“Spain, by its’ very nature, understand neither words nor reason. [Spain] only understands judicial sentences and executive actions. That is to say, while there is no overseeing entity that will force it to respect democratic principles, [Spain] will continue to practice its’ own methods of a totalitarian regime. Unfortunately, it has no other option when you consider a country whose constitution includes a threatening article justifying the use of military force to quell any territorial intent to secede in a democratic manner. We are speaking of a country that has closed in on itself and has made territorial unity its’ fundamental reason for being. This makes it so that the essential similarities between Islamic fanaticism and Spanish nationalist fanaticism are enormous The only difference is the form they take. The first utilizes violence, and the second utilizes its’ right to impose antidemocratic laws, but both impose subordination to their one god. The first call their god Allah, the second call their god Spain.” (Victor Alexandre)
“The fact that liberty is not possible in Spain, is not an argument against liberty, it is an argument against Spain”
Spain
Spain is not a national unit, but a geographical unit that includes a plurality of nations. Portugal among them. The Spanish State, however, with the defection of Portugal, even arrives not to a geographical unit.
How beautiful they would be a pair -at least- of Portugals more in the Peninsula!
Spain is the attempt at the realization of a myth. Some live “the unit” and on “the unit”, while the other ones we suffer it and still we have to finance it. It is not in the same Hispanic unit than “Castilian unit” of Spain.
For the devouts of the myth of Spain first it is the myth than the men: Spain must be saved and fuck the Spaniards.
The called “Spain One” is not a nationality, but a frightening prison of nations.
Spain is a frustrated country. It is the attempt to an impossible event. A myth without any contact point with the reality. A pure possibility. More: a utopia.
The myth of Spain has been secularly the instrument of oppression of men and peoples, in use of some privileged classes monopolizers of the power. Because of that, any totalitarian ideology that is loved, whatever that its color is, will want to preserve the myth. It would not find any other better tool for reaffirming its domain. Because of that Spain and totalitarianism are correlative ideas.
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The Spain that we know of centuries is a historical violence that the Franco’s regime has brought to the last extreme. This violence has been turning bitter the peoples that are victims of it, starting for the same Castile. For this in Spain can not fit any normal regime and it seems that there are only possible the regimes of bad humor: the subversion and the tyranny.
The fanatics of the hispanitarism are the most fanatical of the dictatorship. They tell us that the country is not prepared to govern itself democratically. Then it results that the most interested to introduce us Spain as “Mother of peolpes” recognize that this “mother” has a people that is an eternal apprentice.
The fact that the freedom is not possible in Spain, is not an argument against the freedom: it is an argument against Spain.
In Spain the freedom will not be possible as long as it is not organized the state in really confederal form, which allows autochthonous legislations for each different national group, or as long as Spain has not disappeared.
They tell us that Spain is not prepared for the democracy. We ask ourselves: is it that Spain is prepared for any form of regime?
Is it that it was prepared for the tyranny? The tyranny, to be efficient in its way, asks from the dictator until the last civil servant, an selection of intelligent men, selfless, self-sacrificing and honest to every prove, because they lack the corrective of the opposition. This selection could not provide a politically primitive people and ideologically devastated as it is a Spain.
The tyranny, of right wing and of left, depersonalizes the man, de-educates him and brutalizes him. The problem of the social communal life is also a problem of political education. Only a long period of practical democracy could educate them. The things are learnt doing them, although first they are made badly.
A day or another we will have to decide for the democracy. We can not leave to our children a so absurd homeland as the one that our parents bequeathed us.
We think, however, that a democracy that deserves the name of such it reaches, not only the freedom of the individuals, but also the freedom of the social classes as such and the real freedom of the peoples. There are not free men in slave peoples.
Spain did not have enough intuition for guessing that when the Renaixença [Catalanist movement, only cultural at the beginning] posed the problem of Catalonia, what came off posed definitively was the problem of Spain. Catalonia was not understood already, because previously, Spain had been misunderstood.
The problem of Spain is deep down a problem of freedom. The “Spain One” has deprived us secularly from the practice of the individual and collective freedom, but Spain has not been able to deprive us to wish it every time with more illusion. Because of that, we in fornt of the dilemma: either the freedom or Spain, we will decide on the freedom firmly.
It is more worth an hour of freedom than all the history of Spain.
The victorious Spain in war 1936-1939 has declared “anti-Spain” the defeated Spain, the one that does not think like the winners and that is major. If the majority of the called “Spaniards” -or only an important part- is the anti-Spain, where the Spanish unit is? Where is Spain?
The true anti-Spain has been the unitary Spain.
For the Catalans and the other peripheral peoples, Spain does not represent another thing than a geographical accident, pretext for the political fastening.
If Castile does not have another vision of Spain than the one that has shown us until now, in the non Castilian ones another decorous way than consider ourselves as non Spanish.
If Catalonia had been as separatist as Castile, of the “Spain One”, it would be time ago that it would be heard nothing about it. They and we would have finished winning.
It is not honest to say that in last war 1936-1939 Spain fought against the anti-Spain. Two extremisms fought, so Spanish one as the other one in the orthodoxy of the love for Spanish things unitarist.
If we spoke about authentic love for Spanish things, we should say: so anti-Spanish one as the other one. The horrors of the red Spain and the horrors of the national [pro-Franco] Spain are the horrors of a same Spain, they are the two sides of a same question.
One speaks repeatedly about the problem of Spain like a problem of details. It is the same Spain that it is questioned. The solution is not to accept Spain as a premise. The solution is to search another Spain or to do without Spain.
The problem starts with the first attempts of central hegemony. The “Spanish Unit” was not at all a synthesis and an improvement: it was a subversion. It was the destruction of the juridical personality from the peninsular peoples and the first step towards the colonial servitude of the men who formed these peoples. It was a step back. Now it is necessary a new subversion that destroys the assembly of the “Spain One” so that the men of the peninsular peoples can enter to the new era with dignity, with community personality and with freedom.
The monarchy has made Spain, best said, the monarchy could have done it, and the monarchy has undone it. The centralist and unitary Spain, so dear to the typical Spanish republicans, is a work of the monarchy.
The identification of Castile with the monarchy determined the identification of Castile with Spain and the substitution of the Castilian nationality from the happened “Spanish” nationality. These two identifications have not been -they could not be- in the peripheral peoples. From here has started the problem of Spain, which is not another than the fight of Castile for the domain and hegemony, and the fight of the attacked peoples for the dignity. And the problem will not be solved until it does not cease the aggression.
If an anti-Hispanic idea there has been in the Peninsula, it has been the idea about a Castilian Spain.
The monarchy is not the traditional regime of Spain. It stopped to being traditional with the Catholic Kings, if not before. With them the Spain was not yet “One”, but it already started to being so the monarchy. And more important thing, the set of the peninsular kingdoms started to be a “unit of fief” that fatally had to lead to a supposed “national unit”. From then, the monarchy has been in Spain the instrument of the antitradition. It is not, then, the traditional regime of Spain, but the treachorous regime.
The Spanish Republic of 1931 sank because of unitary. In a truly confederal republic, the “Movimiento” [fascism ideology] would not have been possible.
A federal monarchy would not have fallen down in 1931, nor a federal republic in 1936.
In the Republic of 1931, the Spanish socialists demonstrated that, against Catalonia they were capable of joining with the devil, however fascist that he was.
In spite of everything, however, the Republic in Spain was little difficult of winning, but it was very difficult to demolish. This the winners of 1939 have never wanted to take into account it.
The problem of Spain comes from the fact that what had to have been a Union, it degenerated into “Unit”. Translated into more understandable terms: that what naturally and in a historical way had to be a Confederation, it ended in a unitary and centralizer State. Solution: undoing the unitary State and trying the Confederation.
In Spain there are two kinds of citizens: those who suffer “the Unit” and those who live on it. As there are two kinds of peoples: the colonizers and the colonized ones. The non Castilian Hispanic peoples can not live the “Unit”, but thye have to suffer it.
With the name of the “Unit”, Castile intends to justify the genocide. It has nothing of strange. What is surprising is that there are still Catalans, Basques, Galicians and Andalusians who swallow it. When diverse peoples join spontaneously, they do not make it to suicide themselves or to let them assassinate, but to keep complete as such peoples, to preserve their personality, to help among together against a possible aggressor. One looks for the guarantee in the union for the nationality. In the “Spanish Unit”, however, we find a guarantee of our disappearance as people. In Spain, the aggressor is in the inside.
Spain as an idea has a very simple origin: the unifying suggestion that the peninsular geographical accident offered to the central peoples. Suggestion that felt like the thought of the Visigoths, that later made that a Castilian king claimed for himself the title of emperor and that in last war 1936-1939 costed a million lives.
The idea about Spain is a daughter of the geography. A geography of synthesis, not of detail, fitted for the Castilian people. Stressed still this suggestion because of reasons of communal life, also geographical in their origin, derivatives of the imbalance in the economical possibilities between the periphery and the center. All the later ideological contributions, it would not be enough to explain the unifying fancy of the peoples of the center, without this elementary previous geographical fact.
The discovery of the Americas finished to made lazy the usuafructuary people of that discovery and depopulating and impoverishing its ground. And when, later on, the ultramarine empire started the slope, the central Spain will have to search a colonialist compensation in the political and economical domain of the peripheral nations.
The history of the Castilian colonization of America is the history of the expansion of a weak people. And especially it is not a Spanish history. Castilian and that’s all. They excluded us from it. Juridically, then Castilians and Catalans we were foreigners the ones of the other ones. We wish we were it still! Now we do not want to share nor the glory of the successes nor the responsibility of the horrors, because there was all about it.
The “Spanish unit” has a vice of origin: it is not spontaneous, it is an imposition. Every people that enters to be part of this gloomy “Unit” it is necessary that, as the hell by Dante, leaves at the entry every hope.
The idea about the Hispanic union would have been able to be a respectable idea whenever this union had been conceived like a big synthesis, like a confederation of free nations. But an idea like this Castile demonstrates to have had never. The central peoples have never been Spanish nationalists in a sincere way, but localists provincially. They have been incapable of conceiving Spain like a great overall view.
“Castile has made Spain and Castile has unmade it, it wrote Ortega y Gasset. Only it is truth halfway. Castile has not made, it has not attempted to make Spain, but to steal it. And it has not been able to undo a real Spain, which has never existed yet, but it has undone the possible and desirable Spain.
Castile, in the attempt to build its Spain, has not contributed to the “Unit” its great primitive virtues, but its not less great faults.
Spain One, this satanic attempt that has rotted everything…
The Castilian mentality, heiress of the Lionish mentality, was the most suitable to impose the “Unit”, but the most inept for constructing a true union.
Castile, with the Reconquest, the discovery of America and the Inquisition, was consolidated more as a mission, than as a nation. More that as a people, as a military bureaucratic and ecclesiastical caste, with mission of material and mental domain. Unlucky the peoples that, like Catalonia, have a neighbor in this way.
The Castilian peninsular hegemony is not the one of the ancient Castile “popular, lay, comunera and feudal”. This Castile was defeated definitively by the Spanish monarchy in 1521, in Villalar.
The Castilian hegemony that we suffer is that of the Castile deformed by the Spanish monarchy: the Castile conqueror, inquisitorial, ultramundane, militaristic and bureaucratic.
But already before the defeat of the Comuneros in Villalar, the democratic Castella had suffered the first falsifications in letting it to penetrate for the Visigothic spirit of the Asturian-Leonese monarchy.
The Castile that we know, certainly, is not Castilian but in the language. But Castilians and the language have been and are a vehicle of a hegemony that, more that of a people, it is of a spirit. More that of a national community, it is of some castes. Perhaps it would be more exact if, instead of hegemony of Castile, we spoke about hegemony of the Castilians, especially of the Castilian traditional caste overbearing ones.
Every Spanish colonialist pressure on the peripheral peoples, has been made from Castile and in Castilian. Having the Castilian people as a basis according to Castilian modules and in benefit of the Castilians.
The called Catalan problem has not been created at all by the Catalans. And we can say equally of the Basque or Galician problem. They [the Spaniards] have invented it and have imposed it to us. It is not our problem, it is their problem, the problem of their spiritual complexes.
The problem of Spain is not another thing than the problem of a people that has been felt called to be the factor of the Union and he has lost its way across the detours of the Unit. The problem of a people that has not been at the level of its mission.
To Castile it has been lacking intelligence, magnanimity and greatness. But it has exceeded to it envy, ignorance and fanaticism when building a Spain for all. Now, there is here a suspicion: is it that Castile has ever proposed to make a Spain for all?
We could say that the problem of Catalonia and the problem of Spain is only one: the inadequacy of Castella to its historical mission. In a word: it is the problem of the Castilians.
Spain is not a nationality, but an assembly social and political, an oligarchic monopoly to assure, with historical, political and geographical reasons, the domain of some social classes over the rest of the country. From here the deepest separatism among the citizens: those who live on Spain and those who suffer from it.
The central peoples, which exercise the hegemony, suffer in the individuals and in the social classes this servitude, but do not notice because are not collectively pursued as a community, they are not attacked in their national personality.
For the Catalans, being Spaniards it has been never a collective and deliberate purpose. In any case we have accepted it resigned as an unforeseen resulting. Being Catalans we would have enough already.
To us, some people come from outside impose of being Spaniards in their way. They have declared us Spaniards for royal decree and without consulting us. Because of that in Spain we suffer a double servitude: as men and as a people.
The Franco dictatorship has stressed the division between the official Spain and the real Spain. One is the Spain of the inaugurations, of the decorations, of the speeches, of the wines of honor and of the official feasts. The other one is the Spain of the work, of the tribulations and of the silence. One is the Spain of the street and the other one is the Spain of the television.
When we speak about the two Spains we do not refer to Castella for a side and the peoples subjected by the other one, because in this case they are not two, but four or five Spains. We refer to a division not geographical but spiritual. It is about two mentalities geographically mixed, although quite polarized due to the national differences, but spiritually very different: the mentality unitary, inquisitorial, authoritarian and delaying, by one side, and the progressive, democratic mentality, dialoging and opened by the other one.
Spain is a historical possibility never been carried out, always in project, always in gestation. It will remain to the history like a mere possibility, like a perpetually unfinished symphony. A lost paradise.
And it will remain like the historical instrument of barbarians to destroy some peoples and some cultures. The Spain that will never have been another thing than the Spanish State, has not created any culture. Because the Castilian culture is Castilian, not Spanish. Without the Spanish State it also would have existed.
But Spain, if it has not created, it does has known to destroy. Or at least it has worked with all the heart to destroy and, as a matter of fact, has braked and adulterated the non Castilian peninsular cultures. The unitary, oppressive, inquisitorial Spain, has been and will always be a political monster devouring of men, of cultures and of peoples, as long as there is, an abortion of the history.
Everybody wants to solve the problem of Spain, but generally everybody starts from a false platform, which is the acceptance of Spain as an irreversible fact. The problem of Spain only has a solution: the disappearance of Spain. It lacks clairvoyance and generosity to see that the solution is more important than Spain.
We say the disappearance and not the reform, because the Spain conceived as a nation will never be able to sustain without the bolts of the centralism, the despotism, the absolutism, the fanaticism –be what it be its color- and the crushing of the dissidents, peoples and men. The intellectual man who thinks, the working man who works.
Without admitting in the advance that the Spanish nationality does not exist and that the Peninsula is a mosaic of true diverse nationalities, the problem of Spain does not have possible solution.
The expression to solve the problem of Spain does not have meaning; it is necessary to choose: either the solution or Spain.
On finding the way of solution of the problem of Spain it is necessary to begin substituting the unit word for the self-determination word.
Unluckily, the world has never known another Spain that the Castilian Spain.
The “Spanish Unit” not only frustrated the union of the peninsular peoples, but it frustrated the ideal Spain. To try it, it would be necessary to promote these peoples, to destroy the “Unit” and to propitiate the free and voluntary union. On the contrary, we must resign ourselves to keep on suffering Spain.
The “Spanish Unit” is not a surmounting, but a break in the life of the peninsular peoples. These, each on its own, had attained a sedimentation every time more accused of their national personality and they had carried out important conquests at own title. Once had been gathered in the patrimony of Felip II, one could say that in the domains of this monarch the sun did not set. The “Unit” was not at all the synthesis, but the national weakening of each peninsular people, in the inside, and the liquidation of the empire in the outside. Empire that Castile will substitute with the colonization of the non Castilian peninsular peoples.
Spain any more will not know more military victories in the outside and will have to console itself with those that half Spain against the other half one in anachronistic civil wars will obtain, since they have been overcome in all the civilized countries. The monocephalous politics inaugurated by the Catholic Kings, has not at all driven us to “the unit of destine”, but to the unit of failure.
But: in each political or military defeat has never lacked the triumph of a historical sentence for consolation of mental destitutes. A decorous way to be frightened.
The “Spain One” is a maladjusted and unadaptable creature.
Why Castile has never proposed to construct the true Spain?
The people of sense have said sometimes: “Catalonia is not prepared for the independence”. They forget that Catalonia is a national entity very former to the Spanish State, and that had enjoyed full independence during many centuries.
They forget that the independence is the natural climate of the peoples and the colonization an unnatural violence.
But, besides, we can ask: is it that Spain has ever been prepared for the independence?
When has it known Spain an independent period? The European politics of the Austrias monarchy, foreign dynasty, was an exotic inheritance that that dynasty provided. The Borbons, other foreigners, imposed an anti-Hispanic centralism of French type. The liberalism of the last century was equally from high-Pyrenean inspiration. The Spanish Marxism and the Franco’s regime, equally copied from outside and promoted from the outside. We do not know any political philosophy that can be qualified of truly Spanish, if it is not the counterphilosophy of the reaction. It is the only thing which Spain does not need to copy from anybody. The “[military] rising” typically “Spanish”, has managed to be a product of export.
With everything in account, however, Spain has ended being a colony of the United States. A Gibraltar of Europe under the northamerican colonization.
The “Spain One”, however, also has its glories: the “Spanish Inquisition”; the decapitation of the Comuneros of Castella; the Corpus of Blood; the separation of Portugal; the Peace of the Pyrenees; Gibraltar; Cuba; Philippines; Annual; the Carlist wars; the litany of the “[military] risings”; the bombs; the terrorist attacks; the Tragic Week; the 6th October [of 1934]; the 18th July [of 1936]; the misery of the south; the outer and inner emigration; the depopulation and the ruin of the field; the desertization of big zones of the country; pyramids of deaths; commemoration and funereal monuments. These are the glories of Spain. Ithas not other.
And if any thing of good has germinated in this unlucky country, if any decent personality makes them a good impression in front of the history, is not at all a fruit of the “Unit”, but it has been born, it has grown and it has developed aside, if not against, of the “Unit”.
Maragall said it very well:
… your glories and your remembrances,
remembrances and glories only of deaths:
…oh, sad Spain!
The “Valle de los Caídos”, the Escorial… without slaves there are not pyramids.
When José Antonio [Primo de Rivera] said that “being Spaniard is the only serious thing that one can be in this wolrd” won the Nobel prize of humorism.
All the faults of the typical Spain have been brought until the paroxysm by the political regime of Franco. So much that we appeal to the destruction of this Spain, and we should wonder if the Franco’s regime will not have been, effectively, the authentic destroyer of Spain, of the good one and of the bad one. The times, the history, will say it.
Some say that the political independence would be a bad business for Catalonia. It would be worth to do the checking of it. The countries that have made it have not regretted at all.
In the meantime, what we know of a certain it is that the “Unit” has not been any bargain. Even in the financial order it has been a bad business. It is always a bad business to work for another.
All the philosophy of the “Spain One” has been elaborated with the mental leftovers of some provincial and numbed castes. Show-off soldiers who digested historical sentences in the rooms of flags. Beatific canons who grumbled in the eaten big chairs of the old Castilian cathedrals. Impotent intellectuals and teachers that vegetated in the provincial high schools of the state. Everything, people of a past world. Dusty castes who feel in the very inside “that so Spanish contempt for the work”, people absentminded in the past, who had never moved from the chair nor had never seen the chimney of a factory.
To Catalonia it does not interest a poor Spain, but all the contrary. A rich Spain would stop the invasion, it would be a beautiful market for the Catalan products and perhaps would remove their chauvinist and provincial complexes. But: that market we can not buy it at the price of the freedom.
The natural aversion of the Catalans to all that configures the “Spain One” -centralism, colonialism, absorption, tyranny, classism, reaction, intolerance, wide landowning- so reasonable aversion, should be reason to promote in all us a new consciousness of nation. Because of that it is not necessary to turn our back totally on the myth of Spain and with a view to all that is oppseed to it.
Spain has always hated us viscerally as an enemy nation. The impossibility of communal life -if it is not in servitude- has to make to born in us a collective consciousness of defense and of evasion. In the state of despair in which Spain has placed us, if there was not a Catalan, Basque, Galician, Andalusian nationalism, it would be necessary to creaate them.
This nationalism is needed not only by the native Catalans, but also all those that have to settle down definitivelly in our country without colonizing infulae, but with desires to work, to live and to share the life with us. They have also started to be colonized by the central Spain.
Nationally, Catalonia is much worse than Hungary, that Czechoslovakia and other satellite countries. They preserve their national personality recognized internationally, their language, their culture, and they have governors, forces of public order and bureaucracy natural of the country. Us nothing of this. Even it has stolen us the national name. And the language, the culture and every form of self-determination.
The worst juridical situation in which a people can be is that of “Spanish region”.
A lot of ignorance is needed or many bad faith on the part of a Catalan, not to recognize that the treatment that Spain gives to Catalonia is that of a defeated people, occupied, object of a political punishment and humiliated refinedly.
It is not necessary to say that, compared with the juridical situation that Catalonia suffers at present in the Spanish State, a Hispanic confederal solution would represent a profit. It would mean a beginning of juridical recognition of our national peculiarity and it would offer a platform for the inner reconstruction of the nationality.
But the colonialist Spain has treated us so badly that our national aspirations can not stop in a federation. We are taught a lesson. We aspire to the independence as a definite guarantee of our national survival.
This does not mean that if the case appeared without alternative we did not accept the federation. It would be as minor problem. Our sincere desire, however, it would be to be able to refuse it, as the Portuguese colonies have refused it when it has been offered to them.
It is a general rule that who pays orders. We work, we pay and do not order. They [the Spaniards] live, order and administer. And they still make it so badly as they can.
The “Spanish Unit” allows the Andalusian feudalitzant bourgeoisie to win the money in Andalusia and spend it in Madrid. If the Andalusians governed in their home, they could make that the profits of the people would be for the people and be spent in their country.
Says Calvo Sotelo: “Spain without Catalonia would not be Spain”. Of course: Spain is Castile more its peripheral peninsular empire. Remove form it Galícia, Euskadi, the Catalan Countries and Andalusia and it will remain what it should be: Castile without empire, but also without fancy dress.
Now, placed in the mental plan of Calvo Sotelo, we would want to ask: And, Spain without Portugal, it is also Spain?
The fact that the “Spanish Unit” requires the previous destruction of all the non Castilian human values former to it –as they are the national languages-, proves that it is a matter of a forced, violent, arbitrary and antihistorical unit. The “Unit” has been a failure because it has tried only the way of the centralism and of the assimilisme.
Catalonia has attempted many times in a sincere way -and candidly- to collaborate with the Spanish politics, but they have never wanted it. Catalonia has managed to hear a certain Hispanic illusion sometimes, but every time Catalonia has tasted the most bitter desillusion. This desillusion has already today become irrepairable. We the Catalans need to search another illusion.
In such a way that, if the Catalan nationality did not exist, it would be necessary to us to create that. And every time that this nationality decreases and disappears almost, it will be necessary to reinvent that. Either this or the provincial and colonial death.
Because, in spite of everything, they have not been able to impose us a unit of culture, nor a unit of thought, nor of feelings; they treat to impose us a footballistic unanimity at use of mental impotent ones. The Spanish “national” team, as an agglutinating agent of non solidary feelings.
There are Catalans that only feel Spaniards in fornt of the international sport contests. And the state makes good use of it to nationalize them spiritually. For us the Spanish national selection is a foreign team more. Our team would be the national selection of the Catalan Countries.
The Franco state has transformed the sport into a drug to anaesthetize the people. And Catalonia has been beguiled. As if all the national aspirations of Catalonia were reduced to conquer a Spanish “national” title. One has the feeling that every time that Barça has won a Spanish league match, Catalonia has lost a battle.
Sentimentally, of course, we all would want Barça to be champion every year. And we have to recognize that through the colors of a club also we have defended the country, when we have not been able to defend it in another way. But perhaps we have become too obstinate about it. If we thought with the head perhaps we would start to ascertain the convenience that all the Catalan teams broke away from the Spanish League. The sport independence also is part of the national independence.
This, at the moment, is familiar to utopia. Anyway, it would be convenient to us to stop having the football as first community experience and to start to think of more important things.
We have entrusted the defense of Catalonia to some teams of footballers, the majority of which are even non Catalans.
To Catalonia, instead of paying footballers, perhaps it would have been worthier to that paying guerrila fighters.
The monarchy called Spaniard does not start purely until with the Austrias. Castile was the first enemy and the first victim. It was the monarchy who converted the Castilians into Spanish -apart from the period in which this fateful qualifier starts to be used- and Castile in nucleus agglutinant and absorbent of the new concept of state: Spain.
The Spanish monarchy has never been democratic.
The Spanish monarchy has never been interested for the homeland, but the patrimony. Because of that rested on Castile, the people that, among all of them, offered more guarantees to consolidate and to preserve that patrimony. From here the indentification of Castile went with the monarchy. Later, Castile will live on the monarchic patrimony, it will live spiritually and even economically of the “Unit”.
The great tragedy of Castile is that it has had to be Spanish, because it has not felt with forces to be Castilian.
The central peoples concentrated in the domain of the peninsular periphery and to life on the work of the other ones, because they did not have energies to reconquer, to repopulate and to make produce the own land. They had to invent their Spain.
Since then, Castile signs with a pseudonym: Spain. It is the signature of its failure.
Castile, in substituting itself for the idea of Spain, has been denationalized unawarely and, with the colonization of the peripheral peoples, has denationalized these peoples, without from the set appeared a new nationality. As results, we do not have an authentically Castilian Castile, neither a Catalonia Catalan enough, nor a Basque Euskadi, nor a Galícia Galician, nor an Andalusian Andalusia. And, because of that, we do not have Spain.
The “Spain One” is a violence that can only be effective with the dictatorship. A Spanish dictatorship will never permit a true federation, because the federal system deadens the repressive efficiency of a central dictatorship.
However, a democracy that is it really, will end spontaneously in a federation. Because the true democracy does not recognize only the rights of the individuals, but also those of the groups. A unitary democracy is not a democracy.
The fault of the liberal democracy has been of not recognizing the rights of another group than the political party. It has not thought of the classes nor of the peoples.
To intend to democratize the unitary Spain, is an inconsistency. It is to intend the freedom to coexist with the tyranny. The unitary Spain will always be a colonial violence, with the acquisitive tensions of the center fighting against the liberating tensions of the subjugated peoples. Tensions that will only be able to be dominated for
a dictatorial system. Because a true democracy would bring Spain to the reform of the state and to the recognition of the independence of the peninsular peoples.
The centralism in Spain has been the crutch of the caciquism and viceversa. The people not having some near and known representatives who were interested for its near problems. It had to resort to the caciques, people not always necessarily bad, to whom it could see every day closely and of which requested the mediation to solve the local problems that are, in the end, the primary problems of the men.
The caciquism has been a marginal institution of the unitary state but, in this case, very explainable and almost necessary. Extralegal, irregular and underground institution, which has made possible the communication of a part of the people, the one best placed, with the power.
But that it created some local powers as abusive as the central power, and that the “Spain One” converted into a constellation of kingdoms of taifas [Muslim kingdom].
It is that the centralism does not join, but, at a long term, mixes and divides.
For the Castilian democrats, the Franco dictatorship is heavy, but it is Castilian. For the Catalans it is doubly onerous: because it is a dictatorship and because it is foreign.
How can we be in favor or against the “Principles of the Movimiento [pro-Franco]”, if the called “National Movimiento” does not have principles?
The first ones to defeat the “Movimiento” have been the usufructuaries of the victory.
When God wants to punish some people he sends it a providential man.
It is very difficult that a subversive movement, even the more justified triumphant revolution, it does not degenerate into personalistic, bureaucratic and police dictatorship, which it manages to make hateful the ideas that had promoted it.
Many triumphant revolutions, more that a change of system, have brought a change of persons. In these cases becomes more effective a sustained evolution than a revolution does. The ideological evolution, when it has taken in the mentality of the masses is always irreversible.
None of the two Spanish republics did not make a true revolution because none of them knew how to apply the basic remedy, the only truly subversive, revolutionary one: the till the end federalism. Every unitary revolution that is produced in Spain will always be a change of tyrants but with the same tyranny.
Spain is nothing more than the fancy dress of the Castilian racism.
The Castilians, people subjugated from the Austrias and from the Inquisition, that can not command at their home, feel an instinctive taste to command at home of the other ones. Like those husbands who can not say nothing at home and, in compensation, are the most authoritarian and cruel for their subordinates of outside.
The Castilians only understand a form of freedom: the “freedom of empire”. Freedom to command at home of the other ones.
Spain is a prison of men and of peoples.
Quite a lot of part of the Iberian Peninsula is more north of Africa than south of Europe.
The Catalan nationalists, because of the only fact of being enemies of the official Spain, we are friends of the real Spain, of the peninsular people oppressed secularly by the official Spain.
Everybody is only who can managed to be, nobody arrives beyond. The poor persons who can only manage to be Spanish have to make do with this. Cánovas del Castillo already said it: “They are Spaniards those ones who can not be nothing else”.
The “glorious” official history of Spain is the history of the oligarchies of the country. The people are not use there. Spain has never had imagination of progress. It has always been the pure reaction. Not even it has known how to copy only from outside. When it has made it, it has damaged what it has copied.
It has not known how to import the progressive ideas that it needed so much. Reactionary ideas, however, it has not needed to import them any more. These ones it already knows to manufacture. Such endemic reactionary movement has created the anarchism and the apoliticism. Here nobody can believe of good faith in a socialism of state. It would be the failure of the socialism. The Spanish State will always be a gloomy and terrifying put-up job.
On the 30th September of 1922, in the first congress of all the Soviet republics, gathered in Moscow, the pact of formation of the U.S.S.R. is adopted. The name of Russia, of bad tsarist remembrance, it is put to one side premeditatedly and is substituted for that of Union of Socialists Soviet Republics. Also here it would be convenient to us to put to one side the fateful name of Spain, of tyrannical and dictatorial aftertaste. But without substitute it for the name of a new imperialism.
In the name of Spain have been imposed secularly to us all the injustices, all the arbitrariness, all the depredations, all running over.
In the name of Spain they deprive us of being Catalans, of having own community personality in front of the world. In this name they have stolen us the political freedoms and the human freedoms. They have deprived us from the use of the education in our language, they have wanted for us to uproot of the history.
At the shout of “Hurrah for Spain” the soldiers assaulted the premises of the Cucut and of La Veu de Catalunya in 1906. At the shout of “Hurrah for Spain” the supporters of Franco assaulted the power in 1936. At the shout of “Hurrah for Spain” they have imposed us silence, they have executed us, have invaded us, have colonized us and have cleaned out our pockets. The gloomy name of Spain has served all the colonialism, all the inquisitions, all the exploitation, all genocide, to protect all the ambitions, all tyrannies. Neither any man nor any people of the Peninsula will not be able consider itself freed, while we will not have erased of the map the funereal name of Spain.
The name and the myth of Spain have been used as a formula alienating of the popular masses. And, generally, the working crowds have swallowed it. And already we see what has given them Spain.
They have made Spain for us as supreme reality, as ideal purpose. And Spain, along religious wars, of endless civil wars and of constant repression, has got paid itself a severe tribute of lives.
In all times the “Spaniard” worker, forgetting every that of the “proletarian brothers” and the solidarity of class, has given generously -stupidly- the life for the myth of Spain. And when Spain had to give the life to him, it has paid him with a passport, a suitcase of wood and a ticket of RENFE [Spaniard railway] to go to search work abroad.
Currently the name of Spain is useful for numbing the masses entranced in the sports. The mass needs a collective enthusiasm; politician therefore. But Spain does not allow it collective enthusiasm authentically political, or of group, or of class or of community national. The sport has been the substitute and the agglutinative commonplace. And the people, entranced in front of the television, have swallowed the pill.
Who invented the word “Spain” and “Spaniard” discovered a narcotic.
The Spanish flag, the one that has supplanted our ancient and glorious Catalan flag here, it was invented late (1785) by a Bourbon, by Charles III. Not as a flag of the Spains, but as a flag of a unitary state and it does not represent nothing else than the institution that has given shape to the centralism: the Spanish monarchy. Because of that only the monarchists recognize it as a their.
Argued flag, unedited, without glory not even history. That it has never waved in Sicily, nor in Naples, neither in Sardinia, nor in Neopàtria [Neohomeland]. That it did not triumph in Las Navas de Tolosa, nor in Lepant. That it did not enter triumphantly into Valencia with the Conqueror [James I, Catalan king], nor in Granada, with the Catholic Kings, or in Tunis with Charles I. And that it did not disembarked with Colom in the Americas, and was never hoisted by the great “conquerors”. Unknown by the Cid and by the Great Captain. The one that never made Arabs nor Turks tremble, not even presided over the terrifying step of the regiments [tercios] of Flanders. That it has never flown in Portugal nor in Gibraltar. The one that lately has cost a million lives [in the Civil War]. Too expensive flag for such little glory.
Non found in books, arbitrary and artificial flag like the state that represents. That it has presided, however, over the Spanish withdrawal from all continents. That in 1931 it was lowered by the same people and that, not knowing other victories than the ones attained in civil wars, it has ended up presiding over the monopolies and the bureaucratic offices, which are the mummified expression of “the secular inefficiency of the Spanish State”.
In the set of peoples that integrate the current Spain we could add two “nationalities” more: the army and the bureaucracy. Not only they are some States in the State, but some mentalities distant of the people and inassimilable.
In the democratic countries the army is an instrument of the politics. In the communist countries it is an instrument of the Party. “The Party commands the rifle, and we will never allow that the rifle commands the Party” (Marx). In the fascist countries the army was an instrument of the dictator. In other countries, politics, party and dictator are an instrument of the army.
We have nothing against the soldiers, but against the militarism. And this to save the honor from the soldiers. As we have nothing against the clergymen, but against the clericalism.
The militarism as an element of subversion only has possibilities in the underdeveloped countries.
Any conscious nationality, or in the power, or in the secrecy, can not be without a form or another of army.
It is necessary to go to a new idea about the army in time of peace. The army, whether it is on duty compulsory or is professional, has to be defeudalized and democratized.
The army does not have to be the jailer of the popular freedoms nor the supplement of the political police.
It is a century and half ago since the Spanish army saves Spain and yet it has not succeeded doing it. The winning army has got paid for itself the victory, not only with honors, but also with fees. The soldiers on active service and the retired soldiers with all the payroll and placed in strategic places of the state bureaucracy, form the nucleus and the support of the new class and are the true owners of the State. For them there is not social nor political problem any more. But the Spain remains to make. Unlucky the people than can not save itself.
It would be desirable for the Spanish army an inner awareness similar to the one that keeps on carrying out the Church, which leads it to ashamed of the hateful role that the Franco’s regime has assigned to it and returns the honor to it of being, not the enemy and the jailer, but the true defender of the people and of its freedoms.
The difficulty is that, if the Church has had a popular basis, the army does not have it, because the private [soldier] is not part, neither as a mentality nor as a class, of the army. And every renovative idea always appears from the basis, it never comes from above.
The Spanish army has everything: power, money, honors… It only lacks the popularity.
Nacionalisme català. Idees i pensaments, by Mossèn Josep Armengou, pages 73-96
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Els pobles-autonomies sense Estat amb més ateus (Principat i Euskadi) són molt nacionalistes però també molt reprimits (i el Principat espoliat econòmicament). L’ateisme a Espanya és menor, almenys el declarat, i tampoc no sol ser tan cristianòfob com ací. Allà prefereixen la hipocresia a l’ateisme.
A Catalunya hi ha massa ràbia, i la passió política és poc respectuosa.