty of people in their 50s and 60s here who can speak Catalan perfectly but are unable to write in anything but Castilian Spanish. But its absence from schools, particularly in the industrialized areas of Catalonia which welcomed hundreds of thousands of workers from other parts of Spain in the 50s, 60s and 70s, helped to guarantee that Catalan became a minority language and certainly one in decline. Excluding the regional language from the education system and pretty much all mass media left Catalan as a language of shepherds, fishermen, villagers, poets and die-hard patriots. But ideally not factory workers, bank managers or government officials. I can’t prove it but I get the feeling that the intention was not to waste any more time repressing Catalan but instead to leave it as a culturally interesting but politically non-threatening rump of a language. Not erased from history but on its way to being left there.

To me, claims that the Catalan language was completely outlawed during the dictatorship are problematic most of all because by failing to recognise that some Catalan was permitted, some of the time, and in limited contexts, they are easily challenged with a handful of books, poetry prizes and posters for the Orfeó Català. Exaggerating the crimes of the dictatorship is wrong, albeit understandable. The revisionist claim, on the other hand, strikes me as more pernicious because it seeks to deny that the language was repressed – an entirely insupportable claim. The facts that the revisionists cling to are facts. But they always remind me of that wonderful Peter Cook line at the top of this post, which was his character’s response to being accused of violence against the men under his command. Yes, there is evidence that Catalan wasn’t always repressed. That doesn’t mean that in general, and certainly in most professional, educational, civil and legal contexts, Catalan wasn’t effectively banned through much of the Franco dictatorship.

The revisionists have a place in this story, most of all to remind us that history can never really be black and white and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. But their narrative is wrong because at heart it seeks to diminish the harm done by the dictatorship to the people of Catalonia and the rest of Spain. I don’t doubt that now these revisionist myths are established, they will grow and mutate into fascinating new forms. How long before we hear that actually, if it wasn’t for Franco, Catalan would have died out? I expect my mysterious friends at Dolça Catalunya are already drafting that one.

And what about Catalan under the 2nd Republic? Now that’s another story….

Catalonia and Godwin’s law – how Nazi am I?!

Catalonia, Politics, , , , ,

Q: Can anyone who has visited the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin seriously compare Catalan civic nationalism with the atrocities of the German NSDAP?

A: Yes I can and you are a Nazi

I admit that this conversation is slightly paraphrased – I can’t be bothered to sift through all of Twitter to find the actual tweets, but that’s more or less how it went. I think I had a go at someone on Twitter for their constant use of a hashtag like #CatalanesNAZIonalistas or something. To be fair to him, he gave as good as he got and insisted that like me, he had visited the Topography of Terror museum [which, were it about almost any other topic, I’d call ‘excellent’ but that seems in rather poor taste], in fact he’d been there twice [beating me, you see] and yes, it was definitely a fair comparison. Well, you can’t argue with that, can you?

Another conversation I had went something like:

Man: Oh living in Catalonia now is like being at the Nuremberg rallies

Me: But it’s obviously not. You can’t really mean that.

Man: Yes I do they are the same [I suspect he really did punctuate properly but it this is the way I remember idiots writing]

And maybe they are. For all I know, they are the same. I mean, I wasn’t around then. All I have to go on is archival evidence, witness accounts, half a century of scholarship on the subject, hundreds of documentaries and books, and extensive museums like Berlin’s Topographie des Terrors. And that’s probably not enough. There are only two logical conclusions I can draw from this: either the initial statements are wrong and Catalonia isn’t “the same as Nuremberg” or Germany as the Nazis rose to power was a very pleasant place to live – a place in which I’d have thrived. I almost feel cheated.

For my learned friends who have shown me the truth, I only have a few questions before I settle down to life in my new fatherland. When will they burn the parliament down? Are people wearing Barça shirts the equivalent of the Print My Logo UK SA? Why don’t they beat more people up? In fact, where are all the beatings?! I was promised beatings! When will the Generalitat burn/quietly sell off all the degenerate art it owns? Why did Mas step down if he’s to lead us to the new dawn? Who’s the Catalan Julius Streicher? What the hell are they doing allowing people like the CUP to run around, causing mischief? Why can’t they get the real Nazis on board? That, for me, is a big one. They should have a quiet meeting with the real Nazis and say “Look guys it’s OK, you can stop calling us “Nazis” now: we’re real Nazis like you” and then we’d all be on the same team. Also why do they keep inviting the opposition on TV and radio. All the time. I like my totalitarians to be a little more total, dig?

Farewell, Juan Arza. May we never meet again.

Catalonia, General, Politics, PP, Spain, , , , ,

It is with great sadness that we announce that Juan Arza, former correspondent on these humble pages, has stepped down as a member of Societat Civil Catalana. Not because he was caught lying. Or because he couldn’t argue his way out of a bag. No, it’s because as an activist for the PP, the poor chap couldn’t stomach SCC’s endorsement of a PSOE-Ciutadans coalition in Madrid.

When you think about it, about the only thing sadder and lonelier than being a member of SCC is being a member of the PPC. Bon vent, Juan, i barca nova. Oh and watch out for those seagulls. They can be vicious brutes.

The difference between Spain and Catalonia: a project

Catalonia, Politics, PP, Spain, , , ,

It seems to me that the great hope of the Spanish center is now the mutually assured destruction pact that a PP-PSOE coalition would represent. Actually, this is almost certainly the great hope of the PP which wouldn’t stand to lose quite as much as the PSOE (whose slogan in the last election was “Let’s kick out Rajoy!”). But therein lies a clue to the potential pact: like the CUP in September’s Catalan elections, the PSOE hasn’t said no to any PP candidate for president. It has said no to Rajoy, which implicitly leaves the door open for an alternative candidate. Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría would appear to be the obvious choice.

So that’s one option. The other is a center-left alliance of PSOE and Podemos, which would also need the support of some regional parties to rule. Which would mean the PSOE offering a Catalan referendum, which Sánchez probably couldn’t offer even if he wanted to.

I suppose the difference between the Spain and Catalonia situations, vis-à-vis the question of negotiations to form a government, is that the Catalans have the advantage of a seriously big question, a national project, which dominates and blurs party politics. This is, at least in part, intentional. But it’s also helpful because in the end, there are enough people who actually believe in that project that it can be used to forge tough political agreements, like the CUP forcing Mas to step aside and then backing one of his allies for president. Spain has nothing remotely similar on the table. You hear terms like ‘constitutional reform’ and ‘new transition’ bandied about but unlike Catalonia, where 48% of voters voted for unambiguously pro-independence parties, the 4 main parties at Spain level don’t have a coherent vision of the nation to offer voters. Even the upstarts – Podemos and Cs – have been unable to explain to voters what Spain looks like in their vision of the future. This is either because they don’t really know or don’t really care… I suspect it’s a mixture of the two, personally.

In the end, say what you will about the independence process and its putative ephemerality, at least it’s a project. Spain has yet to come up with something similar and the best options for change – Podemos and Cs – don’t have the support. So it’s Soraya for president and continuity, or new elections with nothing any clearer.