Josep Martí Blanch
Tuesday, 10/01/2019 – 22:01
Talk show of Jordi Basté in Rac1. A few minutes past nine. Through the television sets of the studio, the participants observe scandalized images of the police opprobrium with which the day begins. Violence, fierceness against defenseless citizens. Anger, helplessness, some tear. That is my first memory of 1-O two years later. No one has apologized from the State institutions for that free orgy of violence, the only one to date in the entire procés. And they should. They will not do it.
Just as the pro-sovereignty side should apologize for altering the rules of the democratic functioning of our society, by passing on September 6 and 7 a couple of despotic laws that sought to consecrate the authenticating value the 1-O could not have when it was already known by then that it would not count on the minimum guarantees and that could not be anything different than a new 9-N. Apologies that should also refer to the shameful declaration of independence of 27-O, made against half of Catalonia (the constitutionalist) and tricking the other half (the pro-sovereignty one). These apologies will not exist either.
Crazy times
The two paragraphs you have read so far are enough for one to be shot, dialectically, twice. Can you be a dangerous separatist taking part in a coup and a traitor or botifler at the same time? In these crazy times we have to live in it is clear the answer is yes. I accept both qualifications willingly, especially since the profile of those who usually utter them makes one receive them as a compliment.
In February 2018, I put an end to the book ‘How we won the procés and lost the Republic’. In the last pages, I pointed out the error of placing the subsequent analysis of the events of October 2017 in terms of winners and losers: “everyone loses by having overvalued their strengths and belittled those of the adversary”. The evolution of events has not altered the validity of the assertion. Everyone and all of us, without exception, keep losing. And the list of liabilities is going to gain weight in the coming days.
Too many people and groups, 24 months after the 1-O, continue to work in scenarios of enemy surrender. I write ‘enemy’ conscientiously, because for those who dream in capitulations there are no adversaries. Take as an example the embarrassing exercise of nationalpopulism of the spokeswoman for Ciudadanos, Lorena Roldán, in the last plenary session of the Parliament trying to take advantage of the crimes of ETA in Vic. Or the last manifesto of the Defense Committees of the Republic (“we will be the ones who will shake the enemy”), which we could ignore, in the case of people who are not in the border of institutional and political representation, if not because they always have the explicit support of the president of the Generalitat, Quim Torra. As Joan Cañete Bayle has written in this newspaper, too many people competing to create or aggravate problems instead of trying to fix them.
Nothing coming in the next few days, particularly the sentence, will cause important changes in the substance of this matter. We can get a little more angry, or maybe much more; but, since we are so much mud-caked, all this couldn’t be considered a novelty. The well can get deeper, but since we already live in it, we will not notice much the difference.
How to escape from the hole in which we – both pro-sovereignty and constitutionalists, Spain and Catalonia – are stuck for two years? The first thing is to accept resignedly that it is not possible to leave it. At least for now. It would be reasonable to hope for a stop in the digging down. But even this humble goal is too much to ask, given who has the shovel in their hands.
The general elections and 155
The call for new general elections has been enough for the 155 to become once again the main electoral offer of state-level parties with representation in Congress – with the exception of Podemos. At the same time, the pro-sovereignty side has released a new religion of a single commandment, “mass civil disobedience”. Nobody wants to realize that not one 155 after another will end with the pro-independence wish, nor that the new catechism of civil disobedience will serve for nothing else than adding more frustration and pain to the pro-sovereignty side.
Out of October 2017, both contenders should have learned a lesson: there are situations in which nobody wins and everyone loses. Far from internalizing this learning, the discourse heard with greater force and clarity remains that of the players ready to persist in mistakes already made. They keep digging in the opposite direction to the exit.
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