Josep Martí Blanch, 11 November 2021
Cuixart in a recent act in Vic, Òmnium Cultural / ACN
They will not do it again, nor will we do it again, nor will you do it again.
Everyone chooses the verb form that fits his or her creed. Jordi Cuixart, president of Òmnium, is wrong in his recently published book: Aprenentatges i una proposta (Ara Llibres) presented on Tuesday at the Sala La Paloma in Barcelona. There will not be a new referendum like the one in 2017, outsourced to civil society like the 9-N consultation of 2014 and therefore impossible to legitimise democratically, even if it was hidden behind some botched disconnection laws that gave it the appearance of being decisive and binding.
There will not be one for the reason expressed in the first part of the book’s title: the lessons learned. Because everyone has learned things, not just those who have been in prison (unfairly, in the opinion of this writer, and with particular cruelty in the cases of Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart). That his has been a more sacrificial apprenticeship, and that this gives him an aura of credibility and almost infallibility among the most dedicated of those who listen to his arguments, does not make it coincidental or morally superior to what the rest of the political actors and citizens, including many pro-independence supporters, have also done. And it is this multiple learning from others, from the others, which makes it impossible for the Cuixart route to have any chance.
The mistake was the unforgivable forgetfulness that in Catalonia there are not only pro-independence supporters.
The proposal is to call another referendum, without adjectives, as the president of Òmnium himself insists, when the pro-independence civil society has been strengthened. That the institutions make it binding at the same time as the Catalans defend the result through civil disobedience, including here the need for tens of thousands to be willing to go to jail in order to collapse the penitentiary and judicial system, forcing international institutions to act. It is a carbon copy of the disaster that has already been played out, only now it would be defended in the street with the bodies of the people, an option that was already contemplated four years ago and which was not finally put into practice for fear, not of the violence that the state could exercise, but of the inevitable conflict of unknown magnitude that it would have provoked between Catalans of different sensibilities and political affiliations.
More than an apprenticeship, the proposal of the president of Òmnium, so celebrated by sovereignism insofar as he is now the only asset capable of generating certain mini-parentheses with the appearance of unity, seems to be a persistence in the main error of those not-so-distant days. The mistake, from which lessons can be drawn, was not, as is still insisted, to underestimate the State’s capacity to respond – including violence and in some cases a state of judicial emergency – but the wilful and unforgivable forgetfulness that in Catalonia there are not only pro-independence supporters and that they are not counted on the fingers of one hand, but by the millions, to the point of reaching, to do the easy maths, half of those who graze on this land.
This is the main lesson that seems to be unwilling to be practised, despite the fatuous appeals to broaden the base. And it is, on the contrary, the most relevant, because it points to the lack of democratic legitimisation of what happened in 2017 and of what may happen in the future if it follows the plans of that monument to nonsense.
Cuixart’s proposal has a very clear virtue regarding the political reality of sovereignty. It moves the ball forward and underpins the idea of a new onslaught – the new buzzword – which, this time, will be successful because the lessons have been learned.
Moreover, it does not anger anyone in the Catalan panorama. It creates an illusion and puts lubricant in the engine of independence, which has seized up from a practical point of view, despite its institutional strength. Only that it does so by insisting on blowing up a balloon that it burst four years ago. And this is an initiatory apprenticeship: if the balloon has a hole in it, whether the lungs feel like blowing it out again is of little importance.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20211111/7853357/no-volveremos-hacer.html
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