16 March: Humiliate and destroy

Vicenç Villatoro
1 min

WriterImmediately following Strasbourg’s slap in the face for the Spanish judicial system, and coinciding with the Spanish deputy PM’s extremely aggressive public statements, a police operation, more symbolic and headline-grabbing than practical in nature, took place in the offices of the presidency of the Catalan government and the headquarters of the cultural association Òmnium Cultural.

The message is clear: faced with what they call the ‘secessionist defiance’, the Spanish state has objectives that it refuses to give up, not even due to international pressure —which so far has been weak— whatever the response from the pro-independence movement. The state believes this defiance offers the possibility of solving the Catalan problem once and for all. And such a solution obviously doesn’t involve persuasion, or even defeating it, in the strictest sense of the word. It involves destroying its roots. This means humiliating it to start with. Secondly, dismantling or debasing what it considers to be the instruments of Catalanism: the Catalan police force, the public broadcasting corporation and the school system, but above all, the Catalan government itself as a self-governing institution, upon which everything else depends. And finally, politically deactivating –even if it means ruining their lives– a whole generation of pro-independence political and social leaders.

The message is that it’s underway and that they have no intention of stopping. I don’t think they’ll get away with it, but a lot of people are bound to suffer in the meantime.

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