Here you can see Catalonia’s own riot police at work on 2011 demonstrations against local goverment’s cuts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS3sKv2F7XI
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You are blowing up a single day’s incidents in a very small number of polling stations (out of thousands) that resulted in only two hospitalizations (one heart attack, one rubber bullet to the eye).
Here you can see Catalonia’s own riot police at work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS3sKv2F7XI
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Gross manipulation. You are generalizing a 0.1% for the remaining 99.9%. Yes, a very small amount of fascist-style protesters were at the massive demonstration. What is your point?
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Here’s a fun case of subtle indoctrination to make sure infants are mentally seceded from the idea of Spain.
The mention of “Spain” in a Bugs Bunny cartoon gets deleted from local Catalan TV (“the king of Spain”, becomes simply “the king”).
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The Spanish Constitution was voted for by 90% Catalonian voters in a referendum in 1978 (one of highest percentages in Spain) with attendance of 68%. Up to year 2010, support for independence was less that 25% in own opinion polls. Most Catalans clearly adhered to the Spanish Constitution for almost 40 years, admittedly less so in the latest 7 years.
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The truth is that the whole thing is just a huge populist “demo” with no real value that will only cause a long deep fracture to the Catalan people and a significant decrease in regional GDP. For years they did not want social re-distribution, but chances are that they will not be a “donor” state anymore by the looks of things (or substantially less so)
The fact is that the current Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya has inherited some of the filonazi goals and beliefs of that faction. Not only they still have the goal to create a Catalan State, they also believe in the racial distinctiveness of the Catalan people, and they want to create a Greater Catalonia encompassing lands of other Spanish regions and of France. This is another reason why a Catalan independence would not be the end of the problem, only the beginning, and part of why it is opposed by other Spaniards. And the second Catalan nationalist party seems to have similar goals.
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A small portion of the Catalan people as well as the central Spanish government. Spain has done everything in their power to drive Catalonia towards independence.
If Spain and Catalonia are unable to talk about this, if the Spanish government is completely unable to represent the people of Catalonia, then how can Catalonia possibly be part of Spain? Spain increasingly seemed to treat Catalonia as an occupied territory with no rights of their own.
And this isn’t just these last couple of weeks; the last couple of years, the Spanish government has gone out of their way to block very reasonable Catalonian laws. How were they expecting Catalans to react to that?
It’s a sad turn of affairs, but the Spanish government is as much to blame as the Catalan separatists.
My impression is that recent Spanish governments are cracking down much harder on Catalan autonomy. That’s probably why support for independence is so much higher now.
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I’ve been to French Catalunya, and Catalan culture is really alive there.
France will never allow it of course, but I can totally understand that some people there would want to join an independent Catalunya.
My impression was that Catalan separatism comes mostly from the left, not the right. I’ve seen people complain that Madrid was feeling more and more like Franco again. And the government in Madrid is right-wing.
The official name of the nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; the SA movement was considered by some to be leftist – an hence “der sogenannter Röhm-Putsch”. Nationalism is always bad; it does not matter whether is Catalan, Spanish, or German; it does not matter whether it leans right or left.
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Traditionally only ERC, hard-left party was independentist. PDCAT, right-wing party that previously ruled Catalonia for 23 years, is now part of the independentist coalition . It does not have much to do with right and left. 3 or of 4 major parties in the central parliament (PP, right, PSOE, left, Ciudadanos, center) have been on the same line here.
The was great support for Franco in Catalonia, anyway (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75iTbWkb4kg)
What “cracking down”? Nothing significant happened. You still cannot school you child in Spanish in Catalonia, 5 channels of regional TV stations still broadcast anti-Spain hate on a daily basis (here’s a “debate”: Tarda oberta - Elpidio José Silva: "Els Jordis són innocents" - 3Cat, even if you cannot understand it it is obvious that there are not opposing views, no real debate, just 1-way opinions). In fact, the trimming by the Constitutional Court of the Catalan Statute of autonomy did not create significant changes in opinion polls or autonomic election results. Ironically, the turning point was the Catalan government service cuts due to recession that ended in nasty Catalan riot police incidents in 2001 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlGRH5uVfjs), which combined with evidences of big-time corruption by ruling party CiU, which ended up going from nationalism to independentism as a way to flee forward.
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That you bring that up, betrays your ignorance of history. The Nazi party was not remotely left-wing. They hated socialists and communists, and allied with the conservatives to gain power. Their name was merely PR to draw votes from workers.
I don’t doubt there are also right-wing people who support Catalan independence, but if all nationalism is bad, then what about the Spanish nationalism? It’s the desperate Spanish attempts to deny Catalonia its own culture and autonomy that are feeding this accelerated separatism.
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Spanish nationalism is also bad, I already said that. All nationalisms are bad.
There was a left-wing faction in the NSDAP that wanted a second social revolution that “pushed for nationalization of major industrial firms, expansion of worker control, confiscation and redistribution of the estates of the old aristocracy, and social equality”. That faction was suppressed during the Night of the Long Knives in order to appease the industrialists and the Army.
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No offense but what you say is inaccurate (that’s the elegant way of saying “a lie”). That’s why you can only give links to blogs of radicals as a reference. It’s a lie that Companys “signed hundreds of death sentences”, that he set up anything similar to concentration camps and it’s science fiction that ERC had anything to do with Nazis. He was arrested by Gestapo in France, handed over to Franco and finally executed. My reference is wikipedia.
After the coup d’état by Franco, there were uncontrolled groups of militias who killed priests and pro Franco mayors in catalan villages. That is true and it’s called “Red Terror” by historians (as opposed to “White Terror”), but the catalan government tried to arrest anybody involved in these killings and started to bring them to justice. The evolution of Franco’s Civil War prevented these trials to carry on. Franco’s justice killed many people with summary executions. There were no summary executions under catalan justice.
Franco won the war and everybody knows the rest. Spain is the second country in the world (after Cambodia) with the higher number of people whose mortal remains have never been recovered nor identified. Why? Because spanish government have repeatedly refused to look for them and allow their families to give them a dignified burial. “They are the losers of the war”.
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I was there, I know all about it.
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your post being the notable exception, of course, new community member.
And you are powerless to change your perspective, we understand. They fools, You wise. Them them them making it worse. Sure thing compadre.
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Always already.
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The “Beefsteak Nazis” (“brown on the outside, red on the inside”) of the SA were not really considered left-wing by anyone, except as a pretext for killing some of them during Reich Murder Week. By joining the Nazi party they forfeited any claim to aspiring to socialist ideals, instead just shifting the excuse for their authoritarian and bigoted thuggery to a movement that incorporated the word “socialist” into their name for cynical reasons (see also the various Communist “democratic peoples’ republics” or the “Holy Roman Empire”).
Any pretenses of “socialism” on the part of the Nazis amounted to very limited state benefits for a very limited group of citizens, as is the case with most right-wing populists (including those in the U.S.). In the end, fascist ideals are not the traditional socialist ones of universal benefits and equality for everyone, but a rather a debased form of socialism grounded in hierarchical power and exclusion that involves theft from scapegoat groups and ends up serving a select group of overlords and their cronies (e.g. Robert Ley, leader of the Nazis’ ersatz national labour union).
As far as Catalan Nazi sympathisers during the interwar period go, there were such people in every industrialised nation-state and separatist movement during that dark period of poverty, inequality and desperation (plus ca change…). Spain bears extra shame in that department not only in having that kind of slimeball as leader during that period and during the war, but in his continuing to hold onto power well into the 1970s. Sadly, Franco’s spirit lives on, judging by Madrid’s authoritarian and nationalist bungling of the current situation.
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