Cataloniawatch

Thank You

2012-01-26T20:29:00.001+01:00

From NASA to the Catalan government, from Brasil to Australia. This blog has relatively few visitors, but they seem to come from all walks of life and all parts of the globe.

It is especially remarkable when someone in Israel googles Pilar Rahola and ends up here. From a lot of other countries many (she's a cute chick) have searched Anna Arqué. Or Catalonia, Spain, independence, Eduard Punset, Scotland, Kosovo...

There are regular visitors from far and near. I feel honoured by the interest, I appreciate the comments, those that disagree even more than those that agree.

Thanks to all of you. It's fun, it's inspiring. I hope to give you something to take home with you.

A Scottish Conditional?

2012-01-25T17:08:00.000+01:00

Alex Salmond has revealed the "short, straightforward and clear" question for the 2014 referendum.

"Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?"

We are also informed that "Mr Salmond was addressing parliament on the 253rd anniversary of the birth of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns."

Burns's most famous use of "should" in the poem that starts with that word leaves no room for doubt about what the author wants to say. And even if it did, such is poetry. Yet in a text that is supposed to have legal validity and ~~should~~ must leave no room for doubt, "should" lends itself to unwanted interpretation.

Lack of clarity is not very Burnsian, but rather... fishy. Did Mr Salmond have any Catalans among his advisors?

Eye Witness Account

2012-01-24T23:09:00.001+01:00

This goes back to the day of the Great Barcelona Demonstration for Independence. Here's what someone who was present wrote as a letter to the editor of a foreign periodical.

"I happened to be in Barcelona that day and witnessed the event. It was truly impressive. One million people out there to counter the decision made by a seedy Madrid court -studded with Franco nosaltgics- against the Catalan Statute. The almost unanymous call of the people at the rally was indeed in favour of Catalan independence, which in Catalan is "Adéu Espanya" rather than "Adeu Espagne" as reflected in the piece on page 6. I think readers need more on what is going on in Catalonia and just why people there are fed up with Spain. Is a new European State brewing up in the Mediterranean?"

I think it's a fair account. Some Catalanista bias, yet not inflating the numbers like many Catalanistas do. As a reader of said periodical he demands more info, which is a good thing, especially when, as we understand by the expression "people there", this person is neither one of these "people" nor does he live "there". To not leave any space for doubt he datelines his letter Oxon.

However, his name sounded familiar. And indeed, after some research I was able to find out that he was at the time a prominent member of a political party and a leading member of an NGO (which he still is), both of which organisations had called for said demonstration.

The party's name is Reagrupament and the NGO is Comissió de la Dignitat. Here's the source that certifies their involvement.

By now you might have guessed who our eye witness is: Mr Toni Strubell. As usual, working for the national cause every which way he can, and no limits. Does anybody still wonder why this guy is my favourite punching bag?

Here's Mr Strubell's letter in full.

Espanish Estupidity

2012-01-23T12:55:00.002+01:00

If The Independent got it right, and I'm not expressing doubt, then the Spanish government is on the road to nowhere, and certainly not on the road to paradise.

It may continue to obviate or ignore secessionist movements at home, but it would be ridiculous not to leave to the Brits what belongs to the Brits.

Update 22:38 - The Spanish Foreign Minister is ~~backpedalling~~ correcting The Independent's story: Britain's "internal affair".

The Impostor

2012-01-22T19:58:00.002+01:00

"Using Catalonia as a scapegoat and stir xenophobia is irresponsible and the Catalan Government should take immediate action to stop this situation for once and forever." Hey, that's what I've been saying all along. Especially in the last few posts. Who's that parroting me?

It's Toni Strubell, who has finally taken to writing in English. Well done! But I was first.

And I'm sure he doesn't refer to himself as the xenophobe.

So the differences prevail, in the end. They go bone deep. This guy's no impostor. He's a poser.

Catalonia/Scotland

2012-01-22T15:08:00.002+01:00

"[...] it is obvious that the case of Scotland and that of Catalonia are as similar as two drops of water [..]." (source)

Scotland on my mind is a kind of leitmotiv of the Catalan separatists. And so is Kosovo, or any other place where there are or have been separatist movements. But especially Scotland, because, as the above quoted text says, there is only one crucial difference: Great Britain is a real democracy, Spain is not. It is of special significance that the referendum on the independence of Scotland is scheduled for 2014. Every 9/11 Catalans celebrate their national holiday. That's the day when in 1714 they "lost their independence", as the local legend goes. A round 300 years later it will the Scots making the move! The Catalans would like to, too. Alas, it's not on the horizon. That hurts.

There are other elements that make Scotland so totally comparable to Catalonia. Just like there is no separatism in Catalonia that is not pancatalan and wants to unite all Catalan Lands (Països Catalans, or PPCC) in one state, Scotland, as the world knows, aspires for a kind of Celtic Lands (Països Celtes, another PPCC), comprising Scotland, Wales, Spanish Galicia, French Brittany, parts of Ireland and of Northern England. The Països Catalans are made up of Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Andorra, parts of Aragon and Murcia, French Roussillon and Alghero in Italy. Two drops of water.

And the similarities do not stop here. Catalonia, like Scotland, was colonised from the South. Lluís Montserrat explains that better than anybody else. Catalonia is a country "occupied by hundreds of thousands of colonists who never have lost nor ever will lose their roots, nor the conscience of the role they are playing here".

In Catalonia, it is the national movement called Catalanism that stands against colonisation, offering a brighter future, and it has to be especially welcomed because it is entirely and utterly positive and humane. Quico Sallés says that it is "the only movement that has swallowed the monsters it has created."

Which brings us back to Loch Ness and the fact that Catalans are ultimately not like the Scots. They're much much better people.

It is obvious.

Speak Catalan Or Die continued

2012-01-19T13:42:00.005+01:00

The complex issue of Catalan language, policing and health services received more attention yesterday. Contrary to what I initially planned I will not write much of a comment here but provide links for further reading.

Pilar Rahola finally came out with her point of view. Estrany was right, she blames it on the unions, taking the easy way out.

More important is that while the debate over the Mossos evaporates like it did some years ago, the one about the use of Catalan in health care is on the rise. It does deserve some more attention, the comments of the readers at several online news outlets show that people have begun to connect the dots.

Strong criticism of Catalan health policy had been published a few days ago. Yesterday, Jordi Pujol, a medical doctor by formation, came out in defence of the undefendable.

Pujol fools no-one (not on this subject). Which is why it has to be expected that questions of national identity will soon be brought again into the headlines, so as to continue diverting public attention from the important political issues.

Meanwhile, Artur Mas has taken the international audience for a ride.

PS: The 12 page document of the Generalitat that obliges medical personnel to teach Catalan before caring for the patients is now online here. Typically, it does first pay lip service to legality by advising to speak Spanish if the "user" "demands to be attended in the other official language" to then give the step-by-step guidelines designed to circumvent legality, as criticised two days ago.

Speak Catalan Or Die

2012-01-17T21:54:00.002+01:00

Over the past weekend we have been allowed insight into the substitution of human values by new technology, or rather by valueless ideology best spewn with the assistance of new technology. A parallel universe was kicked into full gear.

On Friday (which was the 13th) Catalan policemen, called Mossos d'esquadra, protested against budget cuts by the Catalan government. Among one of the points of criticism seems to be the lack of sufficient pieces of body armour. Acutely aware that the Catalan government is more occupied with nation-building than with providing services to the people, let alone security to the security forces, some of the Mossos had the idea to switch to speaking Spanish instead of Catalan.

A day later at one of their demonstrations they swung the Spanish flag and sung "Viva España".

The Catalan blogosphere went immediately abuzz with mischievous comments, accusing the Mossos of behaviour similar to that of Franco-times Guardia Civil. Of treachery and whatnot.

This opposition of two patriotic symbols, own language vs own police force, is treacherous terrain for Catalan opinion makers. Op-eds at the main newspapers stayed largely out of the fray, with the exception of El Periódico. "With what energy will they from now on fight the agressions and the affronts against the language and the flag" of Catalonia, Joan Barril asked. He has little cachet to lose. A few months ago this journalist was forced to resign as adviser to a political candidate because he thought it to be compatible with his work as a journalist for several media houses, among them public Catalunya Ràdio.

The outcry over the campaign of the Mossos was still loud and vicious enough to make labour unions succumb. One of them, called USPAC (Workers Union of the Autonomous Police Force of Catalonia), issued a statement in which it called the song singing and the Spanish flag swinging "an insult and a lack of respect for our condition as Catalan policemen, for our flag, which is the senyera, and for our anthem, which is Els Segadors!"

Catalan policemen are what they are based on Spanish law. Indeed, one of the requirements to opt for a post with the service is to have Spanish nationality. The Catalan anthem and flag are official because of Spanish law. The Autonomous Community of Catalonia is, obviously, part of Spain. Spanish language is official all over Spain, co-official with Catalan in Catalonia, and the mother tongue of many of the Mossos and most of their clients.

Policemen criticising their colleagues for displaying the country's flag that hangs from every town hall. This looks like a twisted parallel universe.

But hey, it's Catalonia. Things can get even worse. They already are. On Sunday El País revealed that medical personnel in Catalonia has been ordered to "always speak Catalan, regardless of the language used by their interlocutor". If the interlocutor does not understand Catalan, it should be spoken nonetheless aided by the use of "non-verbal means or graphic material". Should even that not do the trick, the requirement is to switch to Spanish, if the interlocutor understands that language, but always dropping in the odd word in Catalan "so as to introduce this language into the universe (sic) of the newcomer".

Moreover, the use of foreign languages has to be "restrictive" and "exceptional", and limited to English and French.

This is quoted from a 12 page document of the Generalitat handed out in Tarragona.

Constitutional rights? Hippocratic Oath? Only ten minutes for each patient? This is Catalonia! We're used to it.

More on Catalonia's Health Minister Boi Ruiz here.

The El País story was taken up in Catalonia only by La Voz de Barcelona. Nobody else ran it. There was no démenti either.

And no protests what. so. ever.

Here's a link back out of this parallel universe and into the real life some have the fortune to call home.

Shitty Journalism: The Basic Problem is Not Nationalism

2012-01-16T14:16:00.001+01:00

And La Vanguardia is not the only one standing out.

Let's start with this. Yes, Barcepundit went first, but LVdB allows comments.

Who's to blame? The journalist? Hell, no. To understand the situation of journalists in Spain, here's the blog of David Jiménez.

And one recommended entry. Spanish version here, with lots of comments by the colleagues affected.

Mind that I am not saying that this is a typically Spanish problem.

Honourable Nationalists Do Exist

2012-01-14T14:50:00.002+01:00

Honour is a personal thing. You have it or not, it's your choice.

Salvador Garcia-Ruiz has made his choice: "Catalonia's problems are not the fault of the Financial Times. [...] The world looks at us as a Spanish province because, in the administrative and political sense, that is what we are. [...] The present system of financing was validated by the last Catalan government, which included a separatist party. And the new government lends its support to the economic measures of the government of the [Spanish] state. Well then, before blaming Madrid or the Financial Times maybe we Catalans have to have a look if we deserve what we have got or, more masochist even, if indeed we already have what we truly want."

One might agree or not with Mr Garcia-Ruiz's political standpoint, his self-critical attitude and open-mindedness honour him. He is one of the persons who should be listened to carefully and with respect.

[Mr Garcia-Ruiz has informed me that he does not consider himself a nationalist. The effect here is that the title now has nothing to do anymore with the text, yet both are still true. Just separately.]

Granny Smurf on How to Become a Cataloonie

2012-01-14T00:57:00.000+01:00

She tells it in an interview:

The first Catalan teacher she had was "very Catalanist". Later she "was really blown away by the sense of identity". "Maybe I was looking for that", so she stayed. They liked her, she liked it. "One of the things that I felt when I lived there was that it wasn't Spain, Spain was someplace else." (That's also what Matthew Tree always says.)

Our resident proto-fascist Toni Strubell picks up on it.

But then, how strange, in his next blog entry he laments "we have to live [here] feeling every day more like strangers in our own house."

Who's to blame? "Spanish immigrants", he says. And the Fifth Column (let's not forget its Spanish origin). And Gargamel.

Someone Please Tell Pujol To Shut Up

2012-01-13T10:37:00.001+01:00

Catalonia's former long-time president and political mentor of the present one Artur Mas regales us, again, with tidbits from his political philosophy. See "On the viability or inviability of Catalonia".

In the "Conclusions" Pujol quotes an unnamed European Commissioner as saying that an independent Catalonia would not run into economic impediments. "The difficulty, this Commissioner added, would be political. Radical Spanish opposition, reluctance on the part of the European Union (as [the EU] showed with Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia and will have with Scotland, once the case presents itself) [...]."

One understands that this point is about the recognition of the independence of Catalonia by the EU; and that what stands in brackets are Pujol's observations, not those of the Commissioner. Throwing Slovakia and Slovenia/Croatia into the same pot is plainly, almost hilariously wrong. Velvet Divorce, anyone?

The case of Scotland would be comparable to that of Slovakia: an agreed separation from the UK, and thus no opposition by the EU either.

Catalonia's most overrated politician gets 3 Godós. Only 3. He is not trying to manipulate, he just does not know what he is talking about.

On the other hand, one remembers that Pujol has voted for the independence of Greater Catalonia, not the Catalonia he is talking about here. This should earn him the other two Godós, but I pass.

The Individual vs The Rest

2012-01-11T17:23:00.000+01:00

Only few times a dialogue in the comments section leads to a new blog entry.
This is the re-posting of one (two-part) comment from here:

Well sure, all human relations are more successful through empathy. Which is why our brains are hard-wired for it: the mirror neurons.

This has created communities and those have ultimately (culture added) given birth to nations. But I disagree that empathy is the element that connects communities of originally some 20-40 individuals to nations of several millions. Empathy needs immediacy. This immediacy can be extended by artificial means, such as the internet that facilitates the conversation you and me are having. But I consider this kind of remote empathy to have the decisive element of will. I may as well chose not to feel empathy with you, whereas faced directly with a person in distress my mirror neurons leave me no choice but to feel empathy.

Additionally, I may feel as much empathy for someone of my nation as for someone of another one.

Empathy does not build nations. At most it may have a collateral role. The element that connects the dots between the most immediate community, call it the pack or the tribe, and larger entities such as nations is politics.

Even other primates such as gorillas or chimpanzees show political behaviour. Well, look at those bonobos! They have developed sexual intercourse into a most effective social tool. Maybe we can learn something from them, but sexuality like empathy thrives mostly on the level of immediate contacts.

No. It's politics. And if you are trying to make the argument, as I fear, that apart from individual rights there are certain collective ones (i.e. the nation) -an argument that is being used by nationalists right here and now- I'd like to raise two points.

Following the above strain of thought, I have to observe that all levels of politics have to be taken into consideration. One must not be selective. Language use is being wielded as an element of social cohesion. That's right there in the law, even. But... what about the rule of law itself?

There is no doubt that language is a main element of culture, and as such it is one of the distinctive elements that define a nation. That can be accepted as fact. However, on what I'd call a higher level both politically and culturally speaking, there is the law. To come to be it has required a conscientious effort: we have given ourselves these laws because we have determined them to be the basis of our political interactions.

For this reason it is the law that rightfully provides us with social cohesion more than any other element of culture, and in any conflict between language (nation) and the law (society) -and we do seem to be in the midst of such a conflict at present- I have no doubts that I'm with the law at first.

This leads us to the second point I want to raise, and I take one phrase of yours as the starting point. "We do not have just an individual dimension, but a collective one as well", you say.

This is certainly true, and well done to remind us members of an all too individualistic society of it. But never can this be used as a legal argument in favour of "national rights" (and to the detriment of other rights) the way it is being used by quite some here in Catalonia.

Hit me with the UN-Charter etc. if you will, which may be part of our legal corpus as much as you like, the underlying understanding of such a right is always that collective rights are regarded as an extension of civil rights. A nation has a right because its individual members have it. And these rights are indivisible.

The freedom of the individual comes before the freedom of a group of individuals. Many a conflict has arisen from the subjugation of the individual under the will of the group. We are now in danger that this happens again.

The UN-Charter et. al. do not apply: the self-determination of nations was meant to protect small nations against the clear and present danger of colonialism. This is not the case of Spain.

The case of Spain, however imperfect it may be, is that of a political community built on the free will of its citizens, however imperfect time and place may have been when its founding document came to be.

Better times and better ways can be found to make a better community, but never will I accept that in such a process my individual rights are being pitched against the part of them that some call "national rights". I will not accept to be divided against myself.

A long way I have gone from our initial topic of "empathy", and many assumptions about your position I have made in the process. I apologise if I have made too many, and I beg you to correct me wherever you see due.

It is this time and place, and all other circumstances, that have compelled me to venture out this far. And I can only hope that some of this is of value for you, or any other reader of this blog.

I have ventured a lot into most general terrain, which is why it seems conclusive that I repost this comment as a blog entry, so as to give it importance and let it reach a more general audience that was not originally intended, but might be interested.

Fisted by Ed

2012-01-09T22:37:00.007+01:00

He is said to be an eminent economist, yet the name of his blog, A Fistful of Euros, has gained a whole new sense to me since I got censored there.

Yesterday I posted the following comment:

My dear, this article is so simplistic. Certainly, economics affects politics, no election goes by without this element. However, politics also affects economics, and to conclude that Catalonia "would surely be part of 'core Europe'" is no analysis; it's just summing up all favourable parts while leaving out any unfavourable ones. Half-baked, in every sense.

This is reductio ad absurdum all by itself, and no need to point out that Germany would be better off outside of the EU, and its Western part should not have gone for reunification.

Even worse, it seems that you, Edward, are going back from the desired end-state to the single arguments that in this kind of quasi hindsight might be used to further the creation of said end-state. Thus, every phenomenon has to be made to fit the argumentation, getting ever deeper into the realm of the far-fetched.

We end up with the paranoia so current among Catalan nationalists, in which everybody is against them, everybody who does not totally agree is evil; manipulative or at least manipulated. Like the lot of foreign correspondents. Any of them might be wrong, any their text might contain huge flaws, but the assumption that they are all somehow part of a conspiracy is the vexing element here.

At which point it should become clear that real life offers more details.

This morning the comment was gone. Generally speaking, that is something I have grown used to in Catalonia, and my readers know I have exposed in this blog several examples of this particular kind of censorship. So I usually make a screenshot of every comment I send. Not so at Mr Ed's, whom, I do not want to remember why, I did not think that lowly of.

Comment gone also at EconoMonitor, where Mr Ed had repeated the same article. So today I resent the comment on both sites. And this time I did take the screenshots.

Hours later the comment was again gone from both sites.

I do understand that Mr Ed is God at his own Fistful-thingy, yet I had the feeling that EconoMonitor must have more objective guidelines. And indeed.

First I learned that "Your comments are treated as User-Supplied Content under the RGE Terms of Use". Then in those Terms of Use I found that "All Users agree not to: [...] (d) delete or alter any RGE Content or User-Supplied Content posted by any other User". And I think that we can all agree my comment was not "harassing, libelous, defamatory, abusive, tortious, threatening, harmful or otherwise objectionable".

But there also stands that "RGE has the right, but not the obligation, to monitor, modify, restrict the contribution of and/or remove User-Supplied Content, in RGE's sole discretion."

Could it then be that Mr Ed is not a "User" but someone entitled to act at his whim at RGE? He is not part of "Our Team" there and I have found no other indication that Mr Ed were special. But obviously he's pals with Mr Nouriel Roubini (and what would that say about the latter?).

Mr Ed wields a lot of influence for a mere BSc in Economics who hasn't published one single book and never taught at university. At least not on any regular basis; he has to make ends meet by teaching English to the local folks. Nonetheless, his ~~Filthful~~ Fistful-blog gets truckloads of visitors every day, many of whom apparently regard him as an authority. But what's an authority without a certain degree of objectivity? And what's more contrary to the strife for objectivity than the suppression of dissent?

Mr Ed does allow for some carefully selected dissent, not much unlike old Franco's censors, or like it could be seen in other dictatorships such as Bulgaria back then. Dictablanda is the word they coined in Spain in the 60s. And suddenly, it's one shitty little comment that could rock his house of cards... What an honour.

Above all, Mr Ed has a mission.

A friend had alerted me of the Rain-in-Spain entry with the words: "Edward Hugh has finally come out of the closet. He is a ranting Cataloonie." I first expressed my doubts, not about the "ranting" part, but about the "loonie" one. I have them no more.

Mr Ed, aka "the bonobo" (those jolly chimps that pass their days fucking each other crosswise in the most literal sense), has proven to be just that, a ranting, relentless, reckless Cataloonie, and I had to get fisted by him to find out.

Worse things have happened to this human. But you watch out next time he offers you a handshake.

Catalonia's domestic audience has been elated about Mr Ed's article. Examples are here, here and here.

I'm sorry, Salva, but that's you actually kissing that hand.

Update January 10, 16:25: Mr Edward Hugh put my comment up again on his blog. Not so at EconoMonitor (for now), but I am terribly mollified. Much appreciated, Edward.

(I have by the way realised that my above timeline is wrong: the record has it that first and second sending of said comment took both place January 8th, not on successive dates as my stressed-out brain made me believe. I am sorry for this mistake.)

20:51 Further updates see comments section.

Bel Ami

2012-01-06T12:40:00.002+01:00

A brief debate yesterday revealed Mr Germà Bel to be a good writer. I had hoped that much after reading one of his recent tweets.

Note: ABC newspaper did run a campaign against "Catalan embassies" three days ago. (A screenshot of its frontpage via eldebat.cat.) I have not been able to find any Op-Ed by its editor, however I, too, think that ABC like other media on the right tend to turn up the heat unnecessarily. That said, a comparison with Serb state media of the 90s would have been equally misleading, yet less revolting.

Funny Folks No. 6: Josep Maria Vila d'Abadal and How War Crimes Come in Handy

2012-01-03T13:31:00.009+01:00

Mr Vila d'Abadal is making one headline after another. For some background, here's recommended reading.

Vila d'Abadal now sees the independence of Catalonia right ahead, "in two to three years". Attaining a "60% to 65%" majority does not seem difficult to him, given that, as La Vanguardia indirectly quotes him, three out of four Catalans are for a new fiscal pact with Madrid.

How this majority can be speedily reduced we have discussed in an Iberosphere article. Strangely, Vila d'Abadal counts on this majority even though he refuses the new fiscal pact his very own president (Vila d'Abadal being of the same federation of parties called CiU that rules Catalonia) Artur Mas is seeking as not enough; "a bad approach" he says literally.

Others have a more utilitarian approach. They hope that if no new fiscal pact can be achieved this would be the turning point for many Catalans to want to break away from Spain. This is the direction the whole debate is moving in, and there does seem to be some element of design that it move in this direction even on the part of Mas. External and unofficial advisors like Ed Hugh have jumped on that train. "Catalonia [...] as a separate state would surely be part of 'core Europe'" Mr Hugh jubilates. Some economist who bases his analysis solely on one element, i.e. public spending.

Not being a man of pesky details, Vila d'Abadal is already one step ahead. He wants it all, and he wants it now (I spare you the link to the song today). But after achieving independence? What then? Vila d'Abadal has an answer. It's not about such minor points like the territory the new state should comprise, its form of government or its constitutional framework including minority rights. Full turn of the wheel it's again first and foremost about economics. Vila d'Abadal opts for an "economic federation" with what would be left of Spain.

Go figure. Doesn't he want Catalonia to be a member of the EU? Does this gentleman know what "Internal Market" means?

The funny part ends here. "Faced with a crisis one has to create more crisis", says Vila d'Abadal, and again I say that that's the guerrilla approach. That this is where Catalan extremists link up with the Kosovo they adore. Shoot, and when the others shoot back the international community will be full of understanding. Even if it means shooting from behind the crowd.

And just like in Kosovo territorial issues are not quite resolved yet. The conflict is bound to spill over. Say "Eastern Kosovo" or Macedonia, you can as well say "Northern Catalonia" or Valencia. Oh yes, Vila d'Abadal's Assembly of Municipalities for Independence is going for the Greater Catalonia option, that's in its statutes, and as usual La Vanguardia (and with it the public debate at large) totally misses this crucial point.

You want these analogies? I give you these analogies. Again and again, because you choose them, and I know what they really end up being.

Sorry to take the fun out of it.

La Vanguardia, Pissing on Havel's Grave

2011-12-30T16:33:00.002+01:00

In the past two days we've dedicated space to racism, hypocrisy and censorship. To all what spells the opposite of freedom. Today we have to come back to some of the agents of oppression that were mentioned there.

Again there goes Pilar Rahola in La Vanguardia. It's almost tiring to see how day after day they themselves rip apart the fine coat of liberty they are trying to cloak themselves in.

Pilar Rahola's op-ed today is a comparison of Václav Havel and Kim Jong-il, who died just one day apart. It's the usual stuff, the good guy vs the bad guy, "the two sides of the coin, the liberator and the oppressor·" What? Of the same coin? Never mind, my Spanish sucked too when I posted a comment as my alter ego Liz Quinn.

In English (and respecting the bad level of the original Spanish): "For someone who knows people of the kind of Havel from very close, and who has read what Rahola writes -what she wrote yesterday, for example- wants to throw up. You are the least adequate person to speak like this, Rahola." (Link added.)

Oh yes, I do know -or I did, for some are gone- people very much like Václav Havel, who got thrown into prison when there was no freedom of speech, some were forced into exile, some stayed, all never stopped working for freedom and when the opportunity arose they took the lead and made a change for the better.

I can't stand that someone who yesterday made a sly racist remark today bathes in the light of her own eulogy of one great man; in an article published in a newspaper that knows nothing of freedom of speech.

And as if laughing into one's face were a national sport, my comment stayed for a half hour until La Vanguardia's Oompa-Loompas deleted it.

Now, thank you very much! If ever I needed confirmation....

Go Pick Your Own Nose, Rahola

2011-12-29T20:47:00.004+01:00

One case of the locally typical whining of the hypocrites about the state of the Catalan language can be found in today's La Vanguardia (where else!). And it's a stellar one.

On the face it seems to be just some more bitching about the growing use of Spanish to the detriment of Catalan. Pick your favourite fallacy, they're all there: that Catalonia was monolingual a hundred years ago, that then came Franco and Catalan became "a forbidden language and reduced to the private sphere", that then came the immigrants, first from the rest of Spain, later from abroad, and that as a result you cannot even order a coffee in Catalonia's own language.

The little nice new detail is that Pilar Rahola has been hearing almost only Spanish Christmas songs being played in the shops where she was buying presents for her family. Hardly any Catalan nadala.

And that all over Catalonia, not only in Barcelona, "which one already knows is very contaminated".

But this shall not be about the racism here revealed. Let this be about La Vanguardia. Catalonia's biggest daily has historically been quite comfy under any form of government. In fact, it was always the mouthpiece of the Catalan oligarchy. When democracy came it speedily took to defending Catalanism, as this was now the ruling ideology. This year, the heavily subsidised outlet finally came out with a Catalan edition. That earned it great praise and a "national" prize from the oligarchy, while having little effect on the sales.

So this is the newspaper in which Pilar Rahola complains about shopkeepers chosing the music they play in their establishments. To complete the picture, Rahola most probably wrote her piece in Spanish, because that's the usual procedure among those Catalan newspapers that publish both a Spanish and a Catalan edition. I know so for sure regarding other cases, as to La Vanguardia I can conclude as much from the Leo Messi incident, when La Vanguardia in Catalan translated the name of the Barça football player into "Llegeixo Messi". I read Messi.

Once more we witness a show of hypocrisy that earns La Vaguardia and Pilar Rahola, the dog barking to the sound of its master's voice, a full five Godós.

And now it's about those "contaminating" immigrants, who are again on the receiving end. Now it is about the racism not behind, but right there in the words. A racism that has never ceased to exist. And the smokescreen: This is no down-to-earth KKK attitude, they don't really mean it. Well, I'm sure Pujol did, but La Vanguardia and the whole of the Catalan oligarchy are smarter than that.

They just use nationalism to control the masses. Even in its worst form. Worst Person(s) in the World. Totally.

The problem with using racist arguments is that it ultimately boosts the real fascists. No wonder that Catalonia is the Spanish Autonomous Community where the far right has got strong in the form of Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC); and then there's also Solidaritat per la Independència (SI). In a feedback loop, when extremist parties rise some traditional parties move their way to keep the voters, which is how we came to have a Badalona mayor called Albiol, who rode in on anti-immigration rhetoric. We haven't seen the end of it yet.

Coda: And you know what? As you can read in the comments on today's first entry, two people have tried to make the point that La Vanguardia has itself been publishing in Spanish since it exists. La Vanguardia's censors won't have such "contaminating" comments on its pages. Say no more.

Spanish Fool's Day is Over

2011-12-29T12:52:00.001+01:00

December 28th is Fool's Day in Spain. For a day the name of this site changed to

A quote of former Catalan president Jordi Pujol also suffered some changes. Here is the original:

"El hombre andaluz no es un hombre coherente, es un hombre anárquico. Es un hombre destruido […], es generalmente un hombre poco hecho, un hombre que hace cientos de años que pasa hambre y que vive en un estado de ignorancia y de miseria cultural, mental y espiritual. Es un hombre desarraigado, incapaz de tener un sentido un poco amplio de comunidad. A menudo da pruebas de una excelente madera humana, pero de entrada constituye la muestra de menor valor social y espiritual de España. Ya lo he dicho antes: es un hombre destruido y anárquico. Si por la fuerza del número llegase a dominar, sin haber superado su propia perplejidad, destruiría Cataluña. Introduciría en ella su mentalidad anárquica y pobrísima, es decir su falta de mentalidad."

Pujol did apologise much later for these words. However, Catalan nationalists are so happy to quote "what the Spanish think of us" that the words of their most overrated politician may serve them as a reply.

And to us as a reminder that this level of political debate is endemic here.

El hombre catalán

2011-12-28T13:29:00.000+01:00

It's a good day to put some things straight. Best to say it in Spanish:

El hombre catalán no es un hombre coherente, es un hombre anárquico. Es un hombre destruido, es generalmente un hombre poco hecho, un hombre que hace centenares de años que está oprimido y que vive en un estado de ignorancia y de miseria cultural, mental y espiritual. Es un hombre cerrado, incapaz de tener un sentido un poco amplio de comunidad. A menudo da pruebas de una excelente madera humana, pero de entrada constituye la muestra de menor valor social y espiritual de España. Ya lo he dicho antes: es un hombre destruido y desorientado. Si por su fuerza de dar el coñazo llegara a dominar, sin haber superado su propia perplejidad, destruiría España. Introduciría en ella su mentalidad victimista y paupérrima, es decir, su falta de mentalidad.

What Shall We Do with this Drunken Sailor?

2011-12-22T15:04:00.005+01:00

I have been analysing the situation in Catalonia -admittedly with a focus on the wheelings and dealings of its nationalist/secessionst sector- for some time now. I have been very critical, especially of that sector, yet I have never said what actually should be done. In the absence of any better text, I repeat here the improvised words of a reply to a reader's comment.

I am sorry for not being capable right now of delivering something more elaborate. We'll have to make do with a rough cut located somewhere between "barrel [with a hosepipe]" and "the captain's daughter", for now. I hope it's of some value anyway.

- To the Catalan nationalists: stop dreaming of a Greater Catalonia and respect the rule of law.

Greater Catalonia is beyond utopian, and it makes you an easy target for criticism. In its consequences it means the destabilisation of a region comprising four countries.

Why the rule of law has to be respected Francesc de Carreras explains today in a really great text.

- To the IC, especially Europe: a clear sign should be sent that neither the destabilisation the pursuit of a Greater Catalonia entails nor the constant disregard of the rule of law are acceptable.

Catalan nationalists rely a lot on Europe. So the EU and/or some member states should make a move in defence of their interests and basic principles.

- To the Spanish government: patience, clarity and an open mind.

The rule of law has to be defended. It's what the state is there for. However, this has to be done by a combination of firmness and understanding. A strategy has to be developed to deal with the phenomenon of secessionist movements. It must be a public strategy carried by the most ample consensus possible. It's first aim has to be to defuse the situation wherever this can be done.

We have to keep in mind that any recommendation to the Catalan nationalists such as "stop using those fallacies" cannot be made; however much one wishes they'd finally do so. It's frustrating, but that's just the way it is. They are free to use whichever argument they see fit, and ultimately it's up to the citizens to make up their mind.

This does not mean one must not criticise said fallacies.

At the end of the day, it's the citizens who decide. And if ever there is a clear majority in favour of the independence of Catalonia, and provided that minority rights are respected in such a new state and that this new state represents no threat to its neighbours, this new political fact has to be respected regardless of how many fallacies helped to create it.

Instant Fame

2011-12-19T20:37:00.001+01:00

Two books published (mind, published, they were written by others), one dedicated blog with 70 entries over the past three years. That's about it.

Wait, I forgot the third book, of her own making, that retails for a whopping €2,44 EUR.

Enough to get you a prize, hic et nunc.

Well, that is still more of a corpus than the one article by Colm Tóibín.

So, if you are a foreigner living in Catalonia, never do what I have done. Be smart.

Cataloonia's Great Google Smurf

2011-12-18T15:28:00.001+01:00

"Catalan disappears from Google Maps" Vilaweb smurfs, and desmurfs itself with the GM capture provided alongside the article. Not as radical, but not up to smurfs either, La Vanguardia headlines "Google spanifies streetnames all over Catalonia"; and takes care that its capture shows what the article's Reporter Smurf wants it to. Catalan professionalism.

Catalans easily get the blues about their language. It's an endagered species, attacks against it are many and it has to be expected that they come, as in this case, totally out of the blue. Quite understandably, when it was discovered that Google Translate had smurfed Google Maps, Catalan defence mechanisms smurfed in immediately.

Some got totally blue-faced about it: Smurfette smurfs the translations "illegal" (welcome to the Web!), while Granny Smurf smurfs they are "rendering [Google Maps] useless" and "offensive". And a certain Belzunces Smurf smurfs Franco's smurf.

An official Barcelona Smurf even offers the necessary database to smurf to smurfing only Catalan, and does so in Catalan only.

On the other hand, many Spanish Gargamels smurf about the Smurfs' smurf. And we know that gets the Smurfs totally up in smurfs. How smurf they!

The whole azure affair is a big smurf for the observer who knows about the limitations of Google Translate and can just smurf about Google getting smurfed by Google itself.

However, it has to be smurfed that the Google smurf-up was based on the Gargamelian (but nevertheless legal) idea that there are two official smurfs in Catalonia, and that there was no intention to de-smurf the smurf, but to reflect both smurfs on its smurfs. Even in the cases smurfed in La Smurfguardia. As shown here with the example of Ronda de Smurf, whose name is given as both Ronda de Smurf and Ronda de Smurf:

Yes, it is a smurf. But seeing Gargamel's hand in every smurfing detail is one too. "Thanks for alerting our team!" should be enough of a smurf to smurf even the biggest Smurf.

Shoulda, but if I was Google I'd prepare for a smurf attack. Le Pays Maudit never forgets.

Le suicide du PSC n'aura pas lieu

2011-12-17T19:50:00.001+01:00

At least it didn't occur today, when the Catalan Socialists elected Pere Navarro their First Secretary. He took a fair 73% of the votes against his nationalist competitors.

Mayor of Terrassa (212.724 inhabitants) in the Red Belt around Barcelona. Some say he's the candidate of the party's apparatus, others call him a conciliatory figure. Oriented towards socialism with some green influence. He looks, more than others, like a modern central-European social-democrat of the 90s. That would already be a leap for catalankind.

Demokos has started spitting fire ipso facto, calling him an evil agent of Spain and its PSOE.

The ghosts of past and present will haunt Navarro starting immediately. Too many are now intoxicated by Helen's brainless beauty.

759

2011-12-16T14:23:00.001+01:00

759 million Euros is what Madrid owes Barcelona. So Barcelona says.

First argument in favour of Barcelona: this is what the Catalan Statute of Autonomy stipulates:

"1. With the exception of the Inter-Territorial Compensation Fund, State investment in infrastructure in Catalonia, shall be equal to the relative participation of Catalonia's gross domestic product in the gross domestic product of the State for a period of seven years. These investments may also be employed in eliminating tolls or for construction of alternative expressway roads.

2. "To this end, a committee representing the State, autonomous and local administrations shall be established."

Note: the Constitutional Court has established (see point 138) that this Third Additional Provision of the Statute of Autonomy must be interpreted "in a sense that it does not limit the state in the definition of its policy of investment, nor that it undermines the full liberty of of the Cortes Generales [parliament] to decide about the existence and the amount of said investments."

Second Barcelona argument, and maybe the strongest one: in meetings and other contacts this year the Spanish government assured that it would transfer these 759 million.

It has not done so, which is why over the past 2-3 weeks we have been regaled with a tug-of-war between the Catalan Generalitat and the central government in Madrid, in which Barcelona insisted that it had Madrid's word, and Madrid answered that the necessary memorandum had not been signed yet.

Without entering too much into tedious details of mutual accusations, I'd like to raise two points. This money is most clearly assigned to infrastructure works, yet the Generalitat has included it globally into its 2011 budget. Secondly, Catalan Conseller (Minister) of Economy Andreu Mas-Colell has apparently little clue of what he is talking about.

In this video, Mas-Colell, pressed by a reporter of e-notícies (good job!) about how exactly such a memorandum would come into existence, replies at 4:33: "I don't know either how it works."

Fuck the People: La nation, c'est nous.

2011-12-15T15:49:00.003+01:00

We now have conclusive proof of what Catalan nationalists do when they don't like what the citizens have voted: they take them hostage and go ahead anyway.

Yesterday 157 municipalities of Catalonia (out of a total 947) founded the Assembly of Municipalities for Independence (AMI). Its figurehead is the mayor of Vic (40,422 inhabitants) Josep Maria Vila d'Abadal (CiU).

Vila d'Abadal is well known for his extreme positions, for disrespecting the law and the rights of the inhabitants of his town while pandering to the far right. Last year he gained notoriety for trying to deny foreigners without a residence permit access to social services. He simply wanted them out of Vic. The government in Madrid had to intervene.

For Vila d'Abadal, everybody who comes to Catalonia has to become Catalan, and Catalan language to him is "our only proper language". Quite unsurprisingly, far-right Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) is relatively strong in Vic, and most recently Vila d'Abadal has announced his willingness to cooperate with it.

On a not entirely unrelated note, Vila d'Abadal has shown his disrespect for the victims of the 1991 ETA bombing in his town.

Such a show of character would earn you a cordon sanitaire in many parts of the civilised world. Not so in Catalonia: here it's prizeworthy. "For his work with the immigrants and for the commitment and clarity of his messages", as La Vanguardia puts it.

During the past year or so, Vila d'Abadal has been the driving force behind the creation of the AMI, which has now elected him its president. In a show of rarely-seen hypocrisy, Vila d'Abadal claims that "if a clear majority of Catalans asks for freedom, Catalonia will be free".

In most of those 157 municipalities, more often than not under the benevolent eye of the local authorities, people already were given the chance to express their view on the status of Catalonia in the faux referendum. The outcome was an average 20% participation, and even though it was an unofficial referendum, its low participation sent quite a clear message. That the municipal authorities now continue to pursue the idea on their own behalf is more than just a gross show of contempt for their citizens.

It is illegal. No municipality has the authority to intervene on this level of politics.

Should the parliament of Catalonia declare independence, even though such a thing is not in its mandate either and thus would also represent a violation of the law, it would nevertheless inherently guarantee rights to the citizens. New rights, but rights anyway, by the creation of a new legality.

That can not be achieved on the municipal level. There the effect of what we now see is reduced to the violation of the law, pure and simple, with no new legality there to replace the old one.

Extremism being what it is, Vila d'Abadal and his troupe will not be satisfied with only holding their respective populations hostage and trampling on their fundamental rights, they will also laugh them in their faces.

The AMI seeks to integrate itself into the Catalan National Assembly (Catalan acronym ANC), a pancatalan movement for the independence of all Catalan Lands. This confirms that there is no organised separatism that is not pancatalan, and also that the mistakes of the faux referendum will most probably be repeated. Then the public was largely kept uninformed that it was actually voting on the independence of much more than Catalonia proper.

Now the AMI is trying to bring in through the backdoor an issue that is of no interest to the people in Valencia or the Balears, and of very little even to those in Catalonia who, chiefly for economic reasons, are flirting with independence.

Ideology, again, has gained the upper hand over practical thinking. Nothing good can come out of it.

This is not freedom, this is the absolutist rule of a radical minority that does not care a bit about what the people want.

Coda: "We have to convince them town by town, house by house and person by person that the freedom of Catalonia is the best for everybody." (J.M. Vila d'Abadal) House by house, town by town? What does that remind me of? Oh yes, guerrilla warfare. This man is dangerously nuts, and it shows.

Eat Shit, Grammar

2011-12-13T21:43:00.001+01:00

Old school had it that grammar was really important. High culture. Philosophy. Psychology. Within the essence of human nature.

Forget that. Enter the politicisation of everyday life. Thanks for the heads-up, George. La Vanguardia today writes that Miguel de Unamuno sent a letter to Manuel Azaña in which he says: "Catalunya will, very soon, end up seceding from the Kingdom of Spain". Now, in Catalonia Catalan place names are the only official ones. Even the central government has ended up recognising that the "original" spelling is to be preferred. That already is stretching grammar to its limits, or squeezing it into a very narrow box.

La Vanguardia, writing in Spanish, unable to maintain the original Spanish spelling of "Cataluña", is not only telling grammar to eat shit and culture to go to hell, but also the readers to look for another newspaper in which real journalists are at least able to quote correctly.

LV's "Catalunya", my very personal sic-transit moment of today.

That Evil Constitution cont'd: Send in the Tanks

2011-12-11T15:47:00.001+01:00

A recent post discussed the constitutional role of that evil Spanish army just waiting to "invade" Catalonia. Quim Torra, a moderate nationalist because he does usually not toe the party line of brainless gibberish, says that the evil that men do against the Catalans can actually be pretty useful for the latter.

After speaking about Kosovo and Slovenia as examples for Catalonia, and expressing his worries that Catalonia is quite unknown abroad, Torra says: "If Spain messes up and sends in the tanks we'll win a lot. I do hope that they send them in, because we can win some sympathy."

Which proves two things: that nationalism is a sick thing and that when a few days before Catalan nationalists got all worked up over remarks about past bombings of Barcelona they were actually quite happy.

But that's not learning from Kosovo, that's learning directly from the KLA. And, quite conclusively, we can now sit and wait for the provocations meant to draw in the army. Catalan nationalists always want "Catalonia on the map". Even if it's a frontline map. Or, even better?

Funny Folks No. 5: Toni Strubell, Again, and Circumcised

2011-12-09T15:39:00.001+01:00

Canal Parlament has made a portrait of Toni Strubell, which Toni Strubell duly announces on his blawg.

Right at the start you can hear how he presents himself as Member of the Catalan Parliament "for the circumcision of Girona". Oh indeed, he does not say "circumscripció", which would be "electoral district".

The UN's Blue Helmets in besieged Sarajevo were unable to tell circumcision from squid rings, so guess what they would buy on the Black Market. But that was only a joke back then, may the Flying Spaghetti Monster bless the Bosnians.

Toni Strubell is the biting reality that exceeds all jokes, because he's the guy who went all Goebbels on Mr Punset for not speaking Catalan well enough.

Teachers, Leave The Kids Alone!

2011-12-08T13:42:00.004+01:00

Thought control in the classroom: Catalan extremists yesterday celebrated "collective immersion" in five schools of Torelló (Barcelona province, 13,944 inhabitants). Torelló Town Hall was in on it.

This article shows some pictures. Ain't they cute, them submarines? The idea to liken linguistic immersion to diving came from the same nationalist activist who invented the palindrome "català-a l'atac".

We have warned. This was bound to happen.

The radicals could not get more than 20% of the population interested in their faux referendum, so now they turn on the helpless "0 to 12" year old at a time and in a space in which the children are entirely at their mercy.

This is in every way illegal, it is illegal also by Catalan law, but it has the tacit support of the Catalan government, which might see here a perfect way out of the problem that there is no majority for independence. No new state, no new legality can be created, so the solution is simply to break the law. And let the so-called "civil society" spearhead (or rather U-boat) it, creating an asphyxiating atmosphere that will mostly keep the parents from complaining, especially in small towns. But isn't this a case for public prosecution? Where the hell is the penal code when you need it?

I don't want to go all Ernst Reuter on you, but there are walls children are shut in by, while other walls are being built within them, and the peoples of Europe should better look this way.

Or is all we are left with to hope for fat and psychopathic wifes?

For those who read Catalan (or can get by using Google translate), here's the manifesto that was read to the kids in favour of a school that is "catalan, democratic and of quality". Mind the order of the words. The hypocrisy is all too obvious, as are the true intentions.

Here is also the homepage of that little known group The Catlanders. Anticolonial "catpower". "And we even have fun with it."

That's ok, except they are having fun with other people's children.

Puta Soy

2011-12-07T23:15:00.001+01:00

With best regards to the good man Trevor.

And here's the info that it actually took a lot of people to create such shite.
(Man, I can't always be serious.)

That Evil Constitution

2011-12-07T18:24:00.011+01:00

Yesterday, December 6th, was Constitution Day in Spain. And Spain being Spain, for many it was an occasion to celebrate their respective scrota. To do something "por cojones" means doing it against all odds, often against better advice, not out of courage but for one's own satisfaction respecting nothing else but one's own mind which, for the self-centeredness hereby revealed, is justly localised in he testicles.

Unsavoury as such thoughts might seem to start an article with, the actual scrotal political behaviour displayed yesterday is much worse. Let's start with the Catalans.

Catalonia's president Artur Mas refused to take part in the official Constitution Day celebrations in Madrid: "I do not feel called to celebrate a thing that has clearly been interpreted against the aspirations of the Catalan people and also against its national aspirations."

The background is the foul play of the Partido Popular, which used the Constitution against the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, something even one of PP's Catalan leaders, Jorge Fernández Díaz, has finally recognised. Also the Constitutional Court was criticised by Catalan nationalists over its ruling on the Autonomy Statute, together with basically all things Spanish, parties, parliament and government included.

The underlying conspiracy theory is preposterous, but the beef is in the fact that Mas, instead of defending the Constitution -which would be his duty as president- against perceived manipulations, refuses the Constitution itself. (On the other hand, he does take the money that comes with the Constitution, the 144,030.12 euros/month he has allocated to himself as representative of the state for Catalonia.)

The historical parallel with Lluís Companys is evident. 1934: After rightist parties had taken over power in Spain, quite legally on the basis of elections in the Second Spanish Republic, Companys, instead of defending that republic, declared Catalonia to be a new state within a federal Spanish republic of his own invention; thereby effectively helping to lay the groundwork for what would later be the Spanish Civil War.

Mas, in a fit of unintended hilarity, would like Catalonia to be part of Europe, because the Union "does things better".

Dangling their testicles even stronger are the people on the extremist fringe Mas panders to. To them it looks as if the Spanish Constitution "empowers the Armed Forces to attack Catalonia should it democratically decide to secede" from Spain.

Quite incredibly, there are 3 full fallacies in just 13 words. But let's get straight to the main one. Article 8 of the Spanish Constitution says (in this official English translation it is called "section"): "The mission of the Armed Forces, comprising the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, is to guarantee the sovereignty and independence of Spain and to defend its territorial integrity and the constitutional order."

Obviously, it's not up to some generals to decide where and when to deploy the troops. There is still a civilian government in charge. But Catalan extremists love their Article 8! Let them also have Article 87a of the German Constitution:

"(4) In order to avert an imminent danger to the existence or free democratic basic order of the Federation or of a Land, the Federal Government, if the conditions referred to in paragraph (2) of Article 91 obtain and the police forces and the Federal Border Police prove inadequate, may employ the Armed Forces to support the police and the Federal Border Police in protecting civilian property and in combating organized armed insurgents. Any such employment of the Armed Forces shall be discontinued if the Bundestag or the Bundesrat so demands." (Translation taken from this site. Thanks.)

Admittedly, the German Grundgesetz is more elaborate in this point, but we do get the general idea that the use of military force to safeguard the constitutional order is not anything specifically Spanish.

Let's leave out all the other, very many things that were said and published yesterday, like the criticism that the Spanish Constitution has not been voted on again since it came into force 33 years ago, and that it's anyway an invention of Franco times. This is going straight into the ridiculous. As a European I consider the above mentioned dangerous lies proof enough why we should tell these extremists, including here the very president of Catalonia, that their dealings are not well received in any democratic order.

However, it gets worse. Catalan extremists were not the only ones to spit fire.

If we can believe La Vanguardia, ex-communist Izquierda Unida also saw the Constitution in danger by the dealings of PP and PSOE. They protest against the recent change of the Constitution, obeying, and I agree, a dictate by Germany and France. But they now see it as not anymore representing them, an attitude that only aggravates the situation and is no way to protect the Constitution.

Some Spanish politicians still ride high on the notion that they must be right because their predecessors were the victims of Franco. They do not see that being a victim does not make you right, and they forget that the part of the world that heroically sided with the Second Republic did so because that was the legal government. Over their cojones they forget reality and History's lessons.

It's the law, stupid!

5 Godós out of 5 for what is mostly straight out lies, total disrespect for the citizens and self-serving bullshit in a density rarely seen.

Continued here.

Il Blu Dipinto di Blu

2011-11-25T17:13:00.003+01:00

When I wrote this entry I knew they were falsifying History, an ability any good Stalinist is breast-fed on, but even I didn't imagine how ridiculous they'd get.

Pilar Rahola's "historic victory" of her beloved (for paying a good part of her income) CiU is just at the lower end of the scale. However, it does make clear to the reader that nationalist idiocy is being well received in the upper echelons of power of the local oligarchy. As long as it serves the oligarchy's interests.

On the lower end, the original one, die-hard ethnocentrists like this and this one speak of a kind of blue PP-Tsunami that has overrun the whole of Spain, except for that little part called Catalonia. Yes, we are different! God bless Uderzo.

[Update 27/11: Here is, in English, another mention of "the blue tide of the rightist Spanish Popular Party" which was nevertheless "unable to make inroads in Catalonia"; in spite of growing from 610.473 votes in 2008 to 715.802 this year, which is an increase of 17.25%, as opposed to the 5.38% increase in votes for the whole of Spain. As to more intimate connections (aka inroads) between CiU and PP see also the first comment to this entry.]

Thing is that the Avui frontpage these people refer to -in matter or, like Rahola, in mind- paints Partido Popular territory in light blue, and CiU territory in dark blue. Blu dipinto di blu...

The colour choice is actually very correct, being CiU and PP the flip-side of one single coin, almost undistinguishable from each other for the voters, which is why they govern together in Catalonia. It's not anymore a question of how stupid you can get (my original take), but how blind.

So I'd like to ask the morons and the manipulators: what kind of public do you think you're writing for? How many Catalans do you take for idiots today? And how many more tomorrow?

I've never given out any of my Godó Prizes since I announced their existence. I have to start today: four little Godós out of a maximum five for the mindless, false, self-serving and generally hilarious interpretation of last Sunday's election results are for La Vanguardia and each of its op-ed writers, as well as for all those innocent souls like Albert from Cataloniadirect.info who think that the oligarchy gives a shit.

Never too late. Penso che un sogno così non ritorni mai più....

And the higher you fly, the faster you fall. Long live Domenico!

Živeo Inoslav Bešker!

2011-11-24T15:59:00.000+01:00

If you ever wondered what was so wrong with the Zapatero administration, this video is an illustration.

Jutarnji List's Inoslav Bešker, after apologising for his "poor Spanish", uses English on the Secretary of State for Communication. But neither this gentleman nor the lady to his right, who earns her bread, butter and much much more as Undersecretary for the Interior, understand any English. So they offer Mr Bešker a one-on-one "with camera" (Jutarnji List being, as its name says, a newspaper) alleging they do not want to "interrupt the process" (which, as one could see at the beginning, had already arrived at the stage of awkward silence).

The two official clowns will now hopefully disappear into an undeserved early retirement. Mr Bešker, however, is actually one of Croatia's top journalists and a lecturer at the University of Bologna.

Who says that Balkanisation would be all bad for Spain? Long live Inoslav Bešker!

Spanish Elections with a Catalan Twist

2011-11-23T13:27:00.005+01:00

We thought that the biggest lies are being spread before elections and after fishing. Catalonia, being different as it is, offers the novelty that the biggest lies are being told after the elections. A behaviour made easy by the fact that the election campaign was void of lies because nobody dared to touch on the issues in any concrete way.

Last Sunday night millions of envelopes were opened and the winner was Mariano Rajoy with his Partido Popular. The biggest loser were the Socialists, who received a historic and well deserved slap in the face. Within the normal sequence of events is that the PP was not the only winner. Smaller parties got their fair share of the limelight, like UPyD and, more notably, ETA's political strategy under the name of Amaiur.

It is Catalan CiU, coming in third with 16 out of 350 seats, that now behaves as if the elections were a day of fly-fishing. Admittedly, Mas and Antoni Duran i Lleida campaigned on the double argument that, faced with an almost sure absolute PP majority, the "Catalan voice" in Spain's Congress should be strong, and that it should seek a new fiscal pact more favourable to the region. And voters did buy this argument in some way.

However, CiU and its minions in the local media are now getting into full hyperbole-drive. Says Francesc-Marc Álvaro in La Vanguardia that "the fiscal deficit is a reality the people can understand, regardless of the language they speak". When has the population at large of any country ever been able to understand fiscal or economic policies? Especially in Catalonia, the issue of fiscal deficit has been quite complex, even the experts haven't agreed on the numbers. That makes it a subject open to much demagoguery, like the claim that Spain is taking literally 3.000 euros per annum out of the pockets of every Catalan. Buying an argument does not mean understanding it.

Even more over the top than Álvaro went CiU's grand seigneur Miquel Roca i Junyent. "Yes, we are different!" he shouts from the top of his article. And then he explains: "In a clear and undisputable victory of the PP in the whole of Spain Catalonia constitutes an exception. Not only has [the PP] not come out on top, but this is the region in which it has gone up the least." Let's not discuss the obvious grammatical issue in the second sentence ("no sólo no ha ganado sino que ha sido la comunidad en la que menos ha subido"). Let's look at the numbers.

In the whole of Spain (i.e. the average) the PP went up from 39.68% in 2008 to 44.04% in 2011. That is an increase of about 11%. In Catalonia the PP had 16.31% in 2008 and has now won 20.39%. This is an increase of 25%. Hence, Roca i Junyent is not only wrong, reality shows the opposite of what he claims: in Catalonia the PP has increased its share by more than double the average, and absolute numbers show exactly the same picture as the percentages; 5.38% increase in the whole of Spain vs 17.25% in Catalonia.

Isn't the "we are different" claim the basis of any nationalism? Roca is wrong, but he is spot-on with publicised opinion. The overwhelming might of nationalist discourse in the Catalan media has established a "truth" that will prevail over the facts.

We return to the facts and have another look at the numbers. CiU's 16 MPs can be compared to past elections. In 2004 and 2008 CiU had both times 10 MPs. But in the 5 elections before that, from 1986 to 2000, the numbers are: 18-18-17-16-15. So it's rather back to normal for CiU than any big success.

We can also compare voter motivation. Let's compare regional elections to general ones in absolute numbers, and let's take pairs: regional elections vs the next general ones. In the last Catalan elections in 2010 CiU won 1,198,010 votes. Last Sunday it got 1,014,263. That is minus 15.33%.

Doing the paring back to 1988 vs 1989 the first thing we see is that CiU always had less votes in the general elections than in the regional ones, which except for 2006/2008 each time had been the year before. The second thing we see is that minus 15% is within regular limits. The four pairs before -2006/2008, 2003/2004, 1999/2000, 1995/1996- and 1988/1989 show roughly these differences: -16%, -18%, -17%, -12% and -16%.

Only 1992 vs 1993 gives an abnormal result, when voter motivation for CiU was so high that there was only a minus 4.35% difference.

These details work to help us understand that CiU was not overly successful in last Sunday's elections, but that the outcome of the elections was before all the result of the collapse of the Socialists, in Catalonia as well as in the whole of Spain.

Catalonia's particularity is that the center-right comes in two flavours, Spanish centralist PP and Catalan nationalist CiU, but the common tone with the overall trend is maintained: a shift to the right.

Yet, there is still this "Catalan voice" cum "fiscal pact" element. Opinion polls were giving the PP such a strong standing both in Spain and in Catalonia that the wisdom of the voters was to in the end look for a bit of a counterbalance by awarding CiU with a certain corrective role. One hopes that they will use it wisely.

Scary Teachers

2011-11-18T11:53:00.011+01:00

Education is a sensitive field, the younger the students the more so. Which is why political activism is banned from the schools' premises.

However, some teachers in Catalonia, empowered by that dangerous semi-knowledge their incomplete academic studies have given them and inspired by ideology, are making ill use of the powers society has invested them with.

Most worrying is the part where they claim that "the implementation of the Immersion Program requires that at all times, i.e. in the classrooms, during recess, in the canteen, during excursions... Catalan be used as the language of communication."

Certainly the worst kind of political proselytism, being that it violates some of the basic civil rights as codified in a country's Constitution.

Let's step back some 40 years and remember that Catalans were suffering the Spanish-only policy of the Franco era. Indeed, by democratic standards they had the right to be educated in their mother tongue. This right was finally recognised by the Constitution of a new, democratic Spain. Since then the mother tongue has mutated into the "country's own language" and for the sake of "social cohesion" the pendulum is swinging back to a one-language-only policy, this time in Catalan.

That is, if these half-educated teachers of Somescola have it their way.

Can't they just go about improving their services? Here's where there's a lot to be done.

PS: The song for the mood today is from Mr David Bowie.

Update: Follow-up article is here.

National Dignity? No Thanks!

2011-11-16T20:45:00.004+01:00

Nationalism is toxic waste and Francesc Moreno is a voice in the desert. Under the above title, the editor of eldebat.cat has today published an op-ed that should be read on prime-time TV and distributed by every teacher to their pupils, analysed at schools and posted on every official building's message board.

Excerpts: "National dignity has been a recurring argument of political leaders who belong to different ideologies but share the same totalitarian ambition to limit or abolish freedom of speech, justify purges, imprison members of the opposition, point their fingers at traitors, justify civil wars or invade [other] countries."

"National dignity is a recurring argument of politicians who do not have the necessary personal dignity to defend their points of view in a democratic and non-exclusive fashion."

There are quite a few online news outlets hailing out of Catalonia, directe.cat, naciodigital.cat and elsingulardigital.cat are some of the worst pamphlets I've ever read. e-noticies.es is at times acceptable, vilaweb.cat is very nationalist, but actually quite professional. (Admitted, that last one actually has its origins in Valencia.)

eldebat.cat stands out as maybe the only online publication written in Catalan that strives to be truly even-handed. Not easy: Money's short in such kind of business, especially in this ideology-laden piece of the Globe.

Mr Moreno's op-eds are always worth the read. Today he totally nailed it.

Mr Hackett, meet Mr Bou.

2011-11-13T12:14:00.008+01:00

A commenter has yesterday suggested that all's just fine in Catalonia: "I mai hi ha hagut violència, ni marginació, ni separació. El melting pot català és impecable." ("And there never has been violence, nor margination, nor separation. The Catalan melting pot is impeccable.")

The obvious reply is to remind him of the existence of Terra Lliure, and to wonder about the consequences on society it has when someone who had become known for defending Catalan-Spanish bilingualism gets abducted, tied to a tree and shot in the leg. The sign this sent was not precisely a warm welcome to Spanish-language natives, even though this crime was immediately condemned by all Catalan parties.

And even though Terra Lliure is now long gone, only commemorated by some at the radical fringe, the search for ethnic purity it stood for has never ceased to exists.

Consider this ope-ed. Here its author Lluís Bou refers to a graffito painted over (or rather beneath, as the photo shows) the copy of a medieval Hebrew inscription. The graffito reads "Palestina libre", "like that, in Spanish language, in the midst of [Barcelona's] Marlet Street", as Bou points out.

Bou sees the hand of "anti-nationalist political progressives", i.e. the left, of whose actions he then gives another example from 2009, when, as Bou says, leftist conseller Joan Saura cancelled a Holocaust commemoration to protest against "the war in Gaza" (Bou).

Then follows the last paragraph which has to be translated in its entirety: "And [now to] the curiosity that closes the circle. What does it do there, a 'Free Palestine' in Spanish in Catalonia? One can defend the right of self-determination of a community thousands of kilometers away without [establishing] any respect nor relation to one's own national demands [back home]? Well yes, in this country you can and it's being done. This is the usual channel of certain politically progressive anti-nationalists in Catalonia, who are in need of references. 'Palestine free and Catalonia Spanish', one might resume. Even stranger causes could be found."

I'd say that being Spanish one's mother tongue it seems entirely normal to use it even when painting stupid graffiti. Mr Bou sees Spanish as a foreign element that if used has to have a hidden meaning.

I looked up some more writings by Lluís Bou and saw that his previous op-ed at El Singular Digital was titled "National Emergency". (I wished that Agamben would make some observations about the perpetual state of exception some Catalan nationalists live in.)

This text, too, mentions the Jews, albeit in the self-serving fashion already known from other Catalan nationalists: "We Catalans will once more be seen as the Jews of the Spanish imaginary". The link Bou provides here is strangely inconclusive, but what to expect of someone, I thought, who cannot write "Moody's" correctly, publishing in one shitty little online outlet unable to provide proof-reading.

However, it was just then that my eyes swung over to the brief about the author and, blimey, Mr Bou is actually a someone! Reporter and political analyst (!) for El Singular, former head of Catalan politics at Avui newspaper, editor for the entries on politics of the Enciclopèdia Catalana etc. etc.

He even exists in (the Catalan) Wikipedia.

Would you agree, Mr Hackett, that Mr Bou's opinions can be taken seriously? I'd even think that they say a lot about the "Spanish imaginary", section Catalan nationalism.

A Silver Lining

2011-11-10T19:16:00.001+01:00

Everywhere. For it's in Greece.

The new prime minister responds to the warm and caring name of Papademos. Even better, he, who was the vice-prez of the ECB, bears the first name of Loukas.

And St Luke is associated to which animal? The bull!

Oh cruel Tyche, thou even laughest at us.

The Deal or Here Goes the Solution to the Catalan Problem

2011-11-10T02:21:00.010+01:00

This text has been rewritten by the author and edited by Guy Hedgecoe. The blog entry has metamorphosed into a press article and can now be found at Iberosphere.

Neighbours in Catalanoia

2011-11-05T15:29:00.009+01:00

What shocked Bosnian Muslims the most during the war was not to be left alone by the international community (that came in close second), but that it was their very neighbours who led the death squads to their homes. I remember talking with a man who had been through one of the Chetnik concentration camps in western Bosnia. He had somehow managed to bring a few personal belongings with him when he was finally released into exile. Among those was the VHS tape of the wedding of one of his relatives, on which he pointed out to me those men who a few years later would almost beat him to death.

There seem to be two categories of genocide. The one that is committed against the unknown others, and the one in which the neighbour, colleague, associate and even friend is made suddently into that "other". I hold this second category to be the worst, because it is especially treacherous and cowardly, and it defies reason. It does not only do away with those you once knew and respected now labelling them as "the others", it also cuts away a huge piece of the perpetrators' own culture.

But then there is purity, and some strive for it at any cost.

Be it the Spanish genocide of the Moors and the Jews that started in 1492, or the persecution of the Jews, again the Jews, all over Europe during so many centuries, finally culminating in Nazi Germany. Be it that "the others" once had come as conquerors, like the Moors to Hispania, or crept in like the Jews to indulge in christian baby-blood drinking ceremonies and usury, or be it that centuries of conversions from one religion to another and back had forged a society so amalgamated that intermarriage was at the order of the day, like in Bosnia. Or be it the seemingly eternal "others", the Gypsies. (And mind that after getting rid of that pesky foreign element, it was always their "own" population the criminals turned against.)

In each of these cases, in each and every one, "the others" had enriched the whole country to the point of their culture being shared by everyone. Before they were killed.

So how can anyone who has learned History's lessons not be impressed by the purity seeking nationalists of today's Spain? There are, on the one hand, centralist aspirations to assimilate "periferic" cultures into a purely Spanish and only Spanish-speaking one. But this is not what this text is about, in that case we would be talking of inter-national conflict, not of one's literally next-door neighbour.

Secondly, and most importantly, however much one speaks of "the two Spains" still being in conflict today, it is the third Spain that won the upper hand 30 years ago. There is a democracy, there are guarantees for national minorities. There is a simple fact, call it the Constitution. Against that, the centralist purists do not represent the general culture. No, they don't.

But there are indomitable regions where time stands still, such as Catalonia. Here there is indeed a search for purity that is being sold to us as defence against a stronger opponent. But isn't that the same as speaking of a judeo-masonic conspiracy like in Nazi Germany or of world-wide muslim domination like in the Bosnia of the 90s? Didn't the perpetrators always try to get off as the real victims, claiming that even the genocide they were committing was only self defence?

In today's Catalonia immigrants from other parts of Spain are called "fifth column" (Antoni Strubell i Trueta), parties that largely represent them are called "a cancer" (Ferran Requejo i Coll). In Catalonia you have to speak Catalan, or else. Or else you are not Catalan. (And what are you then, before society and the law?) The one-size-fits-all approach to catalanity is omnipresent in political discourse on every level, street-corner debates are being elevated to the heights of regional government's policy. Thought police enters your bedroom quite literally (as in the Gerard Quintana case). You either bow to it or... you write your blog anonymously. Yes, that's not a moot or selfish point. The fear of being fingered out as anti-Catalan and thus maybe not getting butter on your bread is where it begins. And it is not limited to a shitty little blog and its author, the awareness of who is the master and who is the servant is deeply ingrained in the local psyche. When such a thing happens, even election results are tainted.

Catalanoia rules.

This is not the antechamber of genocide. It is the antechamber of the antechamber, it is rampant nationalism that leaves no space for differences, cutting out large portions of society on the basis of their non-conformity to what not in any planned, but surely in much more than just a casu consulto fashion is now accepted as the right and patriotic way of doing things; and of thinking itself.

May this text serve as a warning to everybody, the perpetrators, the victims and all those abroad who still think in terms of "poor small nation being bullied by a big one". Things are not that simple. You might want to have another look.

Still things have not gone totally awry in Catalonia. Still there are many diverging opinions to be heard on every level of society, including politics. Still there is the rule of law, however much it is getting eroded by the local authorities, defended by their minions in the press and the zillion "NGOs" they subsidise. And even though those who speak their mind freely are taking an ever growing risk to their personal wellbeing, or precisely because of that, let us use this moment to prevent worse things.

They bring no good to anyone.

(Against all my customs, this has been an entry without any links. Find your own ones, it's easy. Those of you who live in Catalonia don't even need them.)

Tiny Doses of Arsenic

2011-11-03T21:44:00.002+01:00

Today in the Catalan parliament Jordi Cañas criticised the use of the term "expolio" (same root as "spoliation", plundering) when talking about Catalonia's net fiscal transfer to the central goverment in Madrid. (Video in this article)

Cañas quoted Victor Klemperer: "Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all."

His brief address was introduced by the journalist of public TV3, in Catalan, using the Catalan form of Cañas's party "Ciutadans", same as in the subs. However, after Cañas had finished, the same journalist, still in Catalan, spoke of "Ciudadanos", the Spanish-language form of that party, in what sounded to my a sour tone of disapproval.

Call it Urdaci-esque, I consider that this journalist validated Cañas's quoting of Klemperer. Another tiny dosis of arsenic.

Paid for with my frigging tax money!

(Sorry for the French. Tiny is the dosis, still it is poison.)

Fanning the Flames of Ethnic Conflict

2011-11-02T14:43:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, surfing the local news as I do each day to take society's pulse, I came across this article saying that one of the characters of the Spanish TV series Aida finds a baby on his doorstep and decides to keep her because "imagine some undesirable person takes her; or even worse, a Catalan."

I was much taken aback. What an insult! And in these times of national conflict. Luckily, if not the article itself, many of the comments on that article provided the necessary context. The character of this series called Mauricio Colmenero is the archetype of a racist, homophobe Francoist bashing anybody who in his view is deviated. A caricature, a parody, much like Francis Kuntz in France, Ekel Alfred in Germany or the charming Eric Cartman from South Park.

The character Mauricio Colmenero has a gay brother in the Aida series, and the actor himself, Mariano Peña, is said to be gay.

As a matter of fact, when the certified despicable guy bashes, say, the Catalans it's acutually a defence of the Catalans, not an attack on them.

So WTF?

Irony is a dangerous thing, there are too many coneheads out there. Indeed, many people didn't get the drift, and the wording of the article helped a lot to incense Catalan national feelings. A Catalan nationalist debating blog called Racó Català also took up the issue, but apart form the usual coneheads here, too, many commenters provided the necessary context. Alas, far from settling the debate.

I wondered what would become of the whole affair so I kept an eye on it during the day, hoping it would not snowball out of proportion. The debate continued on e-notícies and Racó Català, but Google kept coming up with only around 50 search results. The hype seemd to be disintegrating.

Until in the late evening, with everything basically said and the necessary context provided to prove that this was a non-story, La Vanguardia online had it on front page. Dammit! Google results reached the 500s and the same debate was repeated at this newspaper, with again many even complaining that La Vanguardia was being quite unprofessional, but also many others showing their rage and providing with the inevitable nationalist outcry. Calls for the independence of Catalonia included, how else could it be.

In contrast to e-notícies, La Vanguardia did give a bit of context by reminding the reader that the Colmenero figure is "characterised by his explicitly racist and homophobe comments", but leading with the idea that this all was "a phrase for polemic".

So the polemic continued in the blogosphere, with one of the srciptwriters of Aida getting her share of all the nonsensical accusations via Twitter.

Come this morning and Google had soared to more than 1,000 results (and still rising). Now it was secessionist El Punt Avui that took up the issue, hypocritically referencing to the debate in the blogosphere and quoting from e-notícies's article. And again the same debate repeated itself now on El Punt Avui's article's comments, with again some commenters immediately warning that this was not to be taken seriously and others taking it seriously very much.

Which is where we are at right now. At e-notícies the "news" has attained high readership and comment numbers, likewise at La Vanguardia, where in mid-morning it was on top of the "most read" list.

Dammit again! That stupid thing really did snowball.

One bright spot is that so far none of our homey editorialists have picked up on it.

To be continued.

Worst Person in the World or Bombes amigues i bombes enemigues

2011-10-30T18:29:00.014+01:00

Introducing your words with "I always half jokingly say" doesn't grant you carte blanche to utter stupid and hurtful things such as "I don't know how many times Barcelona had to be bombed. I think this time we can solve things without doing so." Nobody jokes about that, because the reference to "bombing Barcelona every 50 years" -be those the original words of Manuel Azaña or General Espartero- is frequently used by local Catalanistas to justify their fear of Spain. See helpcatalonia.blogspot.com, where all those historical grievances are regularly milked to get the world's attention. (The site offers comments sections, but don't think you'll be able to lodge more than 3 critical comments before you get banned, an already usual phenomenon in Catalonia).

Fear of Spain based on past injustices is what Catalanistas themselves use most to publicly display their togetherness, this attitude dominates the local political debate here, but beware not to stoop to that level, as Gregorio Peces-Barba did in one light-minded moment.

He also said, with the same joking tone, that it would have been better for Spain to "keep" Portugal instead of Catalonia in the 17th century. That was certainly more to the liking of the Catalanista troupe, who bashed the patronising tone but immediately saw there a de facto recognition of Catalonia as a nation.

They didn't need to have waited so long. Peces-Barba as one of the "fathers of the Constitution" was an important ally of the Catalans to have their character as a nation respected in the 1978 Constitution. Under "nationalities", because for semantic and legal reasons the term "nation" had to be reserved for the whole of Spain. Catalan culture has since thrived, just compare Catalonia proper to formerly Catalan Roussillon and you get the drift.

As any nationalism goes, nothing is ever enough. In a sort of prelude to his above quoted words, just a few days prior Peces-Barba had insisted that sovereignty lies with the nation, not with the nationalities. As the connoisseur of Catalan society he is, he showed that he was wary (and most probably also weary) of the rampant nationalism that is besieging Catalonia presently. When he then spoke of the bombing of Barcelona he was on eye-level with the present nationalist discourse, no more no less, and the Catalanistas were immediatly all over him like africanised bees. Never mind that one Catalan national hero, General Prim, also bombed Barcelona only a few years after Espartero, and that there are still streets named after both of them; in the Catalanista psyche there seem to be good bombings and bad bombings. Bombes amigues i bombes enemigues.

No matter his political record and his many apologies (mind the feat, in a country that knows very little of the art and sincerity of apologising, be it in private or, even less, in politics), Gregorio Peces-Barba now forms part of that black legend of grievances Catalanistas jerk off with one sunny day after the other. Having enemies is so useful for the great big national cause.

Speaking of jerking off, the JERC, which happens to be the youth organisation of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), symbolically burned Peces-Barba's Constitution back in 2008. The same Constitution that gives so much recognition to the Catalans, the same Constitution that allows them to burn its effigy because it recognises free speech as one of the pillars of democracy. The same free speech which allowed Joan Tardà to shout at that burning Constitution festival: "Long live the republic! Death to the Bourbon!" Tardà was very easily let off the hook, he said that the reference was not to the present king of Spain, from the House of Bourbon, but a mere reference to the times of the War of Succession. As if Catalans had been fighting for a Republic in the early 1700, and not for simply another pretendant to the Spanish throne.

Tardà pointed out that it was his "long political experience, always within the framework of democratic values and of progress" which made him burn the Constitution.

This same Tardà now calls Peces-Barba an "enormous son of a bitch".

Tardà and his goons would certainly put Peces-Barba on top of the list of Worst Persons in the World, but reality is never their friend and has it otherwise. While so much ink and spit is getting spilled -and other fluids ejected- on the new favourite enemy Peces-Barba, the real Worst Person in the World is receiving hardly any attention, even though he had had his appearance only one day before Peces-Barba; and to much of his convenience. This man, a Catalan, is doing real damage to his fellow countrymen.

Boi Ruiz is the Catalan Health Minister, or conseller. According to him "health is a private good that depends on the individual, not on the state". He also said: "There is no right to health, because it depends on the genetic code of each individual, on their family history and their habits" and therefore "the users [of health care] have to take the moral responsibility that if they do not watch their health all of us together will have to pay for it". (source)

Boi Ruiz, who joined the Catalan government straight out of the private health management sector, is surely no user of the public service but rather can afford to go to private doctors. His words are in every bit remindful of good old times:

"60,000 Reichsmark this genetically deficient man will cost the Volksgemeinschaft (racial community) in his lifetime. Volksgenosse (racial comrade), this is your money too."

You might also want to consult a habilitation paper titled: "'You have the obligation to be healthy.' The Health Service of the Hitler Youth 1933-1945"

Or you might want to consider this quote of Julius Streicher from Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden: "Health insurance is a cancer to physical and mental health. The self-education to health is being sabotaged by the prospect of free treatment and compensation payment for sick-leave days."

Certainly, Boi Ruiz is no Nazi, he only is proof that some do not need to be one to be socially cold, apart from greedy. Boi Ruiz is a lobbyist for private enterprise, and the more he ruins the public sector -to which his ministry has applied severe budget cuts- the more the private insurance sector will thrive; and that will also pay off for Boi Ruiz himself once he goes back to work there after finishing his stint in the Catalan government. He is one of many crony politicians worldwide but here this, like many things in Catalonia, comes with a difference: the blatant manner in which Boi Ruiz goes about, and is allowed to go about, denying the Catalans their constitutional rights and, as Amnesty International has pointed out to him, also their human rights.

Boi Ruiz's unlawful and inhumane words sound like a spiteful retort to an article by a prominent legal expert who, with regard to the health budget cuts, had warned that the Catalan government could be liable before the courts for violation of both the Spanish Constitution and the Catalan Statute of Autonomy.

Criticism of Boi Ruiz in Catalan society has been scant, not only in comparison to the Peces-Barba affair but by absolute measures. Even though such important matters as health and money are at stake, Catalans are so immensely consumed by their ever same questions of identity that they have deluded themselves into ignoring the facts that actually count, those facts that really hurt them. Have a look at the Catalan blogosphere if you think I exaggerate. And it is certainly a factor that much of the heavily subsidised Catalan media houses are run by the same oligarchy that put Boi Ruiz in office. They are quite content with their conseller, Catalonia is their ballpark and nationalism their smokescreen.

Just under two weeks ago Boi Ruiz was awarded a prize by the employers association CECOT most cynically for "best practice in public administration". This prize was handed to him by his very own boss Artur Mas, whose "government of the best" will continue its labour of breaking the law wherever it sees fit. For the best of the Catalan nation.

Today's Worst Person in the World: Boi Ruiz, Catalan Health Minister under Artur Mas.

Oh, by the way, does anyone know if Mr. Mas's wife Helena Rakosnik, who has just overcome breast cancer, was treated in a public or a private hospital? And aren't the main causes of breast cancer genetic?

The Empire and its Fringes; and La Fura dels Baus Dancing with a Dictator

2011-10-23T17:02:00.010+02:00

Today we have the internet and it serves us well to observe the flow of information between the empire and its fringes.

Vilaweb recently quoted from a NYT op-ed by Paul Krugman to inform us that this eminent eocnomist is siding with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Vilaweb gives a basically correct summary of Krugman's words, yet it is vexing that, while it does quote the first two sentences of Krugman's article, it is unaware of their historical reference.

"There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear" are also the first two lines of the song "For What it's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield. Although this song was not about the Vietnam War, as many think, but about the hippie riots, both references are certainly intended by Krugman, and the relation he thus establishes between the protests of the 60s and 70s to those today is essential to understanding his article.

Ignorance works in the opposite direction, too. The Wall Street-Hollywood complex quite wilfully abstracts from the interests that might exist on the empire's fringes. When that backfeeds into the fringes there can be results that are sad and hilarious.

This October 5th several Hollywood stars attended the birthday of Chechen tyrant Ramzan Kadyrov, with toothy Hillary Swank doing a Marilyn Monroe for the puffy president and Jean-Claude Van Damme eerily mumbling an "I love you, Mr. Ka-ka-Kadirov". This was on the news all over the world. El País, Spain's biggest newspaper, ran the story too.

Fixation on the empire, however, prevented everybody from mentioning that among the buffooning "artists" there was also a Spanish representation. La Fura dels Baus, who had gained world-wide fame in the 92 Olympics that exacty 25 years ago were awarded to this group's hometown of Barcelona, were entirely overlooked.

Well not entirely! One small online newspaper of indomitable journalists still held out against the invading tinseltowners. This time we have to say something good about Vilaweb, which covered the story from the start and didn't let La Fura get off the hook.

La Vanguardia risked one small and very by-the-by mention of La Fura's dance with the devil, and didn't follow up! El País even datelined from Grozny, with a Moscow correspondent who had studied in Barcelona around the time La Fura were doing their first gigs there. Nothing. Not a word. A few days later Vilaweb was joined by another online outlet, La Voz de Barcelona. And that was it.

La Fura dels Baus must have been elated to be spared attention, and actively avoided the journalists, as I am told. The only brief public statement they awarded to Vilaweb spoke of their ignorance of the true nature of the celebrations in Grozny, which were officially announced as the reopening of Grozny's city centre after its rebuilding following the war.

However, ignorance is a weak excuse to keep the blood money. And ignorance on the part of the Spanish journalists might not be the only reason why they did not do their job. La Fura dels Baus are darlings of El País, as Malaprensa reminds us, and also of the Catalan oligarchy, whose newspaper La Vanguardia has still not picked up on the information provided by Vilaweb and La Voz de Barcelona, Malaprensa's criticsm, or their own reporter's insight in the first place.

There are many lessons to be learned from these observations. Lessons about what and who is and is not important in this world. Lessons about Spanish journalism. Lessons about a theatre group that alleges its works have a social and political message.

The message I'd like to send out today is to boycott La Fura dels Baus.

But who in the world would care for that....

Today we have the internet and information flows instantly from one corner of the world to the other. But we still do not have the culture and education to get out of our ideological isolation and escape from the engineered consent, be it that great one of the empire or those little local ones; and on one level and the other they use the word "freedom" much to prolong their grip on us simple people.

Ramzan Kadyrov, too, chooses freedom.

And La Fura dels Baus, that miserable and disgusting troupe, are only using this freedom.

¿Endogamia u onanismo?

2011-10-22T15:14:00.001+02:00

Veo que el conseller que aplicó tan bien los recortes en Sanidad recibe un premio de la Cecot. De manos de su propio jefe, Artur Mas.

Total, Mas se premia a sí mismo.

Recordemos que estos días una patronal competidora de la Cecot, el Cercle d'Economia, fue muy criticado por publicar una "opinión" en la que no se menciona Cataluña.

Ahora la Cecot es alabada por Mas porque le sigue la onda en el tema del "pacto fiscal". Al mismo momento, Mas se entrega un premio Cecot práticamente a sí mismo.

Sólo tengo una pregunta: ¿Esto es endogamia o es simple onanismo?

Sea como sea, no os perdáis otro elemento del artículo ya citado: "El president de la Generalitat, Artur Mas, ha preguntat als empresaris catalans si estan disposats a 'jugar-se la posició' i renunciar a certs aspectes de la seva vida 'per defensar el bé comú'."

El señor 144.030 euros (con 12 céntimos), es decir aquel señor que cara a la galería de vez en cuando se aplica algún recortito, por supuesto sin dejar de ganar más que el presidente del gobierno central o cualquier otro presidente autonómico, ese señor infumable pide a sus amiguetes de la Cecot que "renuncien" a un trozo del pastel.

Visto el ejemplo de Mas ya conocemos el tamaño de este trocito que está dispuesta a sacrificar la oligarquía catalana que gobierna y se premia por ello.

Que se note el cuidado, pero que no tenga mucho efecto.

Nuff said.

Katalonia është Kosova

2011-09-25T21:53:00.005+02:00

Adding a picture to the last entry about Anna Arqué I thought I should elaborate a bit on Catalan separatists' insistent claim that Catalonia is like Kosovo.

This little design is my present to them.

Update - This is so funny!

More seriously the issue continues here.

No Love for Mankind, Says La Vanguardia

2011-09-25T13:17:00.010+02:00

This happened between September 23 and 24. La Vanguardia carried an article about the discovery that neutrinos travel faster than light. "Roll over Einstein?", asks the NYT.

My alter ego Liz Quinn is no physicist, but she had an Einstein quote readily waiting on this blog. So she used it in a comment to the La Vanguardia article, took a screenshot of it being published and expected it to get censored. She was a little suprised that it didn't. What it did get was an insult from another commenter, to which she, logically, replied "Yes, child. Yes.". The insult was correctly erased after some time, Liz's reply kept lingering on awkwardly, and that seemed to be it.

Then, it was already September 24, a certain Myrddin^ found kind words: "The Einstein quote is well employed. Nationalisms separate us, they make us be distant from the others. The truth is that we are all beings of the same species, we are born as equals, without clothing, without speech, without religions or beliefs (....)"

When Liz came home in the afternoon and saw these words they reminded her of another quote from the same Cataloniawatch article, the one of Pau Casals. She dedicated it to Myrddin^ and "everybody who wants to understand it". Within minutes all of this was gone, the entire exchange, leaving nothing between the comments by "No soy físico" and "moj", as if there never had been anything. No Einstein, no Pau Casals, no love of man. No information: a Black Hole.

Luckily, Liz kept taking PDF copies of the site.

Here you go. Before:

And after:

It must be that Liz got too much off topic. La Vanguardia knows no relativity, but only absolutes. Roll over, Einstein.

Note - I have decided to implement an evaluation system. Any news reported here will from now on get between zero and five Godós, one being the minimum and five the maximum of lies, manipulations or ~~phallacies~~ fallacies that led to the news item. This has nothing to do with anybody or anything called Godó, any resemblance with existing persons or concepts is purely coincidental.

I just happen to have a huge stock of cute little Godós and no other use for them.

Coming up: Toni, Listen To Your Mom! (corrected again)

2011-09-24T17:27:00.003+02:00

A new feature on Cataloniawatch: upcoming posts will be announced.

Soon to be seen on your nearest internet device: Toni, Listen To Your Mom! ETA Sunday, September 25, after noon. Featuring Josep Maria Prim as The Author, Josep Trueta as The Scientist and Salvador de Madariaga as The Bogeyman. Special appearances by Toni Strubell as The Publisher and Amèlia Trueta as herself.

Update: I am sorry, another post got me busy today. Toni and his mom will have to wait another 24 hours. My apologies.

Update 02: No way to finish this today or tomorrow. ETA delayed until Thursday. Life's a bitch.

Money But No Moral

2011-09-23T20:30:00.003+02:00

I have just corrected an error in a previous post. The president of the Generalitat of Catalonia does not earn twice as much as the president of the Spanish government. He only earns 60% more than him.

Caveat: I have not been able to make sense of the Spanish budget. So for information on the income of the president of the Spanish government I have to rely on some sites that all concur he gets about 90.000 Euros p/a.

Link 1. Link 2. Link 3.

What I could officially confirm is that the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia earns 144,030.12 Euros p/a (see page 19). That is about 15% less than his predecessor (see again page 19).

Yes, 15% less. That's still more than 12,000 each month. Spain (21% unemployment, IBEX in free fall and no social security net worth mentioning) is the land of the mileuristas: 1,000 Euros is regarded here as a normal monthly salary.

Which means that Artur Mas, the very honourable president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, makes in one month what a lot of others make in a whole year. If they have a job, that is. During his four-year tenure he will make what a great many people earn in a lifetime. And even after those four years he'll still be given large official compensations while he can make millions on the free market.

Enough is never enough.

Why do I link to a German song? Because it's the European Union, i.e. Germany, that has sunk billions into Spain, which makes 144.030,12 doubly perverse: "1. willfully determined or disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired; contrary." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/perverse)

And what when strike three comes and Spain's got to be bailed out like Greece?

"Ich lass' mich nicht belügen.
Schon schweigen ist Betrug.
Genug kann nie genügen."

I am not going to be lied to. Even silence is treason. Enough can never be enough.

Funny Folks No. 4: Pilar Rahola

2011-09-23T13:52:00.006+02:00

It is terribly difficult these days to keep control over the masses. There are just too many aspects to be considered.

So Pilar Rahola (at whose feet this blog has thrown itself admiringly already several times, such as this) suddenly came over with an op-ed that criticised Barça coach Pep Guardiola for his defense of the Qatari sponsorship of his club. La Vanguardia had to pull the piece, but it had already been online for a few hours.

Barça is holy to Catalans, and Guardiola is already an icon. Indeed, he was one of the best Barça players to then become one of its best coaches, and he's a great guy, anything else than flamboyant, but efficient, intelligent and even humble. A role model like all too few. Guardiola has won the hearts and minds of the Catalans, he has received highest official recognition.

What delusion rode Pilar Rahola to write, precisely in La Vanguardia, "I am sorry for Guardiola, but I'd never have imagined that he would defend a dictatorship", what made her break the very rules that had made her is anybody's guess. It's not her Zionism. It must be her high moral standards which, truth be told, apply to everybody else but herself. But there they do apply, much. Alas, Pilar Rahola has entered in the phase that she really believes in her lies.

The effect is best told by this online newspaper, all links and comments respected.

Pilar Rahola has gone beyond the limits of the socially acceptable as established by the Catalan bourgeoisie that pays her bills. For once she has suffered the same wrath that comes down on so many law-abiding citizens day after day, something she has never complained about but rather cooperated with.

Pilar Rahola, Funny Folks No. 4 because sometimes Schadenfreude tastes like honey.

And seeing La Vanguardia, this mouthpiece of the rotten Catalan bourgeoisie, having to call back an article by one of its most successful propagandists as if it was toxic waste is quite satisfying. Oh, how hard it is to keep control over it all.

Update 17:29: Some more collateral information here.

History Repeating?

2011-09-20T20:16:00.007+02:00

"Wir gehen in den Reichstag hinein, um uns im Waffenarsenal der Demokratie mit deren eigenen Waffen zu versorgen. Wir werden Reichstagsabgeordnete, um die Weimarer Gesinnung mit ihrer eigenen Unterstützung lahm zu legen. Wenn die Demokratie so dumm ist, uns für diesen Bärendienst Freikarten und Diäten zu geben, so ist das ihre eigene Sache. Wir zerbrechen uns darüber nicht den Kopf. Uns ist jedes gesetzliche Mittel recht, den Zustand von heute zu revolutionieren."

["We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves at democracy's own arsenal. We will become Members of the Reichstag to paralyse the Weimar mentality with its own assistance. If democracy is stupid enough to award this foul service of ours with free entrances and financial compensations, well that's their problem. We will not lose one night of sleep over it. Any legal means serves us well to revolutionise the status quo."]

Joseph Goebbels, Völkischer Beobachter, April 30, 1928.

"L'interés a anar a les Corts Espanyoles és per a fer política independentista. És a dir per reventar Espanya des de dintre. Per defensar els interessos de Catalunya. Per fer mal als interessos espanyols. I per utilitzar-lo com a plataforma mediàtica de cara als mitjans espanyols, els catalans i els internacionals."

["We are interested to enter the Spanish Cortes in order to make separatist politics. I mean, to blow Spain up from within. To defend the interests of Catalonia. To harm the Spanish interests. And to use it as a media platform before the Spanish, the Catalan and the international press."]

Alfons López Tena, TV3, September 20, 2011 (15:57).

Here is also a newspaper article, for quick reference.

I think I've seen it before, but I hope that was only the song.

Coda - La Vanguardia is certainly repeating its pattern of censorship:

Before

After

Update Sept. 30: Apparently, Mr López Tena's intentions to blow things up do not stop at the Spanish parliament. More precisely, he spoke of blowing up Spain, and in the Spanish region of Catalonia, where he is an MP, he seems to see another parliament worthy of his services as the Catalan Demolition Man. (In this case "rebentar" -Spanish: "reventar"- is better translated with "to disrupt".)

Funny Folks No. 3: Anna Arqué. Or: The Referendum Was A Hoax

2011-09-20T11:44:00.009+02:00

Her name means "grace". Anna Arqué was one of the bigshots of the referendum on independence that started in 2009 in tiny Arenys de Munt and ended this year in the Catalan capital Barcelona. The faux referendum as I will start calling it today, thanks to Anna. Before we come to what Arqué told Basque pro-independence newspaper Gara, one brief look at the question that was put before the public:

"Està d’acord que la nació catalana esdevingui un estat de dret independent, democràtic i social, integrat a la Unió Europea?" This translates literally as: "Do you agree that the Catalan nation should become an independent state, under the rule of law, democratic, social and integrated into the European Union?". At the organisers' webpage it was rendered in two ways. One was "Do you agree that Catalonia should become a social, democratic and independent state in its own right, as a member of the European Union?", and the other one was "Do you agree that Catalonia should become a democratic and independent state, under the rule of law, and member of the European Union?"

In French they also had two slightly different wordings. However, neither the French nor the English versions contained any reference to the "Catalan nation". Here are some screenshots:

Even more surprisingly, the Spanish version does not speak of the "Catalan nation" either:

Now to Anna Arqué's interpretation of the term "Catalan nation" as she revealed in her Gara interview last April:

"Last Sunday's question referred to the "Catalan nation". What map do you have in mind when using this term?

That of the Catalan Lands: the Principality [i.e. Catalonia proper], Valencia, the Franja [in Aragon], the Balearic Islands, Northern Catalonia [in France] and Alghero [in Sardinia, Italy]."
(Note the absence of Andorra, the only country where Catalan is official state-wide.)

In an earlier article I already mentioned that the public was not informed about the pan-Catalan aspirations of the groups that organised what from now on one can legitimately call the faux referendum.

In the same post I also quoted from a La Vanguardia interview with Arqué in which she revealed that the true aim of the faux referendum was not to get as many people to participate as possible, no matter the result, as the official claim usually went, but to get them to vote "yes" to independence.

This "spokesperson for the international community" was at the time of the La Vanguardia interview still honest enough to inform in time and tell the prospective voters that the organisers were not neutral to the outcome before the faux referendum went region-wide. Then, after it's culmination in Barcelona, she finally informed them what it had been about. In Gara. Which nobody reads here.

Gràcies, graceful Anna.

Does this look like a lot of mess? Arqué can do even worse. More from her Gara interview:

"Was it necessary to mention the European Union in the question?

It was necessary, because if we had not done so, you couldn't understand the message of what we want. We have to take into account that we addressed the whole country: the grandfather, the young man, the lady, all of them. That means, what you can't do is subordinate the most important objective, which is independence, to parallel conditions because the only thing they can do is complicate and distract from the message. Had we mixed in a change that goes beyond the natural change, which is a state of our own, we would have created a confusion that was neither constructive nor positive. No matter how much we like or dislike the European union, we must discuss this once we are a state."

Anna Arqué i Solsona, spokesperson.

Latest news about her fate is already a few weeks old: she was opting for the post of Secretary of Citizen Movements and International Issues at Solidaritat Catalana per la Independència. Yes, that's Toni Strubell's coalition of tiny radical parties.

Oy vey.

PS: "Les Kosovars nous ont montré le chemin à suivre." Anna Arqué dixit.

Anna Arqué is Catalan separatism's talking, walking, living blonde moment. I have no doubt she is telling us what really goes on in their minds.

Update - I had a picture of Arqué right here, but I certainly wouldn't want to keep it forever. Her thought that Catalonia should go the Kosovo way made me think that there should be a new KLA: Ushtria Çlirimtare e Katalonisë. The Katalonien Liberation Army.

See more here.

The Language Manipulations: A Follow-up and One Little Girl's Story

2011-09-18T13:30:00.000+02:00

I am not going to soften my stance on La Vanguardia's manipulation of one of its polls. For purely sociological reasons, let's take a moment to think about what caused La Vanguardia to do it.

The poll started on September 5. Until September 14 the participation went up to around 40,000 when for several days the result had been a somewhat steady picture of roughly one third in favour and two thirds against Spanish as classroom language in Catalonia. Between September 14 and September 16 there was a hike in participation numbers, reaching around 80,000. At the same time, votes in favour of Spanish climbed over the 50% mark. In real numbers this means that the "no" option gained some 14,000 votes while the "yes" option gained almost double that much, 27,000 votes.

Where did these tens of thousands of "new" votes come from? What was it that made as many people participate in the last three days of the poll as in the previous 9 days, i.e. three times as many per day? We can guess that the good folks at La Vanguardia asked themselves these same questions.

They must have feared that someone was trying to hitchhike their poll. Indeed, some research on the Web shows that one side and the other tried to mobilise their constituents. Falange Española (Sept. 7) and Intereconomía (Sept. 13) both used Facebook. While it is entirely legitimate for a political party to do such a thing, it is at least questionable in the case of a media group, even though everybody knows that Intereconomía, rather than press is a propaganda tool.

On the opposite end there was Racó Català, where calls for voting "no" were made from the very first day on, but seemd to lose track in the crucial last days.

It is impossible for the outsider to gauge the effect of such activism on the La Vanguardia poll. Did La Vanguardia get any valid information by tracking the IP numbers? Were they able to make sense of tens of thousands of them?

Even if they could determine that a large number of votes came from outside of Catalonia, would that justify to exclude them? Or does La Vanguardia have evidence of automatic voting? I think this last possibility can be excluded: any voting bot would have sent the numbers sky high within a few hours, not days.

Whatever went on in their heads, the good folks at La Vanguardia ultimately took it into their own hands to determine which votes were to be counted and which not. And they have not provided any explanation.

They seem to be unaware that both democratic and professional principles were at stake. La Vanguardia made a judgement call, and it took the wrong decisions.

This is a harbinger of worse things still to come. The present language conflict is an ethnic conflict; and even though it has legal elements, it will not be decided by the courts but by politics, which here means that everybody will take matters into their own hands just like La Vanguardia.

For a long time we will be presented with anecdotical evidence until a bigger picture emerges. So here is an observation I have been able to make today.

A few hours ago I talked with a nine year old girl, daughter of friends of mine. She told me that last week at school her teacher told the class that if they were to be taught in Spanish this would mean that the class would be split in two. "Do you want to separate?" she asked the class. The children were very sad about that possibility, they did not want to be separated from their friends.

My friends are furious. The little girl's father is still spitting fire and brimstone. They want to confront the teacher, but they don't know if they would be confronting the whole school, or even the whole neighbourhood. They have never complained that their daughter is taught only in Catalan, even though Spanish is their mother tongue. They didn't want things to change, but now faced with the teacher's aggression, for this is what they feel it is, they want justice.

At the same time, they want their daughter to be kept out of the conflict. This is why they will not do anything, for now. And I don't know what advice to give them. I really don't know.

La Vanguardia manipula una encuesta propia

2011-09-17T19:08:00.012+02:00

Click here for the English version.

Si hoy visitáis la página de una encuesta de La Vanguardia con la pregunta "¿Apruebas que se implante el castellano como lengua vehicular en las escuelas catalanas?", veréis este resultado:

Sí: 34%

No: 66%

El número de votos recibidos que se da es de 33.132. Como cierre de la encuesta se da el 13 de septiembre a las 12:00 horas.

Lo cual es extraño, puesto que yo he estado siguiendo el desarrollo de esta encuesta hasta ayer mismo. De este modo pude observar como, a medida que iba subiendo la participación, el resultado iba quedando cada vez más igualado hasta llegar prácticamente a un 50-50. Desafortunadamente, mi última captura de pantalla de un artículo que recoge esta encuesta en el margen derecho es de 13 de septiembre a las 18:47 horas.

Esto ya era después de lo que hoy LV da como cierre de la encuesta, y los números eran:

Sí: 38%

No: 62%

Votos recibidos: 37.557.

Si acabáis de hacer clic en el vínculo os habréis dado cuenta de que las cifras han mágicamente desaparecido de la página de ese articulo.

No pasa nada. Google cache tiene el resultado de ayer por la noche. Hay que escoger la versión sólo texto:

Sí: 51%

No: 49%

El total de votos recibidos no se muestra aquí. Pero la última vez que miré era de 53.045, con un resultado similar.

He podido encontrar otra página web que da testimonio al mismo efecto, contando hasta 80,000 votos, resultando en una relación 54-46 a favor del castellano como lengua vehicular.

Está claro que un tercio de los votos a favor del castellano como lengua vehicular, según recoge la versión manipulada de la encuesta de La Vanguardia, ya es un buen indicador de que hay una corriente a favor de un cambio que no puede ser ignorada. Y esto es básicamente todo lo que se puede concluir de una encuesta de este tipo. Tal resultado representa ya una verdad incómoda para los nacionalistas en La Vanguardia.

Cuando los números seguían mostrando esta realidad de una forma cada vez más cruda, la buena gente de La Vanguardia tuvo que hacer recular el momento del cierre de su encuesta varios días. Debían darse cuenta de que el tiro les había salido por la culata por plantear tal pregunta. Como dije en una entreda reciente en este blog: "Language use and responsibility for one's children are very personal issues. So what about consulting the people? That won't happen because it would be the right thing to do." El uso de la lengua y la responsabilidad para con los propios hijos son temas muy personales. ¿No se debería consultar a la gente? Esto no se hará porque sería lo correcto.

La Vanguardia lo hizo y se asustó.

Una vez confrontado con la verdad, la mentira es la salida. Esto es Cataluña, y el nacionalismo te come el coco y el alma.

Esta manipulación de La Vanguardia no me sorprende lo más mínimo. No sólo han manipulado esta encuesta suya, día tras día están manipulando las secciones de comentarios de su propia edición en línea. Aunque te atengas a las Normas de participación, no puedes dar por sentado que ellos cumplan su parte del contrato. Antes de publicarlo, tienen que comprobar si tu comentario es políticamente oportuno. Incluso en el caso de que, por un despiste de los censores, te lo hayan publicado inmediatamente, cuando ellos se den cuenta del error tu comentario se borrará. Lo he visto muchas veces.

El contenido editorial de La Vanguardia está, lógicamente, muy controlado. Su línea política es clara, es rabiosamente nacionalista. Cubre sus vergüenzas de vez en cuando con aportaciones disidentes como los artículos de Francesc de Carreras, y esto es todo. Pero no es suficiente, así que todo cuanto no pueda controlarse, como la participación del público que confiere a LV la apariencia de ser un periódico moderno y abierto a las aportaciones de sus lectores, tiene que ser manipulado. Honni soit qui mal y pense.

[Si queréis hacer vuestras propias comprobaciones, tengo un truco. Enviad un comentario a cualquier artículo de opinión de Pilar Rahola, preferentemente a uno de esos muchos sobrados de moralina política, en La Vanguardia online. Criticadle a Rahola de no ser la persona idónea para dar lecciones de moral a nadie, ya que Rahola ilegalmente presume de dos títulos académicos, los de doctora en Filología Hispánica y Filología Catalana. Tened en cuenta de que La Vanguardia está al tanto del fraude y hasta participa en él. Aquí vemos como La Vanguardia orgullosamente anunció su nueva colaboradora en 2007. Apuesto una botella de Vodka que tal comentario no verá la luz del día durante más de media hora.]

Today's Worst Person in the World es un periódico; sus propietarios, sus editores y sus censores: La Vanguardia de Barcelona.

De todos los periódicos que de una forma u otra he tratado, y van algunos, La Vanguardia es sólo comparable a aquellos que salen bajo regímenes dictatoriales. Para ser justo, bajo dictablandas como España en los últimos años del franquismo.

Actualización 23:03: Google cache se ha sobreescrito y ahora muestra la versión manipulada de la encuesta. Hay maneras de resolver este problema, por ejemplo esta:

La Vanguardia Manipulates Own Poll

2011-09-17T13:13:00.014+02:00

Hagan clic aquí para la versión en español.

If today you go to the La Vanguardia poll that asks "Do you agree that Spanish be introduced as classroom language in Catalan schools?", you get this result:

Yes: 34%

No: 66%

The number of votes received is given as 33,132. Closing of the poll is given as September 13, at 12:00.

Which is strange, because I have been following the development of this poll until yesterday. So I could observe that as participation went up the numbers kept evening out until reaching practically a 50-50 split. Unfortunately, the last screenshot I took of an article that contained this poll on the right margin was September 13, at 18:47.

That was already after what today at LV is given as closing time, and the numbers were:

Yes: 38%

No: 62%

Votes counted: 37,557.

If you have just followed the link you will have seen that the numbers of the poll have magically disappeared from the page of that article.

Never mind. Google cache has last night's figures. You have to choose the text-only version:

Yes: 51%

No: 49%

The number of votes counted is not shown here. But the last time I looked it was at 53,045, with a similar outcome.

There is one webpage I could find that gives testimony to the same effect, counting up to 80,000 votes, with a 54-46 split in favour of Spanish as classroom language as the result.

Certainly, a third of votes for Spanish as classroom language, as depicted by La Vanguardia's now-rigged poll, already is a clear indication that there is a demand for change you cannot ignore. And that is basically the only conclusion one can take from such kind of poll. Such a result is already an inconvenient truth for the nationalists over at La Vanguardia.

When the numbers kept turning to show this reality in an ever cruder fashion, the good folks at La Vanguardia set closing time back a few days. They suddenly must have realised that they shot themselves in the foot by asking this question. As I have maintained in a recent article here: "Language use and responsibility for one's children are very personal issues. So what about consulting the people? That won't happen because it would be the right thing to do."

La Vanguardia did do it and got scared.

Faced with the truth, lies are the way out. This is Catalonia, and nationalism eats your brain and your soul.

La Vanguardia's manipulation comes as no surprise to me. They did not only rig this one poll of theirs, they are rigging their own online comments sections day after day. Even if you comply with La Vanguardia's Normas de participación, don't expect them to fulfil their part of the contract. Before your comment gets published it also has to be approved for political convenience. Even if, in a fit of distraction of the censors, your comment got published instantly, once the censors realise their mistake it's suddenly gone again. I have seen that many times.

Editorial content at La Vanguardia is, logically, very much controlled. The political line of this newspaper is clear, and it is rabidly nationalist. There are figleafs of dissent to cover the general shame, such as the articles by Francesc de Carreras, and that's about it. Not having enough with it, all things they cannot control, such as participation by the public at large that provides the impression of a modern newspaper open to input by its readers, they have to rig, and honni soit qui mal y pense.

[If you want to check it out yourself, I've got a trick for you. Send a comment to any of Pilar Rahola's op-eds at La Vanguardia online, preferably to one of those many oozing with political moraline. Now criticise her for not being in any way up to morals, because she herself illegally claims to possess two academic titles, those of Doctor in Catalan Philology and Doctor in Hispanic Philology. Be aware that La Vanguardia is in on the fraud, because when they employed her here's how La Vanguardia proudly announced it. I bet anybody a bottle of Vodka that such a comment will never see the light of day for more than a half-hour.]

Today's Worst Person in the World is a newspaper; its owners, its editors and its censors: La Vanguardia of Barcelona.

Of all the newspapers I have dealt with, and in one form or another that's quite a lot, La Vanguardia is only comparable to those in dictatorial countries I know myself. Or, to be fair, in dictablandas, in "soft" dictatorships like Spain during the last years of Franco's rule.

Update 22:55: Google cache has overwritten itself with the new and rigged version of the poll. There are ways around that problem, for instance this one:

Backwards

2011-09-12T13:34:00.001+02:00

At the official celebrations yesterday of the Diada, Catalonia's National Day, writer Màrius Serra made everybody happy when he spelled the name of his mother tongue the other way round. "Català" became "a l'atac".

Now that the general backwards orientation of local nationalism has been coined into a bonmot, aggressive connotations included, let's see if the joy is shared by the speakers of the other two official languages (Spanish and Aranese), or by anybody in the international community whose support is usually much coveted.

If Catalan nationalists want to have it both ways, they'll end up messy.

Silly Season and How Nationalism Disrespects Civil Rights

2011-09-11T18:49:00.018+02:00

With the economic crisis having changed holiday habits all over Spain, and with more people having more time to come up with more stupid ideas, silly season has become even sillier. Especially in Catalonia.

In mid-August, at a Barça-Madrid match, Mourinho pinched the cheek of Barça's Vilanova, or put a finger in his eye, or both, as we can see in this video.

Alas, one Spanish news program, using footage from another camera, only showed the ensueing slapping of Mourinho by Vilanova. That was reason enough for conspiracy theories. Even the Huffpost ran an article titled The Spanish Soccer Civil War.

That's not enough for a blog entry, it's silly season and don't mention the war.

End of August Catalans at the World Police and Fire Games in New York built a castell, secessionist flag on top. The reaction of the Spanish delegation was to call them SOBs and chant patriotically. The Catalan nationalist press presented it as an aggression by the Spanish, the Spanish nationalist media bashed the secessionists.

Flag wars are nothing new, such a silly incident doesn't make for a blog entry.

Then came the blast.

August gone, September just in and Catalonia went from silly to dangerously idiotic. Implementing a decision by the central Supreme Court which itself referred to jurisdiction by the Spanish Constitutional Court, Catalonia's highest court, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia, or TSJC, handed down a decision that (strangely, it now seems) surprised everyone. It contained an ultimatum.

But first let's establish a timeline. Let's go back to 2006. If I remember well that was the year when three (Spanish speaking) families in Catalonia brought to the courts their wish that their children be educated in Spanish language also, not only in Catalan. Ultimately they went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which in December last year decided that Spanish could not be excluded as classroom language.

The TSJC has now given the Generalitat two months time to change the system of monolingual language immersion.

The TSJC's decision lets the Generalitat set the criteria for the new system, but there's no way around finally facing the fact that monolingual immersion had always depended on Catalan being in a position of inferiority to Spanish. That once the use of Catalan will be "normalised" the Catalan administration will have to fulfil the legal requirement of reflecting the bilingual (in Val d'Aran trilingual) character of its society.

While the Generalitat is trying to find a way ahead without fully implementing the court's decision, some parties are calling for "civil disobedience". The secessionsts are quite happy with being presented with what they think is the ultimate argument for independence.

Already in December the historian Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté saw "genocide" on the horizon. This is a term not as unfrequently used as anybody who knows what genocide means would think. Catalan fanatics seem to expect that it gets them international attention, which is doubtful, while at home it certainly radicalises the debate and might help to create a climate in which violence can no longer be excluded.

The terms "war" or "casus belli" have been used several times over the past days. Catalonia's president Artur Mas sees a "red line" being passed by the courts. "You do not play with the language", he warns. His government has appealed the TSJC's decision.

By and large, there is the same show of disrespect towards the law as when the Constitutional Court was ruling on the Catalan Statute of Autonomy (Estatut) last year. This time, however, the protests will not fizzle out. Language is the core issue of Catalan nationalism, indeed of Catalan-ness itself.

Next Monday, when the new school year starts, teachers are supposed to display the banner "One language, one school, one country". If this is supposed to go against teaching in Spanish, what about Aranese? But apart from the anecdotical, there is an attitude in this slogan that goes far beyond ignoring the law. This slogan is socially exclusive of all those who have Spanish as their mother tongue. What, one must ask, would happen if the central government in Madrid came out with such a slogan in favour of Spanish?

Let's also add that this slogan sounds like mockery to all those who know that many of the leaders of The Nation of Catalonia, like president Mas and his predecessor Montilla, send their children to foreign-language schools like the Lycée Français and the Deutsche Schule.

Digging a little deeper, the slogan dwells on the common misconception that two classroom languages would mean two different schooling systems, one in Catalan and the other in Spanish. One of the main arguments of the defenders of monolingual immersion is that it has achieved "social cohesion" and prevented "ghettoisation". Yet the truth is that the same teachers that today use Catalan as classroom language would be perfectly capable of using Catalan in some lessons and Spanish in others. It would be a bilingual immersion system. And that is the only demand that has been made, to teach in Spanish also; at the same school, by the same teachers, to the same pupils.

The argument of trying to prevent "ghettoisation" is one of several Red Herrings that have to be kept in use to make forget what is important and what not. Not important is equality before the law, neither is cultural autonomy or safeguarding cultural identity. Important is nation building. Pilar Rahola, whose articles are as revealing as ever of the local fanatised mindset, writes that education is "the most efficient tool to build one sole nation."

Many Catalans do indeed fear that their culture is under attack by Spanish centralist forces, and they do have historical precedents to go back on. However, those precedents are never situated in a democratic context, and politically analysing the situation one must observe that rather selfish partisan interests are playing with the fears of the people and are trying to use those fears in their favour.

The Partido Popular creates and uses aversion of the Catalans by the regular Spaniard for electoral gains in the whole of Spain, while Catalan secessionists create and use the fear of Spanish "genocide" to further their aim of independence. Moderate Catalan nationalists like Artur Mas, who is reported to earn ~~twice as much as~~ some 60% more then the president of the Spanish government, manoeuvre somewhere in between, increasingly afraid of losing their grip on the people and thus losing control of the money making machine called Generalitat.

More miserably partisan seems to be the PSC, if we can trust this article. According to it PSC leader Joaquim Nadal makes his party's decision to lend support to ruling CiU over the immersion issue dependent on CiU breaking up with the Partido Popular that, however funny it sounds under the present circumstances, is still propping up Artur Mas's minority government.

In the near future the conflict will keep simmering on and occasionally even boil over, but there does not seem to be an interest in Madrid, neither with the PSOE nor with the PP, to rid the Catalans of their cultural autonomy. On the other hand, there is certainly a new centralism that wants Catalan authorities to finally respect the law and thus accept Catalonia's integration within Spain. The Catalan Government will soon spend some effort on window-dressing to give it the appearance of adjusting to the decisions of the courts. What it will not do is consult the parents. The nationalist elite has some more years to keep on muddling.

Whatever moves are being taken on the political front, the courts have spoken and they have made the rights of the citizens prevail over those shady "national rights" Catalan fanatics argue with.

This represents a very welcome turn of events, an axiomatic shift. It's the law that guarantees social cohesion, more than the language. In the foregoing article I quoted an analysis by Lluís Orriols which described the Spanish speaking majority of the PSC voters as silently going along with the PSC's nationalist bias. Expanding on this point one can state that the great majority of Spanish speakers in Catalonia are showing respect for Catalan affairs such as the language, to a degree that has made it possible that not only the PSC but many organisations even of the civil society, like teachers' unions or associations of parents, are being led in the nationalist sense, creating the appearance of a social entente on nationalism that is not confirmed at the polls.

It may also play a role in their submissive behaviour that Spanish speakers have been able to observe that the defense of the use of their own language is often met with xenophobic criticism*, with personally degrading attacks and even with the occasional gunshot to the leg.

Here's an opinion poll from 1998, commanded by the Generalitat and conducted by the CIS. Under question 29 there is a statement that has to be valued as either "rather agree with" or "rather disagree with" which reads: "In the public schools of Catalonia teaching has to be done only in Catalan." Those who rather agreed with this statement in 1998 were 27.5%, those who rather disagreed with it summed 69.9%.

The Spanish nationalist ABC newspaper has had its own poll a few days ago. Although the source bears a huge bias of its own, it has to be observed that a 40% in favour of using both Catalan and Spanish equally as classroom language is an indication that the mood has not changed much since 1998.

There may well be a huge majority for Catalan-only education in the Catalan parliament, but on the streets and at home with the citizens of Catalonia thinking is not all that unanimous. Quelle surprise.

Language use and responsibility for one's children are very personal issues. So what about consulting the people? That won't happen because it would be the right thing to do.

_________________________________

*To give an idea of how degrading this criticism is read this article, which is one of many that have appeared over the past days. Note also the many orthographic mistakes (both in Spanish and in Catalan) of this gentleman who is presented as journalist, academic, publisher, literary critic and whatnot.

PS September 12, 2011: Today the school year has begun and I read in the press that there are 21,000 pupils more in Catalonia, while the education budget has been cut down 10%. This did not affect the children of Artur Mas, who still earns about ten times the salary of the regular Jordi or Juan.

And one correction: This article says that Artur Mas's children do no visit the Lycée Français but another private school called Aula Escola Europea, which takes pride in applying a language immersion system based on four languages: Catalan, Spanish, French and English. "Languages open doors to the world", says the web of Aula Escola Europea.

Plato's Nightmare

2011-08-27T14:30:00.003+02:00

"A social majority in favour of independence. This is the key factor. It implies that the political parties and the civil society have a strategy to achieve this majority."

This was number one of "things to establish" for a "movement" working for Catalonia's independence from Spain, set by Ferran Requejo two years ago. His text Towards Independence hit like a bombshell. The Political Sciences professor had hitherto been known as an advocate of a federalist Spain, an objective shared still today by the main Catalan parties PSC and CiU; at least according to their written bases.

It was this very programmatic text that propelled Requejo as something like the brains behind the pro-independence movement. The new attitude federalism is dead, long live independence went like a wildfire through the Catalan political landscape.

Mr Requejo has since been courted by the new pro-independence parties SI and Reagrupament, and most recently he declined an offer by more established ERC to head its list for this November's elections to the Spanish Congress. Presently, Mr Requejo is a member of the Catalan parliament's experts commission on the planned new fiscal pact with Madrid.

Mr Requejo so far has guarded his independence from the parties. As he explains in his blog "my function will be more useful for the country in the place and the professional activities I am currently excercising." His wish is that all political parties in Catalonia come together to work for secession and suggests the new Catalan National Assembly as the best forum. Certainly, the Partido Popular has long been discarded as an ally and in terms of voters it is not of much interest. Nobody can deny, however, that while ERC, SI Regrupament and many leading members of ICV-EUiA and CiU can easily be counted in, it is the Socialists of the PSC without whom the aspired great consensus would be impossible.

In one outstanding analytical text, another Political Sciences professor called Lluís Orriols explains that the PSC has a split electorate, one-third Catalan nationalist (or Catalanist), while two-thirds are non-nationalist and Spanish-speaking. Says Mr Orriols that the Spanish speaking majority of the PSC electorate has so far bowed to the Catalanist bias of PSC policy. As a third block within the Socialists' electorate there is also an important number of voters who never participate in the regional elections, yet they usually hand victory to the PSC/PSOE in Spain-wide ones.

While the PSC is in a process of regrouping and reorganising itself after the last regional election's debacle, Catalan nationalists of all colours are happy to remind it of its "two souls" and demand that it be even more Catalonia-oriented, to say the very least. Even a possible split of the PSC along the described ethnic/linguistic lines has been a topic. At the moment, the identity debate rages within the PSC, with no clear winner on the horizon. The hottest issue is whether or nor the PSC should form its own group in Congress, separate from that of the PSOE, with divisions running so deep that, for instance, the brothers Joaquim and Rafael Nadal are on opposing sides of the fence.

It is plain to see that no "movement" towards independence could be successful without the PSC, let alone against it. Ferran Requejo's "social majority" would be impossible. A 50% plus one vote result is what nobody serious desires, but that would be, at best, the result if the PSC was not on board. On the other hand, with the PSC campaigning for independence, alonside CiU and the fringe parties, chances are that the result in favour would be well in the 60s.

Acutely aware of of this, Ferran Requejo published a text last May in which he again confirms that he sees the PSC's evolution as "the key point" on the path towards the creation of an ample majority for independence. "The PSC is right now a party without orientation, without a project, without leadership and submissive to the PSOE, a Spanish nationalist party imbued by a strong Jacobin and centralising culture that is lethal for Catalonia." To overcome this impasse, Mr Requejo suggests to the PSC that its "C become more important than the P".

Through the figure of the PSC Catalan nationalists try to tackle indirectly a question that is uncomfortable: What about the sons and daughters of in-country immigrants, who are well integrated into Catalan society, but not necessarily into the Catalan nation? Any false word here can quickly become not only politically incorrect, it could open the Pandora's Box of inter-ethinc conflict.

However, on the radical fringe words have already begun to become acrimonious. Oxford-educated Toni Strubell is making it a habit to call the immigrants centralising Spain's "Trojan Horse".

Nothing else could be expected of someone like Strubell, he's more of a politician than an academic. The surprise is that an independent academic with much reputation and influence like Ferran Requejo would now sound very similar to fanatics à la Strubell.

Requejo's above quoted Quo Vadis text ends with a warning: "The PSC could become a cancer for the country," Catalonia.

Any educated person, even in Catalonia, could have drawn on a lot of examples why to avoid such concepts in politics. To pick just the most blatant one, the Nazis saw cancers at every corner: the Jews, capitalism, communism, homosexuals, democracy itself. Even healthcare.

A well-renowned professor of Political Sciences could also have thought twice before demanding of a party to stop working as such and instead be more national (the "C"), effectively parroting the German Kaiser on the eve of the Great War ("I know no parties anymore, I know only Germans."). According to his 125-page long CV, Mr Requejo, who likes quoting Shakespeare and Einstein, proudly is member of many prestigious national and international professional associations, of public committees and commissions. Based on this academic cachet, he is one of the most prominent talking heads in the Catalan media.

Neither Mr Strubell nor Mr Requejo have been much criticised for their words. The reader might even think of countries in which they'd have become political outcasts. In other countries there are certain things you just don't say.

In Catalonia, such rules do not seem to apply. The attacks on the other based on their origins have just started. The traitor or "cancer" is still mainly the party that to a great extend represents those other people. But looking for a cure -chemotherapy and extirpation come to mind- might bring these beautiful minds or some of their more action-hungry footfolk to one day look for the individual.

At least that's what History teaches us. The same History that apparently hasn't taught certain well-respected Catalan academics the most basic political decency. What, then, are academics good for in politics?

Foul-Mouthing

2011-08-26T18:17:00.001+02:00

I have recently been told that I am "not really interested in constructive debate, but in foul-mouthing everybody and everything you disagree with". Made me think.

Result is that I'd write the same texts again. I am trying to be as transparent as possible, underpinning my observations with quotes and links and my opinions with reasoning. A blog is there to offer debate, and I do not delete any comments. When I'm wrong, I can be told so. There isn't much more that one can humanly do.

I'll certainly keep up the criticism, especially of those extremists I have referred to in the last four entries. I simply want them to disappear from the political scene. People who committed acts of terrorism in a democratic state and those who were in the business of aiding and abetting have no place in politics. All those who do not strongly, publicly, repeatedly, patiently, without leaving any room for doubt or having to seek the speck in the eye of the other repent and forswear should hold no public office. It's a question of principles. Bombs and democracy do not mix. Because democracy is about making up your mind freely and without fear.

There's a lot that makes us feel unfree in today's rabid capitalism, that has the crooks in the banks dictating policy to who should be our elected representatives. We don't need the bombs and their ideologues on top of it.

Who was Joan Carles Monteagudo?

2011-08-25T17:12:00.010+02:00

Joan Carles Monteagudo killed five children.

Joan Carles Monteagudo was a pivotal example of consistency.

For Joan Carles Monteagudo, the end sanctified the means. Any means.

The end was always the independence of the Catalan Lands.

At a time when Catalonia's terrorist organisation Terra Lliure was (again) in dire straits, and not satisfied with its low-level "armed propaganda", one of its leaders, Monteagudo, joined ETA. He wanted real action. He rebuilt ETA's "Comando Barcelona".

On May 29, 1991, the Catalan Monteagudo and his Basque colleagues Erezuma and Zubeldia, blew up the casa-cuartel of the Guardia Civil in Vic, Catalonia, Spain; killing four adults and five children. A casa-cuartel is not only a garrison of the military-style Guardia Civil, it is also the living quarters of the officers and their families.

After the bombings in Sabadell and of the Hipercor supermarket in Barcelona, now it was the turn of Vic, the most Catalan of all towns. Monteagudo and Erezuma were killed later in a firefight with the police, Zubeldia was detained. Catalan nationalists were finally starting to wake up.

In the presentation of his documentary about the Vic bombing, Albert Om, one of Catalonia's star reporters, said this year: "This fascination, that sometimes we thought they [ETA] are the brave ones, we are the cowards, we don't share their ways, but we let them be, this attitude was very extended here [in Catalonia]." (11:14)

"Get out of Catalonia" and "look at the map", this is not Spain and you are damaging our own independence movement, a young Josep-Lluis Carod-Rovira told ETA.

Years later, Carod-Rovira would have another meeting with ETA. In 2004 he met some of ETA's leaders in Perpignan, the result was an ETA ceasefire for Catalonia. ETA's comuniqué in which this ceasefire was declared ended with a "long live" for Monteagudo and Erezuma.

At the same time Monteagudo was making his way from an anarchist group through Terra Lliure to end up with ETA, the debate in Catalonia's pro-independence circles was heated. And it was going along the very lines of thought that propelled Monteagudo into the extreme: what would be the best means to achieve the desired end, independence? Nothing else mattered. Like with Monteagudo, the victims never played a role except the one political opportunity assigned to them.

While the fascination with ETA continued on the side of Catalan radicals, ETA disdained those kids of Terra Lliure who wanted to play war, but just a bit of war. ETA had a grand plan, and it was sticking to it very consistently. ETA was fighting the real war, the mother of all armed struggles for "national liberation". ETA was the place to be for the likes of Joan Carles Monteagudo.

Monteagudo went too far even for many Catalan radicals, if only because he killed in Catalonia. But the kids of Terra Lliure cannot be forgotten. Toni Villascusa and others are being homaged still today by all those organisations that did not partake in terrorism themselves, but from which terrorist were recruited and who formed the "civil society" backup of the terrorists with organisations like Comitès de Solidaritat amb els Patriotes Catalans. The web of the PSAN defines the CSPC as "a movement that represents an active solidarity in defense of all those people who fight one way or another to achieve the independence and reunification of the Catalan Lands".

Hardline groups such as the PSAN, MDT or IPC aspired to be the political wing of Terra Lliure. All modelled after ETA and the political and pressure groups that surround it.

PSAN and others remember dearly those "fallen in combat" like Quim Sànchez, killed by his own bomb. For them, Terra Lliure was the "backbone of the pro-independence movement" in the 1980s, that today is continued by PSAN, CUP and SI. Already in the mid to late 80s MDT and PSAN tried to build a political party that would capitalise on Terra Lliure's notoriety. Splits within Terra Lliure, a new wave of detentions by the police and the feeling that terrorism was ultimately harming the cause of independence all conspired so that at that time going political was not feasible. The reappearance of PSAN on today's political scene where it meets with old allies, some of them in new dresses, is a clear sign of the renewed radicalisation of the Catalan pro-independence movement. The discourse hasn't changed since the 80s, and declarations of these groups to now work through peaceful and democratic means cannot be believed.

Never, ever, was terrorism questioned by this radical fringe as something immoral. "Our political position is clear, ETA is an obstacle to the self-determination of the Basque people, and therefore ETA has to dissolve immediately". When in the early 90s Terra Lliure was partly imprisioned, partly absorbed by ERC, the same worries as today were at the order of the day: how to best reach the political aim. Human lives did and do not count. All else is lip-service.

The radical fringe has never discarded any methods, but just adapts them to "the context". It has no moral but its own interests, and all internal debates that it had and is having never reflect any fundamental repositioning towards non-violence and democracy. The question whether or not to use terrorism is being treated in an entirely utilitarian fashion.

Which means that the tide can change any moment, and violence can again be an option.

Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch, aus dem dies kroch!

Joan Carles Monteagudo is no official martyr of the radical Catalan fringe, homages to him are hard to find. Killing children isn't an easy sale. His example shows, however, what real consistency with one's aims can turn into. Maybe he'll get a street named after him in an independent and communist Catalonia, which is what the PSAN is fighting for as if we were still in the seventies.

How It All Ends: Total Bullshit

2011-08-21T01:12:00.014+02:00

Just a few hours ago, when Josep Guia was trying hard to shake off his newly won notoriety, López Tena raced his car to Prada de Conflent to determine "if Josep Guia had to assume any responsibility".

In the meantime others had the opportunity to have a peek at PSAN's webpage. "The PSAN declares that an oppressed nation has the right to use all forms of struggle as means for its liberation and that the decision which precise means to employ in each historical moment depends on the context (...)." The usual badly written mumbo-jumbo of the far left/right fanatics. This text, titled What is the PSAN?, is from December 2002.

Today on their hompage they still have up the friendly invitation to the annual homage to Toni Villascusa. Villascusa had been a member of PSAN and is said to have been the first Valencian to join Terra Lliure. He died July 20, 1984 when a bomb he had just built blew him into smithereens.

"Fallen in combat" is how a sister organisation of PSAN, OSAN puts it.

"Independentist, coherent, patriot and militant" is how PSAN remembers Villascusa every year.

OSAN provides an account of the event this year. Josep Guia was there. He "stressed that probably it was Toni himself who took part in the armed operation on September 9, 1981, when four bombs detonated in different Spanish delegations in the Catalan Lands: Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia and Alicante."

This is the kind of homage Toni Strubell's friends and associates conduct year after year, while he praises Bildu for having been at one single homage for an ETA victim in Zumaia.

Friends and associates who have never given homage to Emília Aldomà. The tragedy of this mortal victim of Josep Guia's friends and associates in Terra Lliure was that she had left Bilbao for fear of ETA bombs.

The same Josep Guia who today was so much in the headlines, and who was forced to declare himself Catalonia's peacenik No. 1: "I want that ETA never uses the guns again." Oh, we almost forgot: How did it all end with Josep Guia and the SI spokesperson Alfons López Tena who nearly crashed his car to bring him back in line?

"Out of a summer flea they have made an elephant", Guia chants. Then he regurgitates the lie that he is no leader of SI. And López Tena insists ad nauseam that both parties (SI and PSAN) "reject violence, because it is against decency and ends up being counterproductive". Yes, that they "defend national independence through peaceful and democratic means". Lipservice-mode successfully engaged. Moving on.

When one sees this nationalist/socialist crowd all huddling together, one wants to fill the lungs, chin up and sing aloud: "Die Fahne hoch!/ Die Reihen fest geschlossen!"

But after a long and moving roller-coaster day, with barf bags full of the utter bullshit that has been spluttered by the usual suspects, and endured by the innocent now-bespattered public at large, and seeing these two geezers on the photo finally reunited like Peaches and Herb, I get totally mellow.

Isn't it good to see them so happy together?

"Die Knechtschaft dauert
Nur noch kurze Zeit!"

It's 2011. Anno domini, we used to say. When there still was hope for mankind.

More Bildu-Shit

2011-08-20T20:50:00.004+02:00

It never fails. The more they talk the deeper they get themselves into shit.

Josep Guia, according to La Vanguardia "leader of PSAN and member of the leadership of SI" (yes, Toni Strubell's Solidaritat Catalana per la Independència, again), is today reported to have participated in the same debate as Martin Garitano (see previous entry) and according to different press sources has said things like: "The successful existence of Bildu is due to their condemnation of violence and due to ETA."

And: "The level [Bildu] is on today is due to ETA's existence over the past years."

And: "It is very important that ETA has declared a permanent and verifiable truce, but it is also important that they do not dissolve" because soon the Partido Popular would govern Spain, and those were the "sons" of the dictatorship they have never condemned, and something about "unacceptable" and "double standards" .

PSAN, just a brief reminder, was very close to Catalonia's own terrorist organisation of the 70s to 90s Terra Lliure. Last March Mr Guia benevolently described ~~Terror~~ Terra Lliure's activities as "not like an armed fight, but like armed propaganda" aimed against "fascist symbols". Well, kind of like Meinhof, but not like Baader. And Terra Lliure only killed one person! With all those bombs. Seriously, that was exactly Terra Lliure's lingo, "armed propaganda". Even though Terra Lliure is history since the early 90s, Mr Guia still functions as their (inofficial) spokesperson.

Back to today's story. SI rushed to disavow Guia. Its spokesperson Alfons López Tena: "Our political position is clear, ETA is an obstacle to the self-determination of the Basque people, and therefore ETA has to dissolve immediately." (Here's also López Tena's tweet.) Keeping up with one's priorities comes in handy, especially when talking to the press. López Tena adds: "The PSAN is a party with an impeccable democratic and pacific record, if this were not so, it would not be in coalition with SI." Whereafter the public finally gets some blabla about SI being against the use of violence, but Spain would not be Spain if in the end nobody uttered the famous, and famously childish, "but them too". López Tena doesn't fail us: State terrorism of the GAL, fascist monuments that still stand around, the PP still not having condemned the crimes of Franco, and all that jazz.

Finally Josep Guia again, in an interview with Nació Digital: "First of all, I am not part of the governing structure of Solidaritat." Wrong! He is in SI's leadership for the Valencian Community. Then we get the usual "out of context" and "I didn't mean" and "I'm for a peaceful solution" kind of stuff.

Yet, the reporter really presses him. Good job! Until Mr Guia finally says: "The presence of ETA serves to force the state into political negotiations."

And there we are again, the more they talk, they deeper they sink. ETA should not kill, but it's somehow nice to have them around. If only to be generally threatening.

Remember, it's the results that count.

Barf bags are under your seats.

Bildu-Shit

2011-08-20T11:15:00.009+02:00

Personally I was very much in favour of keeping Bildu legal, let them run in the elections even though they could be "the political wing of ETA": how else could we expect that Bildu makes ETA stop the killings, the extortions and the blackmailing. That's also why I greeted Bildu's good election results.

As a matter of fact, it was ETA who had indicated one year ago that politics was the way to go. Clive Myrie remembers it like this:

"Basque nationalists, he told me, were now frustrated.

The chances of an independent Basque state being created were as remote now as they had ever been in the last 50 years.

The people of Catalonia had just managed to win more autonomy from Madrid, and separatists there had no army of bombers and gunmen.

Could it be, he said, that actually Eta had been hindering the cause of Basque nationalism, rather than helping it?

After all, the politicians in Madrid had a ready-made excuse for not allowing a referendum on independence.

That excuse was Eta violence. So what if that excuse was taken away?"

Bildu cannot be seen as anything else but the incarnation of ETA's strategy to leave terrorism and become political. Because terrorism was frustrating. Still, it's the right thing to do and welcome Bildu.

One has to read again the part about Catalonia. "Had just managed to win more autonomy from Madrid" is something not even the Catalan Socialists are able to conclude, let alone the staunch defenders of independence like our resident proto-fascist Toni Strubell.

In his blog, Strubell is shouting victory. His party received a Bildu delegation earlier this month and Strubell was elated. "They are doing exactly what puzzles their political opponent, that is Spain. (...) Should they act faster? Certainly. But (...) what we see now is that members of Bildu are present in homages to victims of ETA. Yesterday, in Zumaia. One has to congratulate Bildu for their historic rectification of course, an important step towards reconciliation and also, for sure, towards independence."

ETA, according to Myrie, had identified their violence as an "excuse for not allowing a referendum on independence" and had asked "what if that excuse was taken away?" Strubell sees Spain now "puzzeled". Cross that one off your list, ETA. But reconciliation? Is likening the victims of state repression to those of ETA now ETA/Bildu's new spiel? Strubell points at Zumaia, but that has so far been the only occasion in which Bildu has sent the right signals.

Strubell sounds like an ETA/Bildu spokesperson who declares accomplished the objectives set out to Clive Myrie last year. Then, in a kind of (totally failed) circular logic that started with ETA bowing to the fact that "separatists [in Catalonia] had no army of bombers and gunmen", Strubell bows back: "We in Catalonia have to be as intelligent" as Bildu. Which is absolutely weird, because, as said above, Strubell would never agree with ETA that "Catalonia had just managed to win more autonomy from Madrid", the key observation on which the whole new peaceful strategy of ETA is resting, which, again, Strubell declares victorious.

Nuts as ever.

Does Euskadi need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Strubell mentions Brian Currin, or rather praises ETA/Bildu as being inspired "by this talented genius". Doesn't Europe, if not Spain, provide with the necessary political and legal institutions to deal with excesses committed by any member state? ETA has certainly been well advised by Currin, and a step by step approach can also lead to the finish line. Nothing, however, indicates that Bildu would be "moving at the speed of a cruise liner", as Strubell puts it. (Is he secretly in love with Sandra Bullock?)

On the contrary, the people who liken ETA victims to those of state repression now see different categories of ETA victims. As we can read today in the Spanish press, the Deputy General of Gipuzkoa province Martin Garitano of Bildu has declared in allusion to ETA bombings in Catalonia that "what happened was more than an error. We Basques owe a special respect to the victims in Catalonia, because that happened in a moment when the Basque society had received a lot of backing by the Catalans."

Sometimes it seems we haven't advanced an inch. This is pure Carod Rovira, as treated in another text on this blog. Different day, same Bildu-shit.

"What I do not like is someone dictating me the words I have to say" said Mr Garitano. Yes, Sir, you have to accept just that. You sound like a child that has to be taught to say sorry. And: it won't happen again. Without. Any. Distinctions.

La Vanguardia online carries some telling readers' comments of what Catalans think of such an exclusive treatment by Mr Garitano. May the Strubells and Carods learn from them.

PS to Myself: The Numbers Stink (corrected)

2011-08-18T14:17:00.001+02:00

(22-06-2011 - Corrections had to be made to this text which are marked in italics. Moreover, two short new paragraphs have been added, also in italics.)

Re-reading our debate over at Iberoshpere my awareness has grown that opinion survey numbers that are getting thrown around lately should not be used as happily as one commenter expresses it. MH from the interesting Syniadau says that:

"Yes, you did mention the poll, Candide. But you called it something “cooked up” and I wanted to show people reading this that it was a perfectly proper question, asked as part of the regular survey of public opinion conducted by the CEO every three months.

I also wanted to show that those who would vote for independence outnumber those who would vote to remain part of Spain by 42.9% to 28.2%. That would easily be enough to win a referendum.

As for the other Catalan Countries, surely it’s up to people who live there to decide whether they want to remain part of Spain (or France) or become independent. Of course there are people and parties in Catalunya who would love to see those territories break away too, but the independence movements there are a long way behind and I don’t think anyone who wants independence for Catalunya will wait for them to catch up. Instead, they’ll hope that a successful, independent Catalunya will encourage people in these other territories to want independence in their turn … and if you believe in democracy and the right of people to decide for themselves how they are governed, that’s nothing to be afraid of."

If the last sentence can also be taken as a general argument in favour of a referendum on independence, such an argument cannot be made without two caveats. The first is that, obviously, we are not talking about elections, but about the creation of a new state. Elections are usually not about changing the whole legal framework. Any referendum on independence intrinsically is about just that, which is why it deserves a lot more thought and has to pay respect to questions that are a lot more fundamental. This is especially conflictive when the underlying question is not about dictatorship vs democracy (like in Slovenia, to again pick up on an example which is so unfortunately being peddled in Catalonia as a precedent), but about questions of national identity/political opportunity without implying any major change in the form of government. (Recognising implicitly this fundamental shortcoming, and trying to put a remedy to it, advocates of the independence of Catalonia like to speak of "freedom for Catalonia". The critical reader of such a slogan has to recognise that any sort of collective freedom is a far cry from the individual freedoms that are codified as Human Rights, and of which indeed collective freedoms are only a tiny, subordinate part. Alas, critical readers do not abound and we are all too often led into an exacerbation of the collective element in detriment of the original human one; in consequence we get nationalism, which inherently tries to content the individual by seeking the sublimation of his or her aspirations/needs through collective action, thus largely annulling the individual.)

Secondly, in Catalonia there has been a one-sided campaign only by those who favour independence, no campaign by those who oppose it. What would happen if, in a real referendum, both sides campaigned is anybody's guess.

Still, some might be enticed by the idea that the already-famous 42.9% of Catalans who favour independence is a valid snapshot of their state of mind. It is definitely not. We do not have to get into all the details of the systematics applied in that survey, let's just pick one.

Let's picture the citizen who, never really sure if his or her data will be treated with the promised anonymity, gets a call from the regional government, and he or she knows that this government is all about nation-building and getting as far away as possible from the central government in Madrid. Now let's also take into consideration that only those for independence have been campaigning (i.e. there seemingly is no local interlocutor for the other option) and that there is an economic crisis which has created an overall sense of insecurity. I'd venture to affirm strongly that such an interview situation is likely to influence the answers of a significant number of citizens.

As to the question of a possible claim of a Catalan state over other historically Catalan speaking territories, see this text. Translating from the introduction to the interview: "[Josep] Guia (...) is satisfied that SI has accepted a declaration of independence "in two steps", first in the Principality [i.e. Catalonia proper], then in the whole of the Catalan Lands."

It seems that if for instance SI (who are not the only Pan-Catalanist organisation) governed an independent Catalonia they would want the rest of the Catalan Lands to join them. At the same time, Spain and France would most certainly want "their" parts of the Catalan Lands to stay. Certainly, all's always fine if you just do your referenda and everything goes peacefully.

The Fringe is Setting the Agenda

2011-08-16T19:17:00.000+02:00

I am very proud that Iberosphere has published an article of mine.

Re Funny Folks No. 1: Ferran Requejo

2011-08-05T20:10:00.004+02:00

A friend told me that I'm an idiot. I replied that I was sure of that fact, but inquired why he would think so this time.

"Einstein hasn't only written about physics", my good friend declared. "He was also an avid participant in world politics." I assured my best friend that I was not ignorant of Einstein's political merits, and that I was sure my readers understood precisely what I had meant.

Nevertheless, to put my lifelong friend more at ease, here's an Einstein quote on the matter concerned: "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." (source)

And while I'm at it, another one from Catalan icon Pau Casals, who is oft, and correctly, quoted to have said that "Catalonia has been the greatest nation in the world". This one goes: "The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men. This must be recognized if life is to remain. We must learn the love of man." (source)

I am sure my brother couldn't agree more.

Update September 24, 17:45: I have just discovered that the second of the above quotes of Pau Casals can be found in the English Wikipedia, but not in the Catalan Wikipedia.

Funny Folks No. 2: Toni Strubell

2011-08-04T12:41:00.001+02:00

El nostre amic Strubell es mereix una entrada més lleugera, després de tantes crítiques serioses.

Bildu i SI són partits germans, en Strubell, que té un gran amor per Euskadi, és l'home ideal per rebre Lorena Lopez de Lacalle (que no "de la Calle") i donar-li la benvinguda en llengua basca.

Després segueix en Strubell en català: "Teniu un país magnífic que, alliberat de la misèria administrativa espanyola, encara ho serà més. I no us oblideu de Trebiño quan feu el pas, que és el que volen els veïns d’aquella 'cuadrilla', com es com es diuen allà les comarques."

"Kuadrilla", senyor Strubell. O bé "quadrilla", en català.

"Cuadrilla" és castellà.

Of Trojan Horses and True Patriots

2011-08-03T20:36:00.010+02:00

The following is a review of the book by Toni Strubell What Catalans Want which appeared last month. It is (hopefully still) available at this site. Please use WCW as username and visca8 as password.

Update September 19, 17:20: The above link no longer works with the given password. I'll try to get a new one.

Colm Tóibín's introduction is full of nostalgia for things lost, and there's also a bit of hope for things that could be won or conserved. Toni Strubell called it "very funny". "[The readers] will be rolling on the floor laughing", he promised. I haven't smiled once.

Toni Strubell's weird way of attracting the audience's attention is on par with his explanation of the reason to be of this book. During its presentation, at one point he admitted that it is not representative of all Catalans, later he said the contrary. What Catalans Want is made up of 34 interviews, all but one of them with people who favour the independence of Catalonia.

The interviews present the reader with some fair and insteresting observations on the one hand, and on the other with some highlights of the nonsense one has grown to know well here but never can get used to. We will start with the nonsense.

The first interviewee is Harvard doctorate and Princeton lecturer Carles Boix: "From the start, the [Franco] regime was brutal in its repression of the Catalan language, to a degree—one may add—that Hitler never was with Polish during the Nazi occupation of Poland." (p. 22) How true that is. The Poles were forbidden access to any higher education. More than a million were "resettled" to make space for Germans, more than half a million were sent to forced labour in Germany (a death sentence for many of them) and all of them were generally treated as subhumans. Tens of thousands of Polish intellectuals were murdered, but their language was not per se forbidden. The repression of Polish language would have been a redundancy while the physical elimination of its speakers was under way.

Mr Boix, the Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, could go straight into my Funny Folks collection if what he says were not so disgusting.

Another failed candidate for Funny Folks is Josep Gifreu, the Professor of Communications who "is also an avid reader of newspapers. 'Preferably American', he states, 'but hardly ever Spanish.'" How can he be a "media expert", then? Well, because Mr Gifreu is precisely a "Catalan media expert". (pp. 176/177)

Unsurprisingly, others, like Joan Ramon Resina, criticise also the foreign press, for not paying enough attention to Catalonia and supposedly buying into some kind of Madrid bias. "It looks to me suspiciously like an orchestrated campaign. (...) Do they ever read the Catalan press, I wonder? Do they understand Catalan?" (p. 64). The main Catalan press is in Spanish, and to read Catalan (or Portuguese) you don't need to speak it. What arguments are those! Even worse, some here really base politics on such arguments and spend public money.

When someone talks about conspiracies the J word has to come up somewhere. Question to Mr Resina: "Why do you say that the Catalans are the ‘Jews of Spain’?"

Answer: "They are in many ways treated as such. Spain was created in a process which involved the expulsion of discordant elements. In the beginning what mattered were religious and racial differences such as the lack of purity of people’s blood. Spain defined itself as Christian. When it feels threatened, it tends to desperately search for those elements which made it feel strong in the past. The conquest of America is therefore often portrayed as an extrapolation of the victory over the Moors. The same happens with the question of Spanish unity. There’s always a need to find the offending enemy within. The one who fails to fall into line. In the modern era—after 1640, basically—I’m afraid this role has been increasingly assigned to Catalonia. From the mid- 19th century onwards, the Catalans have tended to be portrayed as the Jews of Spain. I’m thinking of the cartoons of Francesc Cambó in the Madrid press, the rhetoric of Pío Baroja, Valle- Inclán’s Luces de Bohemia. Anti-Catalanism increased as anti-Semitism came to the fore again in early 20th-century Europe. Catalonia was once again depicted as the grave danger facing Spain. The degree of ‘Catalanophobia’ raised by the new Statute in 2005–6 did not appear out of the blue. This all goes back over a hundred years." (pg. 65)

Presently, Oriol Broggi, the grandson of another interviewee, Moisés Broggi ("We want to be free."), is directing Luces de Bohemia in Barcelona. And I don't want to reply more to this hyperbole, again. I can only take notice that this book manages to insult the Poles and the Jews. And also the Slovenes: Colm Tóibín claims they didn't "have a war". (Slovenia itself seems to be hard to get for Tóibín. First he is a little irritated over the absence of sweet nationalism. He responds by simply relating what his interlocutor says. Fair enough.)

To resume a bit and not to get into all the details, on the positive side is that this book allows a deep insight into the nationalist/independentist set of mind that currently dominates public discourse in Catalonia. What that kind of Catalan wants is the recognition as a nation and to convert Catalan into the sole language, or at least into the lingua franca of Catalonia. If this can be done within Spain, they'll be happy to stay in a common state. It would mean they could live as if they had one of their own without making the efforts and sacrifices it takes to get one.

Above and before all, it's about language. This book shows how much they love their language and how much they identify with it, or are identified by it. And it also shows that this kind of nationalist has, again unsurprisingly, no standards but their own interests.

Thirty years ago there still were common and universal standards. Nobody could be denied their right to use their native language, and historical injustices had to be repaired by legally defining Catalan as "Catalonia's own language", while Spanish was kept as co-official in Catalonia. Now the tendency is towards Catalan monolinguism, which breaks with the very universal standards by which Catalan language received its protection under the umbrella of the Spanish constitution of 1978.

Many examples can be given for this radicalisation. Some months ago the (quite abominable, I agree) government of neighbouring Valencia was criticised for cutting off the relaying of Catalan TV3 into southern Valencia. The arguments used by TV3's defenders were not based on universal standards such as the citizens' right of information, but solely on linguistic rights.

A few weeks ago the EU parliament passed a regulation in favour of product labelling in official EU-languages, which Spanish is but Catalan not. Its effect is that Spanish could now be enforced alongside Catalan. In Catalonia criticism was that this would spell the end of exclusive labelling in Catalan.

Last but not least, here is another passage of the interview with Mr Guifreu (pp. 178-180). Question: "How do you think Digital Terrestrial TV will affect Catalan television and the normalization of the language?"

Answer: "DTT has been sold as a step towards a wider range of programming, with a far better signal and screen definition. But it basically means more efficient use of television space by the State channels. For example, people in the Pyrenean counties of Catalonia may have had trouble receiving some of the State and conventional channels in the recent past, perhaps getting only six or seven, of which three were in Catalan. Now they’ll receive over thirty, with excellent quality, and almost all of them will be in Spanish or English. So the proportion available in Catalan will suddenly drop from 40% to 10%. Disney Channel, in Spanish, will get universal coverage and will compete directly with the children’s programs on Catalan TV. If there are suddenly excellent alternatives available in other languages, people may opt for them. When these changes were discussed and policies decided on, no attention whatever was paid to the question of our language."

What at first seems to be an observation destined to analyse the public prestige, and therefore the usefulness and in consequence the chances of survival of the Catalan language can easily turn into an obsession of those who think that only monolinguism and getting rid of the Spanish language as a competitor can ensure the survival of the nation defined by that language. And again the informational rights of the citizens receive no attention. This book leaves no doubt that there is a whole series of well-groomed and well-fed Catalan nationalists/independentists who operate under the assumtion of a clear and present danger to their national identity, which for them seems to be the only or by far most important part of their personal identities. Such things usually lead to radicalisation.

The only way to get rid of Spanish linguistic competition on TV is to first get Spanish-language channels off the local repeaters, and in consequence to forbid the installation of satellite dishes. Catalonia can do like Valencia, even more efficiently.

Only little less questionable are measures, seriously proposed not only in this book, to have Catalonia be handed over immigration policy responsibility from the Madrid government. Mr Boix and Mr Resina are most worried about the influx of non-EU citizens.

The present legal framework already allows for Catalonia to present itself as mainly Catalan speaking to the newcomer, but these possibilities are not being used even by such staunch defenders of the nation as La Vanguardia. Catalan society itself is not doing what it takes. The onus is passed on to the legislator and from there to the individual immigrant, who might as well react in a way Trevor has properly put as: "If they don't take The Language seriously, then why should anyone else?"

From a nationalist's point of view, everyone else is always to blame, and that, too, becomes clear in this book.

Although Spanish speakers outnumber Catalan speakers in Catalonia, and it shows on the streets as many of the interviewees decry, Catalan is being treated by the administration as if it was the lingua franca, because it is "Catalonia's own language". The ensueing argument that this could lead to double standards and legal insecurity is met by the position that "integration" has to be achieved. A position that is not a mere invention of the most radical nationalists, it was defended also by socialist-led governments.

At the end of the day, the question is not whether or not a Catalan state would be best to preserve Catalan culture, the question is how this state would treat its minorities. If the opinions and attitudes expressed in this book are anything to go by, only one national minority would be recognised in the Val d'Aran.

While efforts to bear down on the non-EU immigrants have already entered legislation, in-country immigrants (those who could claim minority status in an independent Catalonia) are increasingly in the crosshairs.

Toni Strubell likes to call them Trojan Horse. To treat the question in such way would be "politically incorrect" says Mr Resina (p. 65), but then agrees. Non-PC attitudes are "funny", too. The fear has to be that everybody who has immigrated to Catalonia for the past hundred years and their descendants, if they do not adapt well enough and however much they want to be part of Catalan society yet maybe not of the Catalan nation, will ultimately be called an invader.

I was at first surprised that so many serious people would grant an interview to Toni Strubell, given what I think of him. I now see that they are not serious at all, except for being seriously blind. They are ill of nationalism. (I am quite sure that this is an illness somewhat related to Onchocerciasis, and in this case Strubell is the Lord of the Flies who wants to get it to foreigners, too.)

They do have a case, Catalan language is a small one trying to face off a big one. And Catalonia passes a lot of money over to Madrid. And yes, there are anti-Catalan attitudes and especially the Partido Popular has a tendency to ride on them for electoral gains. These people really do suffer, and it shows. They are idealists, not two-headed monsters. But they are also an example of how far nationalist ideals are from universal ones, and that it is apparently impossible to defend nationalist ideas without getting into fully geared hyperboles that ridicule their bearers, and sometimes into extreme positions, that damage their reputation. How some foreign nationals, like those interviewed at the end of the book, are able to buy into such mentality can be explained. But let's not. More important is that Catalan nationalists rely increasingly on presenting their case to an international audience, and this is what the book is trying to do. May this audience listen well and take them seriously, but also tell them which ways are not accepted when dealing with an ethnic conflict.

The strangest of all things is José Montilla's inclusion into these pro-independence pages. The explanation lies in the fact that at the time of the interview Mr Montilla was still the president of Catalonia, and as such he had to defend the interests of Catalonia over his party's line. Or what he saw as such: his policy was leaning a lot on Catalan nationalism. That was certainly never enough for the real Catalan nationalists, while it was too much for his own voters, who served his party a resounding defeat in last November's elections.

As the president, Mr Montilla could not miss the chance to be in a book that is meant to present Catalonia abroad. It is only fortunate for Mr Strubell that he got the interview with Mr Montilla before calling him all but a traitor to the nation. A "Trojan Horse".

Funny Folks No. 1: Ferran Requejo

2011-08-02T16:28:00.005+02:00

For Trevor.

When a debate is very ideologised, people say really funny things. This post is the start of a series about how funny people get when ideology ~~has blackholed~~ is blackholing their intellect.

Ferran Requejo is just the right person to make this first part of the series because his CV is so impressive. Above all, it's really long.

Here goes: "Since the theory of realtivity we know that the faster a person moves, the slower his/her time passes. When Einstein extended his theory to the case of gravity he also saw that the bigger gravity is, the slower time passes. We are faced with an objective (sic) question: if the Earth's gravity were much bigger than it is, people living and working in high buildings would age slower than those who live on the ground floor."
(Catalan speakers will enjoy the full richness of language in the original text.)

The next paragraph starts with "Analogically, we can say that in the field of politics (...)", applying this very ~~down-to-earth~~ subterranean vision of gravitational potentials to the sociological issues Requejo is more used to dealing with.

I maintain that mankind needs an extension of Godwin's law: whenever someone who is not a physicist quotes Einstein the debate has come to an end. Likewise, whenever someone quotes Darwin in politics... But that's already a given.

When will they ever learn...

Lessons in Democracy: A Case Study

2011-07-28T20:10:00.006+02:00

The Camps affair has, over the past months, allowed much insight into the Spanish way of dealing with the issue of corruption in politics. In in the end, Francisco Camps was made to resign, which he did defiantly, pressed not only by being on a straight path to the dock, but more importantly by his party boss Mariano Rajoy. After the elections, that his, which Mr Camps had won, as expected by the opinion polls, and one wonders if this is not yet another, final bad trick on the voters: they wanted Mr Camps in spite of all, but Mr Camps it wasn't to be in the end.

Much has been written about the roles of the politicians, the press and, finally, the judiciary in the Camps case. And all of them have had their say. The citizens were only consulted most recently, on May 22nd. The responsibility of the voters has now been the subject of an article in La Vanguardia, one of Spain's most read newspapers coming out of Catalonia, penned by the very well known columnist Pilar Rahola.

Mrs Rahola's take is best resumed by two of the questions she poses: "Aren't the Valencians who voted for Mr Camps, knowing what was going on, also responsible for the discredit [of politics]?" and "Do they not help to erosion democracy?" To expand on Mrs Rahola's questions: Should the voters not be able to decide according to higher standards, according to a democratic consensus that transcends all parties?

The demand for a better democratic consensus is at the core of Mrs Rahola's commentary (although she does not use this word). Mrs Rahola conludes, with an almost fatalist (and very Spanish) gesture, that "although we talk a lot about corruption, in the end it doesn't bother us much."

How much corruption are the Spanish voters willing to allow for? "You do not represent us", was the battlecry of the 15-M movement. It brought tens of thousands onto the streets and squares of Spain. Yet, it didn't seem to have had any impact on the last elections. Voters are sometimes an enigma.

Politicians, on the other hand, are necessarily partisan. Which leaves the judges and the journalists as the professional watchdogs. While the law, which offers the most clarity, fortunately does not have to be enforced every day, every single day it is the journalists who investigate, explain, comment and criticise. Their role should be almost equally clear, the rules that govern the profession are few, universal and not at all complicated. The role of the press is essential to democracy, it is to provide the public with the means to make an informed decision at the polls. The citizens depend heavily on the press, when someone of the press criticises them we have to have a look at that journalist. This is where the case study begins. The question is: who has the authority to give lessons in democracy?

Pilar Rahola is not only a member of the press. She has also been a politician. Therefore, not only her words, but also her whole life's trajectory offer a telling insight into how the press in Spain plays its role as the "fourth power".

Old sins should be forgiven. Yet, when the issue at hand has any relation back to them, there they come up again. Mrs Rahola is well remembered in her hometown of Badalona for an unsavoury incident. It was during her time as vice-mayor of neighbouring Barcelona, after a night of political campaigning and, one can well guess, the ordinary visit to the bars afterwards, that she discovered her car had been towed. Immediately she went to Badalona's municipal car pound and recovered her vehicle by cajoling the worker and two policemen into submission with words like "Do you know who I am?", refusing to pay the legal fines and costs. This happend February 18, 1996, and it raised a lot of dust those days.

Mrs Rahola had to apologise publicly, which she did somewhat half-heartedly, and nine days later she blasted the Spanish Socialists for alledgedly running "a network of generalised corruption." Mrs Rahola ended her political carrer in 1999 and went into journalism, where she made another brilliant career, with political moral being the backdrop of a great many of her daily articles and numerous appearances on radio and TV all over Spain. Like in the given sample text.

Even though much time has passed since the car pound incident, it is at least tacky that it would be this ex-politician to criticise the voters in neighbouring Valencia. On the other hand, Francisco Camps is something of a bête noire for every Catalan nationalist, which makes him an easy target.

Closer to home, the Catalan Generalitat had its own cause célèbre just after taking office. The vice-president of the Catalan Generalitat was caught lying in her CV about her academic credentials. For years Joana Ortega had been claiming that she possessed an M.A. in Psychology. Finally, after this false information had kept appearing in many articles about her and even interviews with her without raising any doubts, in March this year she had to admit that she never finished her university studies. It is unclear who discovered the deceit and how, which has given rise to some conspiracy theories, but that is another story.

To make matters worse, Mrs Ortega blamed an unnamed secretary for the "mistake". "Transcription error" was the formula she repeatedly used, but it was her who, in first person singular, had written on her personal blog that she had an "M.A. in Psychology from the University of Barcelona." Mrs Ortega purged her blog rapidly, but not fast enough for the journalists or Google cache. Ultimately Mrs Ortega kept her post, not least because the local press stopped insisting. (A very different panorama we had seen only a few days before with the German Minister of Defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg: in spite of being the most popular politician and, like Mrs Ortega, enjoying the full backing of his boss, chancellor Merkel, he was made to resign due entirely to the relentlessness of the press who, regardless of each outlet's political inclination, showed more moral criteria than the citizens and many politicians. As befits its role.)

In Catalonia, it was Pilar Rahola who quickly displayed understanding for Mrs Ortega. In one of her daily appearances on Els Matins (TV3), she said: "rather than a lie, it's an act of vanity".

At one point in her verbose participation Mrs Rahola did assumed as possible that it was Mrs Ortega herself who had done wrong, and still she saw no reason for the vice-president to resign. To praraphrase Mrs Rahola, everybody here does it.

In a certain political sense Mrs Ortega's lie might have been more serious than Mr Camp's fashionable outfit. Mrs Ortega's lie concerned the basic credentials she had built her whole political career on.

Similarly, although not identically, to Mr Camps, the voters spoke after Mrs Ortega's case had become public. Admittedly, the voters didn't know all the details, because the Catalan press was quite benevolent with Mrs Ortega, she was not indicted, the whole affair didn't last half as long as Mr Camps's, and May 22 elections in Catalonia were only indirectly affecting her, as they were municipal, not regional. Yet still, it could be argued that had the Catalan voters held dearly the standards Mrs Rahola pretends to defend, there should have been an effect on Mrs Ortega's CiU. There wasn't. In fact, Mrs Rahola could have built her case against the voters not on the Camps affair, but already on the Ortega issue; or at the very least include the Ortega experience in her article about Camps's voters. If she had any standards herself, that is.

On the legal front, Alfons López-Tena, Catalan MP for Solidaritat Catalana per la Independència and a lawyer by profession, is reported to have said that Mrs Ortega's false university title could be punishable according to the Spanish Penal Code. A fraud. Nothing has come out of this so far, apparently the Spanish Penal Code is less clear about the issue than those of other European countries. Mrs Ortega is lucky to live in Spain. And so is Pilar Rahola, who is, in fact, a kindred sinner.

"PhD in Hispanic Philology and Catalan Philology", is what she had been claiming to possess until at least late 2009. Like Mrs Ortega, Mrs Rahola has since purged the CV on her blog as well as her Wikipedia entry, albeit in quite an incomplete fashion. While the Catalan version of her CV now downgrades her to a mere M.A., both the Spanish and English versions have remained unretouched. Actually, the literal translation from Mrs Rahola's Spanish CV would be: "PhD in Hispanic Philology and also in Catalan Philology." That clearly makes for two faux doctor's titles.

There is no doubt that Mrs Rahola will now soon correct these "transcription errors", but, again much like Mrs Ortega, Mrs Rahola will not be able to beat the journalists (this one, for instance, has copied it all onto his HDD) or the memory of the Net. For some time to come there will be many sites around the globe which have copypasted her blog's CV. And there will also be this report about a conference at which she is introduced to the audience, in her very presence, as the holder of those two faux PhDs.

Pilar Rahola's record should make her the last person to opine about political corruption, and she is the least authorised talking head to give lessons in democracy to the citizens and demand them to exercise self-criticism. This is not the kind of journalist whose information the people should base their decisions on.

One curious sidenote: it was in the same TV program in which Mrs Rahola was being apologetic of Mrs Ortega that she accused Jordi Portabella, the leader of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in Barcelona -the same party Mrs Rahola had made her political career with- to have faked his degree in Biology.

Mr Portabella immediately reacted and a few days later Mrs Rahola was made to apologise (again), which again she did in an ungraceful fashion.

Most of the above must be known to Mrs Rahola's editor at La Vanguardia. And if it were not, attempts have been made to inform of these facts on the comments section to Mrs Rahola's "Autocrítica ciudadana" article at La Vanguardia online. To no avail. All intents were systematically blocked by the "moderators", none of these comments appeared.

That is nothing new. This reporter has even seen several critical comments appear to later be erased. The impression is that La Vanguardia does not allow anybody to question the credentials of the paper or Mrs Rahola, even though it does allow diverging opinions about her texts. It is like in the good old times, when the regime's censors decided which criticism to allow and which went too far.

As to the matter at hand, the picture is now that the whole newspaper stands firmly behind a discredited journalist and her criticism of the voters (that is, of the voters in another Autonomous Community). The fact that both La Vanguardia and, since lately, Mrs Rahola herself are intimately close with the locally ruling Convergència i Unió, Mrs Ortega's coalition, certainly plays a role, especially when they seek culprits in Valencia instead of Barcelona.

All in all, this is just another indication for the partisan nature of the Spanish press, in this case made worse by an underlying nationalist mindset. The conclusion has to be that before the press starts to take on politicians, the judges or even the voters, they better sweep their own doorstep first.

Their apparent unwillingness to do so spells nothing good for democracy in Spain. A democratic consensus that would unite politicians and the press on the basis of universally accepted standards, similar to what is in use in many other European countries and the US, is for now something Spain can only dream of.

Mrs Rahola's "Autocrítica ciudadana" contains a lesson in Spanish journalistic practice, in the state of democracy in Spain, and unfortunately also in what nationalism is doing to this country.

Admittedly, Mrs Rahola is an extreme example of what is going on. All the better her example serves to point out which direction the whole thing is going. A vanguard of her own kind. Poor voters who have to rely on such a press.

Why?!

2011-07-28T17:11:00.002+02:00

For Tom.

Why, oh why...

"Where's the positive side?" they asked the journalist, who was mainly a poet. "Ein Friedhof ist kein Lunapark", was the poet's answer.

Long ago, I was invited to a TV debate, and what I thought would be an analysis of the present situation turned, many thanks to the public channel's conductor, into a eulogy about all that's good and grand and fair in [fill in the blank].

Don't ask me about the positive side, that's not my business. They already do a pretty good job.

Because, because, because, because...

Purisme

2011-07-28T16:17:00.004+02:00

De vegades sembla ser purisme, però no ho és. És el cas dels que usen els topònims catalans ("Catalunya", "Girona", etc.) en textos escrits en altres llengües, però en textos catalans diuen "Londres".

Altres vegades el purisme, tot i que sembli sincer, és hilarant. Aquesta font no és pas l'única que ha començat a dir "Kosovë". Des de la independència d'aquesta ex-província sèrbia, la nova grafia pretesament més correcta per ésser suposadament l'albanesa conté tot un món de fal.làcies.

Primerament, el correcte en aquest context seria usar, en lloc de la forma indeterminada, la forma determinada "Kosova". Així, per matar dos ocells d'un sol tret, els lectors catalans s'estalviarien haver d'endivinar com pronunciar una lletra desconeguda. Però sempre hi ha gent que pensa que és guai, és d'enterats anar per la vida fent servir paraules forànies i pretendre tenir cultura.

Aquest infantilisme conclou que el gentilici de "Kosovë" ja no és "kosovar", sinó "kosovès". Tan bé quedava "kosovar", perquè aquesta ja era també la forma purament albanesa, que fins i tot s'anava implantant en anglès, en detriment del correcte "kosovan". Puristes tontos.

Last but not least, s'ha de preguntar perquè oblidar-se de la veu sèrbia "Kosovo", que era (i de fet continua essent) la que s'usa arreu del món. La llengua sèrbia és co-oficial a Kosovo, ni més ni menys que l'albanesa. Més fonamentalment, "Kosova" no és altra cosa que l'adaptació a l'albanès d'una paraula sèrbia. "Kos" és serbi per a "merla" (alb.: cërrja), "kosovo" és el seu genitiu. Kosovo Polje (alb.: Fushë Kosova) és el Camp de les merles, que ha donat nom a Kosovo.

És a dir, pel purisme de fer servir els topònims "autèntics" s'acaba fent servir un topònim adaptat a la fonètica d'una altra llengua. Tot això un exercici bastant inútil, excepte per expressar el desig: Jo també vull ser independent! Sempre el mateix.

Le Canard

2011-07-16T20:25:00.003+02:00

Alguien le diga a Quim Monzó que hasta para artículos de opinión hay que comprobar los hechos. El escritor ha leído un libro...

Hace ya seis años que la historia del Proyecto Borghild se ha revelado como un "Ente", palabra que literalmente significa "pato" en alemán y en el sentido figurativo es una información (deliberadamente) falsa. Un canard! Pongan especial atención en el hecho de que el autor original de la historia, un tal Norbert Lenz, lejos de ser un conocido periodista, lo único que parece haber escrito (él o alguien homónimo) es un libro... ¡sobre patos!.

Recuerdo como en su discurso inaugural en la Feria de Fráncfort el mismo Monzó patoso tronó que después de Mistral "nunca jamás otra literatura sin Estado ha vuelto a recibir un premio Nobel". No sé si se olvidó completamente de Isaac Bashevis Singer o si esa era su particular manera de posicionarse para un futuro galardón. Que tenga suerte.

The Spanification of Eduard Punset

2011-07-15T20:03:00.071+02:00

«In the case of Catalonia and Spain only one side is democratic, the Catalan one. The other side is totalitarian, arrogant and despotic, and that complicates things.»
Víctor Alexandre

Godwin's Law should forbid any political debate in Spain. They're so fond of throwing around the N-word that you cannot take it seriously. Except for the Catalans. Everybody knows that Catalonia is different. Or is it?

Our above phrase of the day seems to indicate it is. Catalonia is better, fairer, more European and, above all, a totally lovely place to be. Catalonia is not Spain.

Spain, as seen by another Catalan nationalist activist called Antoni Strubell, is a dark place. "Spain, Europe's last Fascist Refuge?", he asks in a letter to the foreign media. And he answers with a clear yes. Well, that's not a direct yes, it's more a Fox News yes at first, a statement cloaked in questions such as the title or "What in heaven's name is happening in Spain?". Strubell diagnoses a "huge democratic deficit that exists today in Spain" to then finally aswer all the questions with the resounding statement: "The one place [fascism] lives on is in Spain".

There we go: Spain, fascist. Catalonia, democratic. Never mind that the latter is part of the former, this is the widely spread view of Catalan ~~democrats~~ nationalists. It is, as Strubell puts it, "the truth about Spain".

Let's have a look at the true face of Spanish fascism. Is it this? The gentleman who goes ballistic at (02:45), translated below[i] , is Santiago Espot, president of Catalunya Acció, and at the last municipal elections he headed the list of candidates of Solidaritat Catalana per la Independència (SI) in Barcelona. The same coalition Toni Strubell is president of and represents in the Catalan parliament. So Strubell cannot have meant his colleague Mr Espot when he talked of fascism. The fascist must be the other gentleman, who Espot accuses of being a Nazi. That other gentleman is the lawyer and Partido Popular affiliate Juan Carlos Segura, who criticises former Catalan president Lluís Companys for his open rebellion against the state (for instance in 1934, only two years before Franco's uprising), and reminds the viewer that Companys handed out weapons to anarchist groups, who then went on killing sprees.[ii]

Companys is today much venerated, Espot defends the memory of the former president, his face and his voice get a little distorted in the process. Nothing major. The ugly face of Spanish fascism must be found somewhere else. As a matter of fact, the face of Spanish fascism can be found everywhere. Catalans are the new Jews. There's one "documentary" called Spain's Secret Conflict in which this claim is being made. Here are the passages:

(17:12) In the views of Spaniards in general Matthew Tree detects "similarities to a certain kind of anti-semitism". "A lot of the stereotypes, or stereotypical traits, that are put on the Catalans are not too different from the ones that were put on Jews before the Second World War."

(28:00) Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté: "Some of us are very worried in this situation, which sometimes reminds us, in spite of all differences, let's say, of the atmosphere in Vienna in the years 1934 and 1935, right? If you weren't a bit anti-Jewish you weren't altogether Austrian. Today in Spain we are living in a dangerous situation, in which if you aren't a bit anti-Catalan, you're not altogether Spanish, let's say."[iii]

At (26:55) Matthew Tree puts a great deal of blame on the Spanish press, in particular on Federico Jiménez Losantos: "It's very similar, and I don't want to make comparisons, but from what I've read it's very similar to the kind of broadcasting that was going on in Yugoslavia ten years... for ten years leading up to the civil war. And the Bosnian war, I mean. And for me it's quite frightening, you know. I hear that man on the radio, and more than upset me he frightens me."[iv]

An Englishman cannot be wrong! Spain is intrinsically fascist. Catalans are the victims. The Spanish press is full of hatemongers.

Now that we've seen what Catalan nationalists say, let's get back to reality. Let's start again with Strubell and his criticism of Germany, pardon, Spain, where democracy arrived about 30 years later than in Germany. So like in the Germany of the 50s, 60s and 70s, today in thirty years later Spain many things still need to be improved. Or let's consider the US. How long did it take until "all men are created equal" was finally implemented? Spain is not ideal, but it's not different either.

Strubell is hugely over the top, but he is an honourable man, one of Catalonia's most respected political activists. Let's see what more he has to say.

When science journalist Eduard Punset was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi earlier this year he made an acceptance speech that voiced criticism of Catalan society, which he found to be showing signs of "closing itself off from the world" with the risk of "asphyxiating itself" culturally. Strubell's take on this is the following: "I believe that if someone who has just received such high honours commits such a verbal misstep, he should see his prize withdrawn ipso facto because of his bad education and lack of respect towards his nation."

Some lines further on Strubell shouts out: "This gentleman doesn't even know how to say one phrase in Catalan without messing with the language!"

To deny someone a public prize on the grounds of his political opinion not being in line with the established national cause is nationalism gone into extreme. To vilify this person for individual traits that have nothing to do with his political views goes a step further. This now is more than just calling for political conformity. It is the demand for uniformity in all aspects of life so as to make the other acceptable as a fellow ~~citizen~~ countryman and a human being. In the Catalan context, bashing someone for his bad Catalan is akin to attacking people for physical features such as the shape of their nose or the colour of their skin in other societies. Such an attitude should have no place in political discourse, and when nevertheless it is used, it must be called racism, even though the references here are cultural and not genetic.[v] (What makes Strubell's accusations so outworldish is the fact that Punset speaks Spanish with a noticeable Catalan accent.)

To top it all off, Strubell calls Punset by the Spanish equivalent of his name. Eduard becomes Eduardo. What little of Punset as a person could have remained in the eyes of Strubell is done away with already at the very start by identifying him as part of the enemy nation. By spanifying Punset. The attack could not be more personal, more personally degrading in its intentions.

Strubell's whole approach, the demand for political as well as for racial uniformity, reveals nothing less than a proto-fascist stance. And I do not call it outright fascism because the punishment demanded for Punset has not been made extensive to all spheres of social interaction. However, Strubell has entered a logic in which the next steps have historically proven to be relatively minor.

A university teacher, journalist, long-time political activist turned member of the parliament of Catalonia and self-styled writer should be aware of such slippery terrain. But neither has he since amended his words nor has anybody in Catalan nationalist circles critised him for them. Strubell, who himself was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2002, remains a well-respected member of Catalan society, and that is what makes the matter grave.

In dubio pro reo -and here goes another mitigating factor that forbids me to speak of more than a proto-fascist attitude- is the whole Spanish debate culture. There hardly is any. We have to see Strubell's words in this context. Another consequence of the absence of a valid debate culture is, as I said at the beginning, that the N-word is used so easily by many on all sides that it loses much of its seriousness. However, let's not forget that by the same lack of seriousness Spaniards have shown to be able to get into civil war. The matter is, therefore, an important one.

Strubell's recent verbal radicalisation has come as no surprise to those who have been following his writings. He speaks systematically from the nation first angle. There also seems to be some admiration for former terrorists that goes back on a more generalised feeling among Catalan pro-independence advocates. Terrorism might be seen as bad, but some cannot avoid a certain sympathy with the devil.

Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, for a long time one of the figureheads of the secessionst movement in Catalonia, made that very clear already years ago: "(...) if you want to attack Spain, first of all have a look at the map." This was Carod's reaction to a deadly ETA bombing in Vic, Catalonia, which he saw mainly as "a torpedo against the waterline of Catalan independentism".[vi] Such extremism gets rewarded in Catalonia: Carod went on to become the leader of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, the party of Companys), which later joined the Catalan government. Then, in early 2004, Carod had another meeting with ETA, this time in Perpignan. His aim was to convince ETA, not to lay down the arms, but to stop attacking in Catalonia.[vii] He was widely criticised for it, had to apologise, lost his post in the Catalan government for some time, but came back afterwards to make it to vice-president of the regional government. Political life in Catalonia went on as if nothing had happened. Just a hickup. But in the rest of Spain they haven't forgotten this.

Just a few days ago, Carod rehashed his "not in Catalonia" argument. "The Spaniards have every right in the world to be outraged. But if they want to do so, as Spaniards, it would be best if they didn't get the map wrong [emphasis added] and demonstrated, showed their outrage, pissed, painted, shouted and insulted where it is due: in their country."

The movement of the outraged or Indignados has Catalan secessionists quite a bit against the wall. It could compete with their recipe of creating a new and propsperous state for the hearts and minds of all those many down by economic crisis. Ideological competition is getting fierce, hence the recurrent complaint that the Indignados are not Catalan enough. Alfons López Tena, Strubell's fellow partyman, even refused to respond in Spanish in a press conference after the siege of the Catalan parliament on June 15 by parts of the Indignados. They were all insulting the MPs in Spanish, Tena said, so he could not use the same language, which is legally co-offical in Catalonia and the mother tongue of more than half of all Catalans. As a regional MP, López Tena is one of the highest representatives of the law and of Catalan society.

So what have we come to, after starting with the claims that Spain is undemocratic, totalitarian and fascist while Catalonia is an oasis of democracy? We can conclude that the same people who make such claims adopt proto-fascist discourse and, as in the case of Santiago Espot, manners, that their proclaimed peacefulness is doubtful to say the least and that their law-abiding and democratic attitude is a farce.

Now let's have another look at Spain's Secret Conflict, which in a short time has gone viral among Catalan pro-independence activists. This is no journalistic work in any possible way. Its presenter, Gary Gibson, is no media person.[viii] Gibson is an English teacher who lives in Mataró. The film's aim is not to inform but to disinform abroad, to "internationalise the Catalan conflict".

Spain's Secret Conflict was not made by the BBC, or any other news organisation for that matter. It was commissioned by a pro-independence platform called Sobirania i Progrés (Sovereignty and Progress). This is quite a crucial piece of information that has been left out of the film's credit roll. Additionally, prominent members of this platform also have prominent roles in the film, without being identified as such. One would think that the public has a right to this information.

Among the founding members of Sobirania i Progrés is the first interviewee, MEP Oriol Junqueras, who at (02:11) boldly claims: "We Catalans want our own state". Junquera's party (ERC) on a sunny day represents some 15% of the Catalans. Junqueras has recently been tipped to become president of ERC, after its 2010 election debacle (7%). Another founding member of Sobirania i Progrés is Miquel Strubell, brother of our friend Toni Strubell.

First-day signers of the manifesto of Sobirania i Progrés include Toni Strubell himself, Matthew Tree, who appears as a kind of foreign star witness in Spain's Secret Conflict, and Víctor Alexandre, the gentleman who made our phrase of the day above. As would have been expected, Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira and his brother Apel.les are also members of Sobirania i Progrés.

Alfons López Tena, presented plainly as "a leading legal expert" (36:09), isn't on the list of Sobirania i Progrés. Neither was he yet a regional MP at the time of the interview, but he had already created the Cercle d'Estudis Sobiranistes (in 2007) together with Héctor López Bofill, another founding member of Sobirania i Progrés (in 2006). If Mr Tree were right about Catalans being treated like the Jews,[ix] López Tena would never have been member of the CGPJ. Nor would Joan Rosell (17:34) have been elected to head the CEOE ("the bosses' union", as Gibson puts it) in 2010.[x]

Spain's Secret Conflict is the opposite of journalism. It is a well-filmed, well-edited and very well scripted piece of political propaganda. There would have been little difference if Matthew Tree and others had interviewed themselves. Tree also doubles as the film's translator, a position that allows him not only to charge money, but also to raise the tone another notch, like when he translates "reactiva" with "reactionary" at (33:44).[xi]

And that's not even all. Sobirania i Progrés's Elisenda Paluzie, whose tweet we linked to above, does not appear herself in the film she had commissioned and that gravitates around the referendum on independence. However, right when her film was shot Paluzie was one of the organisers of that referendum,[xii] while López Tena was driving it in the town of Osona, likely at the very time Mr Gibson interviewed him as "a leading legal expert". Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté, introduced in the film (05:13) as "one of Catalonia's best known historians", was also a prominent supporter of Paluzie's referendum, and so were the other interviewees Matthew Tree and Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira. As to the last Catalan interviewee to be named (with the exception of Joan Rosell), the former long-time president Jordi Pujol has voted for the independence of Catalonia. Most of these facts were know at the time the film was made, but they go unmentioned by Mr Gibson.

Elisenda Paluzie, a prominent member of ERC and professor of Economics, is on record to have recently said about the net fiscal transfer (also called "fiscal deficit", or more bluntly "plundering") from Catalonia to the central government: "We have to use the unfair treatment that Catalonia receives to make the sovereignist [pro-independence] awareness grow".[xiii] The amount of the fiscal deficit is one of the most important political issues today in Catalonia, and one of the strong points in Paluzie's film. Paluzie, however, does not want the problem solved. She takes it as a welcomed argument for independence, especially in times of economic crisis. Economic crises have that unholy tendency to boost extremist positions.

The president of Catalonia, Artur Mas (CiU), says he wants to get the fiscal deficit solved not by limiting it, but by demanding the same exceptional treatment the Basque Country and Navarre get. This aim is not only highly unlikely to materialise, the demand itself is in stark contrast to another, more fundamental one: that the historical differences within Spain be respected. Catalan politicians and opinion makers have repeatedly been up in arms whenever other, "non-historical" Autonomous Communities tried to copy the Catalan model in order to attain similar rights and privileges. A perceived lack of respect is at the very core of all the grievances, real or imagined, Catalans have with "the Spanish", and from here a straight line leads up to the accusations of fascism that were the starting point of this text.

Mas now wants to copy Euskadi. Moreover, Mas's proposal includes a political threat. Or rather it's blackmail: should his demands not be met by Madrid he is willing to lead Catalonia into independence. Having created these false alternatives, it looks like a win-win situation for Mr Mas, who has voted for independence in Paluzie's referendum (and so have several of his ministers) and has officially declared that his ultimate aim is to "complete nation-building" ("completar la construcció nacional", in Catalan).

It is within the logic of such double discourse that false pretenses abound. Paluzie's film is a classic example of both. It pretends to be about the "right to decide" of "the nation of Catalonia". It is, in fact, about something much more sinister.

Sobirania i Progrés's manifesto, co-written by Paluzie, doesn't mention the name of Catalonia even once, instead it consistently speaks of the Catalan Lands. From this angle, both Paluzie's referendum and her film are two parts of the same dialectical Trojan Horse.

It is, both politically and legally, much easier to argue for the self-determination of a well defined territory, in this case of Catalonia proper, than for the secession of all the territories where Catalan is spoken. The former can (and often is explicitly taken to) relate to acceptable precedents such as Slovenia, the latter is all too reminiscient of "Gde je srpski grob, tu je i Srbija"-"Where there is a Serb grave, there is also Serbia". Hence it cannot be sold to an international audience and has no place in Paluzie's propaganda film. The Balkan analogy ends here. Nobody threatens to achieve the unification of the Catalan Lands by violent means. On the other hand, nobody wanted to build the Berlin Wall, either.

A clearer distinction between the different, yet much related, concepts of nationalism, Pan-Catalanism, secessionism etc. in all their different shades shall be made in a following text, that will also try to evaluate what real political influence each current has. One thing should be clear already, if things were to go according to the will of most political activists mentioned here, an independent Catalonia would claim huge territories from the then neighbouring states of Spain, France, Italy and maybe the whole of Andorra. This is their declared will. They all come together in and around Sobirania i Progrés's manifesto, its referendum and its film, and while they claim the wildest things about that devilish Spain, they reveal their own attitudes, methods and intentions all too readily. It just takes a bit of piecing-together.

Even extremists do have to reveal their true intentions in order to achieve the highest degree of domestic political cohesion. Without such cohesion and an absolute commitment to the goal no major change is possible. And only by revealing even the dark sides of their intentions their political leaders can ultimately turn a community of victims into a community of perpetrators.

There is no good Catalan today who would say that he or she is Spanish. The false dichotomy that opposes Catalonia to Spain is the leitmotif of local secessionist discourse, it is present in many of the quotes we have seen here, and it is to be understood as a conflict that demands a very personal choice of everybody, especially of each single one of those many in Catalonia who still define themselves as both Catalan and Spanish.[xiv]

The risk of being perceived as dangerous abroad seems to be mitigated by a general good-will attitude of the foreign audience, an optimism that grows the further away or less known the troublespot is.

It is more worrying for those who have the gun right to their head. When the leader of a new party that has set out to work for "the regeneration of political life" says "we'll bump off anybody who gets in our way, we'll kick their asses" he might be perceived as a bit threatening, even though the bumping-off part was not meant literally. Neither was the gun analogy, yet.[xv]

"(...) totalitarian, arrogant and despotic (...)". As well as undemocratic, misleading, manipulating, lying, insulting, deceiving, distorting, disinforming, vilifying, slandering, vile and perfidious. And if that general climate hasn't been enough to discourage any dissent, there are quite some hotheads ready to disrupt meetings of opponents in a way nobody wanted to see again. Which brings us back to the beginning and Toni Strubell's letter to the foreign media. What in heaven's name is happening in Catalonia...

Let me leave you with another quote: "10.000 organised people are more powerful than one million, we are ready to create this power (...). Hèctor López Bofill, Sobirania i Progrés.

Coda: Sobirania i Progrés, so eager to "internationalise the process towards sovereignty", hasn't cared to publish their website in any language other than Catalan. Toni Strubell, who is half English-half Catalan, only writes in Catalan on his site.

Maybe they know that they mustn't put all their thoughts directly to an international audience. That certainly denotes a lack of understanding how the Web works.

___________________________

[i] "Shut up! Shut up! When I speak of the memory of Companys, you shut up! Shut uuup! You have to shut up, do you understand? Shut up! Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are, to accuse President Companys of war crimes? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? You would be locked up in prison if the Spanish state were a democratic state. In Germany, in Germany you'd be locked up in prison. This is unworthy, that today when we commemorate that 70 years ago President Companys was assassinated, you appear on a TV show to insult the memory of this people. You should be locked up in prison! Do you understand? Nobody has died by fault of Companys. You're a disgrace. You are a Nazi. And you are a member of the political family that assassinated Companys. You do not deserve, you do not deserve to be neither in Catalonia nor in any other place. Do you understand? It's a shame. Your presence here is a shame. Do you understand? A shame! It's a shame!"

At this point the TV show's goosebump-resistant presenter interrupts to criticise not Espot but Segura, demanding him to be respectful, and calls on the viewers to call in if they are in disagreement with Segura. Democracy in the making: let the angry mob take over. At this point Segura actually looks a bit worried. Mission accomplished.

[ii] The main "acció" of Mr Espot's Catalunya Acció association has for years been to (anonymously) denounce all those shopkeepers who were using mainly Spanish in their written communications, instead of Catalan. This, too, is remindful of the core fascist tactics of using the law to abolish the law, i.e. the whole legal framework set by the constitution. Espot is using a Catalan law in order to abolish the Spanish Constitution.

See also a later post.

[iii] To liken today's Spain to the authoritarian rule of Austrofascism is a bold statement and a weird historical analogy. It cannot be saved by "in spite of all differences". The difference is the official promotion of anti-semitic attitudes in Austria from May 1934 onwards, which marked a clear before and after. Is Solé i Sabaté insinuating that Spaniards are (genetically? culturally?) so much worse than Austrians because they behave to the same effect, yet without the need of being whipped up by any authorities? There either must be something intrinsically evil about Spaniards, or Solé i Sabaté sees much less evil in the persecution of the Jews in mid-1930s Austria than there actually was.

Quite unscientific is what this "historian" says about the War of the Spanish Succession. First of all, the date he gives, 1714, is imprecise, and the relation of forces he gives (Castile on the one side, the rest of the peninsula on the other) is plainly wrong. His account in no way honours his scientific credentials, instead it dwells on the level of popular legend, something very contrary to scientific historiography, and easily disproven by anybody with access to Wikipedia.

One can only hope that Solé i Sabaté's colleagues are aware of his words and react accordingly.

[iv] Here we are with an even weirder analogy: Spain is compared to Yugoslavia, Catalonia to Bosnia, and dictatorship equals democracy. This analogy has been drawn on so many times by Catalan secessionists that it has become almost a figure of speech. Those who in the former Yugoslavia were actually fighting for democracy, the rule of law and human rights, and who were tortured and imprisoned, are being insulted by such a comparison.

[v] References to the existence of a "Catalan Race" were made in the late 1800s, but phrenological arguments to detect differences with other peoples of Spain, who were said to have been exposed to Moorish rule and influence for a longer time than Catalans, were soon dropped and have since been replaced by philological ones. The linguistical differences between Catalan and Spanish are objective, these are two different languages, but sadly, as we see with Strubell, the use that is being made of this fact sometimes is reminiscent of attitudes that we hoped were long forgotten.

[vi] Carod was not the only one to be more interested in his own political agenda than in the victims of the Vic bombing. A few months ago, 20 years after the bombing, the mayor of that town, Josep Maria Vila d'Abadal, refused to participate in an hommage to the victims because his predecessor at the time of the bombing, Pere Girbau, had been criticised by the victims' association called AVCOT for showing the same surprise as Carod at ETA tactics. Interviewd by Catalan TV3 Girbau had said: "Since the moment we were feeling that we are Catalans as much as they felt they are Basques, why did they have to attack here?" Both Girbau and Vila d'Abadal are members of CiU. The radical Reagrupament party couldn't miss the chance to condemn AVCOT and show its support for Girbau.

Carod sure knew that a true Basque patriot makes no difference between Catalans and other Spaniards, all of whom he calls Maketos. His discussions in Perpignan must have been interesting.

[vii] Carod always denied that a partial truce had been his aim, yet shortly after the meeting in Perpignan ETA indeed announced a truce for Catalonia. In 2006 ETA showed pride in the truce and signed up to Carod's line of argumentation: "solidarity, respect, non-interference". Certainly, the truce was only valid for Catalonia proper, not for the whole of the Catalan Lands: coming from Tarragona (Catalonia), ETA bombed the Hotel Port in Denia, in the Community of Valencia, in January 2005.

[viii] Sobirania i Progrés couldn't possibly use a Catalan journalist, for fear of missing the air of objectivity only a foreigner could lend them to present this film as a real documentary, a valid piece of journalistic work. Yet they were unable to find a foreign journalist, which comes as no surprise. Matthew Tree couldn't literally interview himself, so he brought his good acquaintance Gary on board. Some in the Catalan blogosphere think that it's actually the Fantasy writer of the same name, others see him as a BBC journalist. Mission accomplished, again.

[ix] At this point we have to mention Catalonia's most prominent fighter against anti-semitism and a vociferous defender of the state of Israel, Pilar Rahola. Mrs Rahola, former leader of ERC and a die-hard secessionist, was quick in criticising Losantos's "we are the Jews", but has yet to say anything to her fellow pro-independence fighters of Spain's Secret Conflict.

[x] The moderately nationalist politician (no oxymoron) Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida has in successive opinion polls last year been named as Spain's most popular politician. The film Pa Negre (2010), proudly made entirely in Catalan and shot in Catalonia, has won the Spanish Goya (actually nine of them, out of 14 nominations) and is being distributed across Spain subtitled, not dubbed. Many other examples can be given of utter normality in the relations between Catalonia and the rest of Spain. (Update July 22: Pa Negre has been awarded the Premio Nacional de Cinematografía 2011. It's the Spanish National Prize for Cinema.)

[xi] A few months prior, another video, this time made by Catalonia's "national television" TV3, was all the rage. Adéu, Espanya? (Goodbye Spain?) also used two prominent interviewees as advisers to the production. There is a clear tendency for inbreeding even in the journalistic sector.

[xii] This referendum was a scam. Its declared basic principle was that only participation mattered, regardless of the outcome. That was the only way its promoters could (and indeed did) seek justification in a "right to decide" with clear references to the "right of self-determination of peoples" as mentioned in the UN Charter, the ICCPR and the ICESCR. However, it's true aim was not participation but the outcome, to get a majority for independence. Anna Arqué, who together with Paluzie was in charge of foreign relations for the National Coordinating Platform of the Poll on Independence lifted the veil briefly in an interview with La Vanguardia. Asked what would happen if the people said "no" to independence, Arqué's answer was concise and clear: "Then we will work to get a "yes" some other day". Whatever she meant with the phrase that made the interview's headline is anybody's guess: "The [result of the] referendum on independence will be binding, even if not legally so". Just not for Arqué, most apparently. Be that how it may, literally everybody in Catalonia understood what the referendum was really about, hence the low turnout of about 20%.

More details in this later entry.

[xiii] To be fair we have to point out that "sovereignty" and "independence" are not synonymous, nor are they being used as synonyms. However, the difference has no real effect. The highest degree of (national) sovereignty means independence, and independence is the declared goal of Paluzie et al. Moreover, Paluzie et al. are playing a dirty game with the sovereign will of the people, as we have shown for the case of the (unofficial) referendum on independence, or as it is the case with the (official) referendum on the new Catalan Statute of Autonomy (Estatut) in 2006. The referendum on the Estatut was used as argument that the Constitutional Court of Spain (CC) had "no mandate to overrule the expressed will of the people". An obvious fallacy, since the CC has to respond to the will of all the people of Spain, of which Catalans are only a part, and even that only within the rules set by the constitution that was approved in 1978 by a majority of all Spaniards, as well as by a majority of Catalans.

[xiv] As a matter of fact, there is a third discourse whose target audience are all those not yet converted to Catalan nationalism, who are especially to be found among the sons and daughters of in-country immigrants (from Andalusia, Extremadura etc.) whose maternal language continues to be Spanish. Here a carrot-and-stick approach is applied, a combination of coercive means and convincing argumentation: proudly presenting Catalonia as a society that has always integrated newcomers is one side, the other is that those who do not conform to the ever narrower standards of true Catalanhood can find themselves quickly accused of conspiring with the "oppressor". They get spanified.

As the party that has traditionally represented the Spanish-speaking working class, especially in the red belt around Barcelona, the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) is increasingly accused of having "two souls", of not defending the interests of Catalonia and, ultimately, of treason.

A fourth discourse, that of Catalan secessionists with the rest of Spain, is becoming more and more scarce. In many ways the rest of Spain is already being treated like a foreign country.

[xv] These words were uttered by the president of Reagrupament when Toni Strubell (ex-ERC) was still a member of that party, which he left six months later to join former Barça president Joan Laporta's SI.

Laporta himself left SI after the regional elections (while keeping his seat in the regional parliament) to join ERC in a coalition running in the Barcelona municipal elections. Strubell became president of SI.

Una Mente Pribilegiada

2011-07-15T13:27:00.005+02:00

Antes de colgar aquí alguno de los textos serios que tengo, como dicen los ingleses, "en la línea de la pipa", vaya este dedicado a mi diosa, omnisciente y ubicua, la gran Pilar Rahola.

Hoy, la Rahola le escribe una carta a Mariano Rajoy, es decir, La Vanguardia, mi periódico favorito, la publica. "Razonabilidad" en vez de "racionabilidad". Todavía casi medio aceptable, pero ya indica por donde van sus tiros.

"(...) el idioma que hace 900 años que hablan sus antepasados" nos sitúa de lleno en la mente de nuestra célebre escritora: la diosa habla con los espíritus, se adivina que en todos los sentidos.

La explicación se encuentra en un texto reciente. "(...) las mentes privilegiadas que (...) dotaron al mundo de algunos de sus grandes pensadores." Rahola, conocida por sacar su coche, aplicación de la ley del embudo mediante, de un depósito municipal con las palabras "¿usted sabe quién soy yo?", esta Rahola no sólo lo sabe todo y está en todas partes, está además al más alto nivel intelectual y artístico.

Y es desde esta altísima cima que puede lamentar el "reino de la mediocridad".

This Blog is Back

2011-07-12T18:06:00.002+02:00

It's almost a year that this blog went out of sight. I am sorry, but I had to do it. I was not satisfied with what I was writing.

This blog is back now. The old articles are discarded and sent to the memory chest. The comments, which all were dear to me, got lost forever: blogger hasn't resolved the unpublish issue in any satisfactory way yet. It hurts, and again I say I'm sorry, but I need a clean cut. I can only hope that I'll be better this time. (Update: Found the comments. That's nice.)

I'll have new articles up in a few days.