There is no oppressed Spanish-speaking minority. The ones refusing to learn Catalan are not being prosecuted or discriminated in an official way, and unofficially no less than a Catalan would be discriminated in the rest of Spain (bigots exist everywhere). Catalan and Spanish are both official languages in the region and any government worker will attend you in any of those languages, and again, save for the minority assholes, you won’t have a problem living in Catalonia without speaking Catalan.
The main problem is the radicalization of nationalism, a push that started ~10 years ago by the PP in an effort to capture the votes from the far right by demonizing any non-central movement, but mainly concentrating on Catalonia’s efforts for self-determination (at that point it was not a secessionist movement, as the majority of Catalans simply wanted conditions similar to the ones offered to Basque country, another region of Spain that has a great degree of autonomy). Later, this movement was co-opted mainly by the Catalan right party CiU, who joined efforts with ERC (left-ish Catalan party) to polarize the Catalan people.
This polarization has been a very successful smokescreen that has served well to hide the corruption among the main governing parties: from the embezzling cases of PP and PSOE, to the destruction of Catalan healthcare at the hands of CiU, everything was hidden behind the struggle for secession and the efforts to contain it.
As the situation has become more and more polarized, there has been a resurgence of far-right groups, mainly on the Spanish side, thanks to the lenience justice tends to show to them, allowing them to act without fear of retaliation in most cases, while mercilessly crushing any reactionary movement destined to contain them (in short, Spain defends fascists, and detains anti-fascists). It also helps most reactionary movements are grass-roots oriented, while there is a lot of money (of “unknown” origin) helping these far-right groups to succeed.
In the week of protests we’ve been suffering, we can see an emerging pattern:
- The protesters meet at 19:00, the protest starts and keeps peaceful
- At 21:00, as people is start dispersing, the police charges.
- At the same time, some of the people start to make barricades setting fire to trash containers.
I have first hand accounts of friends of mine trying, unsuccessfully, to contain these “radicals”. Unlike some press say, they are not police -most of them anyway-, but simply angry young people who think the protest should escalate to a battle against the power. They tend to move in big groups, which makes difficult for protesters to stop them - they risk starting a mass brawl, something that will have the same effect as burning the containers.
Also I would like to point that these “poorer Spanish-speaking Catalonians” have been also part of this polarization, and we can see at most of these counter-protests “for the unity of Spain” a lot of people Nazi-saluting, sporting francoist flags and, with the complicity of the police forces, harassing Catalan protesters.
Finally, as I suggest with most of my foreign friends (as well as my local friends who understand English), the The Guardian Catalonia feed is the best source we have, as it is doing a fair coverage (not leaning one side or the other, and giving voice to both) of the events. I specially recommend the article “Catalonia’s separatists were jailed for sedition, but brought down by hubris” as basically doing a very good job of summarizing the failings of both sides.
As a personal note, being born in the late seventies of Extremaduran (one of the poorest regions of Spain) immigrants, I benefited of a bilingual education and while I do not want “my Cataluña” to secede from Spain, I support the right to decide, and would like if my government stopped using the plight of Catalonia as an excuse for everything that goes wrong with my country, and adopted policies similar to the ones in UK.
