September 20, 2017. Flowers and a banner reading ' I want to vote' on the floor as Spanish Guardia Civil police officers stand guard close to Catalan Governance Ministry in Barcelona. Jordi Boixareu/Press Association. All rights reserved.
When the Spanish Government overturned the Catalan
Statute of Autonomy in 2010, even after it had been approved by an ample
majority of voters in a referendum that had actually been permitted by the state,
I said nothing because I wasn’t Catalan; when
the Catalans then asked the state to engage in talks on federalism and the
state refused, I said nothing because I wasn’t Catalan; when
they asked for a new referendum and were told “we will never even talk about
this”, I said nothing because I wasn’t Catalan; when
the state denied Catalans any possibility for being listened to, sabotaged
their security and taxes, undermined their schools and administration in order
to use these as arguments to cover up their own corruption and play the victim, I
said nothing because I wasn’t Catalan; when
the state throttled their freedom of expression, intercepted their mail and shut
down their economy, when uniformed men entered their political organizations and
their media, when it confiscated publications, closed websites and arrested
mayors, I said nothing because I didn’t read this press and hadn’t voted for those
mayors. I even believed they deserved it for complaining so much and hoped they’d
be silenced.
So
when they broke my community’s rules of coexistence, violated my right to control
my administration, betrayed my security and used me as cannon fodder I
responded but, by then, irrationality had pervaded everything. They only had to
say “that’s illegal” and everyone kowtowed.
The official media has harped on and on, hammering
into people’s heads, all around Spain, the notion that what large numbers of
Catalans are asking for is illegal and evil. Prime Minister Rajoy has even said
that “what is illegal is antidemocratic”, conveniently forgetting that it used
to be precisely the opposite: it’s the power of the people that turns the
illegal into the democratic. And if this isn’t so, go and tell the women whose
right to vote was denied until very recently, go and tell homosexuals,
divorcees, conscientious objectors and other people whose way of life was, for
one reason or another, prohibited not so long ago.
They’ve instilled the idea that a good part of
Catalonia’s population deserves to be crushed, bloodily if necessary, that it
deserves police searches, arrests, and outrageous situations such as might be
expected of Turkey, or China, or some despicable dictatorship.
“They deserve it”: people speak as if these things,
these grotesque scenes, were not part and parcel of this Spain which they so fervently
desire to see united.
I understand. It may look as if Catalonia’s trying to wreck
something sacred, namely Unity, something which all the maxims declare is the
only recipe for Strength. “Unity is strength”, they say, and may anyone who
speaks out against unity burn in hell.
But if we think back a bit, the myth of Unity is truly
a horror story.
History aside, one only has to remember how many lives
were destroyed by the indissoluble union of marriage. We now think of this as
barbaric.
It’s not union that makes strength and, still less,
forced union.
I’ve spent many years of my life saying that democracy
is anything but unity. Democracy is coexistence with differences among separate,
free, consenting adult individuals, which is to say among people who are autonomous and
responsible for themselves.
Catalonia’s not going anywhere.
Catalonia’s only fighting for its rights in its own
way.
It just wants to stop pleading.
It’s truly unsustainable that there’s no way of having
a referendum in Spain. I’m not just referring to this one. I mean any
referendum. The law decrees that it’s the government that decides whether there
can be a referendum or not. And, naturally, the government of Spain always says
no. If this isn’t so, go and tell the PAH (Platform for People Affected by
Mortgages) which collected one and a half million signatures in a popular
legislative initiative (ILP) to change Spain’s foreclosure law and, though an
ILP only needs 500,000 signatures in order to be put before parliament, the Government refused to discuss the issue.
The bottom line is that, according to Spanish law, any
referendum is illegal.
But perhaps it might be more accurate to say that
certain approaches to governance in Spain are barbaric.
The point is not that Catalans can’t have a referendum
because the Constitution doesn’t give them this power. It’s that no Spanish
people can have a referendum. Not about independence and not about any other
matter. Negotiated or not negotiated. Full stop.
Not just for Catalonia
So what Catalonia is asking for is not just for
Catalonia. It’s because the centralism of the powers-that-be in Madrid, and of
all the parties that egg them on with the chumminess of parliamentary rituals,
ignores the peoples of Spain, using them merely as raw material to extract what
they can, regarding them as colonies and even, as we have seen lately with certain
questions of security, as cannon fodder (note: the Government excluded the Catalan police from Europol and the Catalan police are not receiving all the
information about jihadi terrorists in Catalonian territory). Once more all this is about
covering up their own privileges, abuse, and corruption, or simply protecting the
patronage networks of each and every party.
The enemies aren’t the Catalans who want independence.
The enemies are a government and political parties implacable and bull-headed
that asphyxiate and trample all over the rest of us.
This is why I’ll be one more person voting in and
defending the ballot on 1 October. It won’t just be for Catalonia but also for
the organised, non-delegated voice that people everywhere should have; I have
fought for this all my life.
The defence of unity as ideology terrifies me. Old and
new parties are founded on the fallacy of ideological unity. They are very
unlikely to be the ones who will get us out of this mess if there is no
solidarity among people from one end of the country to the other.
For years I
have been advocating a new kind of politics, one that’s not based on faith and
ideology but on people coming together strategically and temporarily to solve
the problems they share. People can’t really be together in the name of unity.
This can only happen when, respecting the freedom of each and every person,
they have interests in common. The peoples of Spain have blood ties and their
prosperity and democracy are naturally united. An independent Catalonia isn’t
going anywhere, but will only gain the manoeuverability which it has for so long
been denied.
The
central government thinks in terms of subordination. It can’t envisage free
people who are able to advance by themselves. I could give a thousand examples
but the clearest one is the fact that we are prevented from communicating. There
is no Mediterranean corridor and no Atlantic corridor (the roads connections in
the circumference of the country, everything must go through
Madrid.) This is a preposterous situation which can only be explained by archaic
centralism with imperialist predilections.
The freedom Catalonia is asking for isn’t a Catalan
question.
It’s about the freedom deserved by all of Spain’s
people.
That’s why I’m going to vote on 1 October, and I’m
going to vote Yes.
I ask, I hope and it’s my fervent desire that, on October 1, the people of Spain won’t revel in state repression, but that they’ll proactively
prevent that repression from being executed in their name; that they’ll feel proud of
the courage, optimism and the peaceful, orderly vision of the future of their
fellow citizens who are carrying out their duty to change the unjust,
inflexible laws which are trapping us all.
____
The Spanish original of this article was first published in Público