Vicente Serrano 19/07/2020
Member of the Board of Directors of the Progressive Citizen Alternative Association ||
In December 2009 I wrote and published the article that I reproduce below on the website of the Progressive Citizen Alternative. Almost eleven years have passed and the panorama is bleak. They say that justice is slow, but time has come. The pity is that in these eleven years the State did nothing and allowed the monster to grow.
Pujol’s legacy goes beyond the billions swindled into the public or common good: Spain is installed in a unique existential crisis in its history. The pseudo-left that governs us blurring its objectives and the right kicking. Both accomplices throughout these eleven years, and before, of the excesses of the nationalists. Little vision of the State that seems not to improve.
In 2014 I published article “300, Pujol and the Catalan caste”, both in Rebellion and in La Marea, that offended more than one, so much that they no longer publish me. In case it is deleted here on my blog. Then I was in Podemos; After a while, the bandage fell off.
I leave you with what was written more than two decades ago,
Vicente Serrano, Barcelona, 17 July 2020
Let the cat out of the bag
“The rule of law is in danger in Spain”
Last October 30, as president of the Progressive Citizen Alternative Association, I sent a burofax to the State Attorney General, with a copy to the Special Anticorruption Prosecutor and to the Superior Prosecutor of Catalonia. It reported on the statements of Mr. Jordi Pujol i Solé, made on television, in which he threatened to “let the cat out of the bag” and talk about corruption in other parties, in the event that new cases of corruption continued to appear in which members of his party were involved.
I asked the prosecutors to proceed to take statement to Mr. Pujol first: so that he would provide the information he has about possible corruption crimes, and second: that they assess whether he had committed any crime of concealment of crime.
To date, the response of the prosecutors has been silence. Mutism has become a constant of the Administration, like the one suffered after the complaints to the Delegation of Finance of Catalonia, which allowed Mr. Millet to continue using public money to illegally enrich himself and finance his friends (associations and parties) from the nationalistic environment.
After the Palau de la Música Catalana (Millet) case, there are more cases of corruption involving senior officials from the time when Mr. Pujol held the Presidency of the “Generalitat de Catalunya”, to which one can add those of the Mayor of Santa Coloma of the socialist elite. It was not Pujol who initiated the threat of letting the cat out of the bag, but someone else did it.
On November 20, I wrote an article on my blog about corruption in Catalonia and its specificities: its intimate connection with the national construction project. The aforementioned cases leave no room for doubt … And, if something is missing to confirm it, you just have to see how little the debate lasted among the Catalan political class: four promises of honesty and blah blah blah blah .. Today they are already occupied with the important thing, what they have in their head and his pocket full: sovereignty, status, the right to decide, independence. “Let’s work!”, the subsidized newspapers, “get an editorial!” We must make clear what the “Statute referendum” did not make clear, that “Catalonia” is a single people. No, Catalonia is not a single people like the “one, great and free” Spain (the francoist Spain wasn’t that either)
And it is not “one” because here those who are involved in the national construction do not exceed a third of the voters (Yes, I know that 36% of the voters who voted yes to “l’estatut”, but among those there were plenty of social climbers, upstarts, and toadies, or at least helpful fools and more than one grateful charnego (Spanish migrant settled in Catalonia). The bad thing is that inside that third one finds the entire Catalan political class and its upstarts (the distance between the leaders and Catalan society is increasing and the PSC will have something to do with it). Don’t you think so, President Montilla?
It is not “great” because we are only little more than seven million citizens, and the deeds of our ancestors are common and similar to those of the rest of the Spanish and Europeans; that is to say: internal fights between nobles. If even “Vifre el Pilos” (Vifredo el Velloso) was a Francoist hero.
And it is not “free” either, because a society is free when its citizens are. We cannot say that this is the case in Catalonia. When the policy carried out by its “Govern” (Catalan government) fines those who label it in Castillan (or Spanish), when it imposes as a vehicular language of teaching one of the two that are spoken and are official (that was also done by Franco, although the “tortilla” was the other way around), and when, above all, it tries to impose, and is the most serious, a collective identity on all citizens and not only at school. In any social environment in which you disagree with what is politically correct (nationalism) you are automatically stigmatized and branded as Spanish and fascist. That pressure is unacceptable in a democratic society.
The editorial blackmails and threatens the Constitutional Court as if all Catalans would subscribe to it, it is evident that more than half of the population has neither read it nor is interested. But as the thing is to continue covering the shame of the corruptions that spread throughout the Catalan geography, there is nothing better than calling for self-determination referendums, as if they were flower games.
They are very reminiscent of the acts of exaltation of the Francoist caudillo although the new caudillo is sublimated to become a holy grail to guide us and which takes the form of an ethereal entity called independence, an euphemism that is nothing more than a secession. Like those of the Italian Northern League, something stale and gruesome: we are rich and we do not want to be with the poor – and some still believe it-.
It is evident that Catalan society is a society with a latent and repressed conflict, a conflict in which the subordinate classes undergo the entire process of cultural assimilation carried out by the political class. The so-called working class in its conflict with capital has been abandoned in Catalonia by the political groups that traditionally championed its struggle: the left. The official left, including the extra-parliamentary one, has embraced the national construction project and has generated a paralyzing schizophrenia among its ranks: “I vote to the left, how am I going to vote for the right-wing Francoist ?, although that left nullifies me culturally, socially, politically, unionly and economically ”.
It is essential to create a new left that makes clear the reactionary character of nationalism, which is a response to the ideals of freedom and equality that emanated from 1789. The substitution of the person as the ultimate subject of political action and making him an object at the service of the new political subject; the nation, what it is achieving is to forget about the objectives of emancipation of the person and transformation of society.
The sentence that the Constitutional Court has to issue, on the statute and that it has not yet issued, provokes preventive reactions in the Catalan political class as Bush did with Iraq: uniformer editorials, referendums, demonstrations for the “right to decide“, etc … And this is so because they are very afraid of the sentence. They know that their “Statut” is unconstitutional in many of its sections, they impose obligations on their citizens (they want us “subjects”), they establish equal relations with the State, etc.
If the TC does not touch a comma, the ego will rise and they will request more and more. If you correct a point and apart, the “offense” to the dignity of Catalonia will be served and justify your new flight forward. Shoemaker…. The one you messed with, the one you’re messing with!
The Constitutional Court must be brave and leave in its just terms the “Statut” declaring unconstitutional those articles that contravene the Constitution, because if it does not do so, the rule of law will be in danger. It is necessary to redirect things to their place. It is evident that the Spanish Government and Parliament have not done so. It is evident that the two great political parties have been unable to do what the majority of society demands: to have a sense of the State, agreeing on capital issues for the survival not only of the State, but of democracy and equality of citizens. Its continuous and alternate pact with nationalists to secure power has led us to an increasingly deteriorated situation. There is a lack of leadership in Spanish society that unites us and makes sense of our coexistence.
The TC has to resolve the unconstitutionality appeals of the “Statut” and, then, the big national parties PSOE and PP plus IU and UPyD have to face a pact that reforms the Constitution, establishing the powers of the central government and of each autonomy that close the autonomic model, and prepare an electoral law that makes the political equality of citizens effective, so that the value of each Spaniard’s vote is equal to that of another, regardless of where they live.
It would also be desirable that each agency and the people who occupy the positions of maximum responsibility in them fulfill their mission, as is the case of the prosecutors to whom I addressed a little over a month ago.
In Spain, throughout, also in Catalonia, it is necessary to let the cat out of the bag and that all corruptions come to light, whoever falls. The suffering citizen cannot be required to accept sanctions and surcharges when he sees that the corrupt are still at home enjoying the money illegally obtained. Only through transparency and honesty can a truly free and democratic society be created. It is also necessary to increase the form of citizen participation in political decision-making and control over what the elect do with our votes and our money.
Vicente Serrano
Barcelona, December 12, 2009.
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