Over three years ago a teacher in Mallorca went on hunger strike. The reason for his taking this extreme action was as a protest against the educational policies of the Bauzá government. Foremost among those policies was the attack on the use of Catalan. The adoption of the policy of TIL trilingual teaching was a thinly disguised means of undermining Catalan, and one really didn't need to be a supporter of Catalan in schools or not in order to appreciate the policy for what it was. He was a teacher of the Catalan language and of Catalan literature. His defence of both was understandable.
At the time of the protests against TIL there was a political undercurrent in addition to specifically educational opposition or a concern about an assault on Catalan culture. That undercurrent was one of independence. The hunger-striking teacher was a supporter of the independence of the Catalan Lands.
The other day the president of the Empresaris de Catalunya, Josep Bou, was warning about an "export" of the Catalan sovereignty movement to the Balearics. The warning was unnecessary. The movement is already in the Balearics and it has been here for many years. From the time of their inception in the 1970s, the PSM Mallorcan Socialists (the principal component of Més) have advocated a form of national (Mallorcan) liberation and the coming-together of the Catalan Lands.
What Josep Bou was referring to was the independence cause in Catalonia and its transfer to the Balearics. In this regard he was also a bit late. Més, David Abril most obviously, have been advancing the cause of Balearic independence. A date has been set as to when it should come about: 2030. In the context of support for Catalonia, and thus the greater good of the Catalan Lands, Més in Menorca have "recognised" the independent republic of Catalonia.
Meanwhile, there has been a call for Més and for Podemos to break their links with PSOE in the Balearic government and parliament because of the support given to the Rajoy government by PSOE nationally. This call has come from the CUP, Candidatura de Unidad Popular, the hard-left Catalonia party which backs independence. The call was specifically from the CUP in Palma, and the CUP have close ties to the radical youth group Arran, the ones who staged the anti-tourism protest by the restaurant in Palma in July and did so within a broader framework of advocating the independence of the Catalan Lands.
This independence sentiment in the Balearics is far from being anything new, but what now appears to concern the likes of Josep Bou is that it is gathering momentum. There need, he says, to be arguments which rebut this movement.
While there is a political framework that is capable of fostering this sentiment, there are other institutional frameworks about which some anxiety is being expressed because of their potential for adding to it. One institutional framework in particular - education.
There was a recent press report about pupils at a secondary school - it was in Inca - being "obliged" to take part in a form of protest in favour of the Catalonia referendum and against the police violence which occurred on the day of the referendum. As one parent put it, "the kids were being indoctrinated and presented with slogans in favour of independence and against the Spanish state".
Following this, the public prosecution service with responsibilities for minors launched an investigation into possible enforced participation in protest actions which went beyond the normal educational sphere. PSOE in the Balearics, Més and Podemos then presented a joint motion to parliament rejecting the "attacks and accusations" of political indoctrination coming from parties towards the right of centre.
Chief among those making the accusations has been Xavier Pericay, the leader of Ciudadanos (C's) in the Balearics. The C's are vehemently opposed to Catalan independence (you might have noticed this) and were indeed originally founded in Catalonia as a party as much against independence as they were against corruption.
In a lengthy interview, Pericay has gone into detail in explaining his concerns, suggesting that indoctrination can occur at conscious and the subconscious levels in schools. He said that this indoctrination can come about through teacher "inertia". Teachers are themselves unaware of operating in a particular way and adopting a dogmatic view of the world. He added that there are "militant teachers" and "professional indoctrinators", noting that there are only a few of these, but took aim at the "imposition" of Catalan by nationalists, believing that this creates their form of "microcosm", the school as a means ultimately of indoctrination.
The defence of culture and of language is a noble cause. But where are the boundaries for this defence and how does society react to their being breached? Pericay can perhaps look at the polls for an answer. The C's are gaining, while Més are going backwards.
Showing posts with label Catalan independence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catalan independence. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 08, 2017
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Celebrating Defeat: Independence And Nationalism
Might yesterday have been the last time that the Catalans celebrate their "national" day on 11 September? Could 1-O become the new 9/11? A victory, possibly Pyrrhic, to replace three hundred years and more of hurt. In Catalan legend, there was a tragedy in 1714 every bit as great as planes that were crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center.
It was Felipe V who was responsible. It took 300 hundred years for the next Felipe to ascend to the throne. The Bourbon dynasty in Spain was the creation of Felipe V. The Bourbons occupied Catalonia, took away its institutions. The Bourbons occupied Mallorca as well and cast the island adrift from the old Crown of Aragon. The Crown was dismantled by the Bourbons, an act of geopolitical regicide. Felipe VI stands to be the Bourbon monarch who witnesses the Catalan redemption: Catalonia lost and found.
If only there hadn't been the War of the Spanish Succession and the eventual consequences for Catalonia. But there was that war and there were those consequences. National days aren't typically celebrations of defeat. In Catalonia the national day remembers the fall of Barcelona. There are those who will argue that the Catalans have lived according to a culture of victimhood ever since. In Mallorca this sense of the victim is likewise said to characterise Catalan sentiment and its fellow political travellers - Republicanism and the odd claims of sovereignty.
In times past, the act of defiance, nay disobedience by Carles Puigdemont and his government would have meant only one thing. Times change. A Bourbon army will not march on Barcelona. Instead we have mayors being instructed to make polling stations available, some mayors saying they will do no such thing, the Madrid government issuing its warnings of dire consequences, and a sense that Catalan nationalism has descended into social division - contrary to the integration it has so long espoused - and even into racism directed towards the lazy Spaniard who seeks to oppress and steal a "nation's" riches.
It is said that, based on a 50% turnout, there will be a 72% majority in favour of independence. The Catalan government is not giving any indication as to what the turnout will need to be in order to validate the vote. Fifty per cent would do. What are the other fifty per cent thinking? Are they indifferent? Or do they assume that regardless of what happens on 1 October nothing will actually happen? Perhaps they are right to do so. What would be the outcome? A rogue state (nation) within a nation and within Europe. A nation defined by an act of unconstitutionality and with no recognition internationally. A vote for independence would be on the basis of a wing and a prayer. Yet it may not fly. Like experimental flight of more than a century ago it will lift off briefly and then crash to earth, caught by the branches of a tree, thrashing around in prayer of rescue. It is bizarre, even if it is understandable.
Meantime in Mallorca, the Republicans, the Pan-Catalanists and the advocates of sovereignty gather in a Palma square. Some two hundred of them lend support to Catalan independence. Members of Més, harbouring a desire of insular nationalism (Més envisage a Mallorca "republic" by 2030), join the small ranks. Numbers at a rally are not true indicators of sentiment, but they are indicators nonetheless. Mallorca harbours no desire for this nationalism, except in the view of Més and minority groups, and certainly not one that delivers itself into the clutching arms of the Catalan Lands.
Weirdly, the Crown of Aragon persists. It has a coordinator to tie together associations in Aragon, Valencia and the Balearics but not Catalonia. The coordinator accuses the Catalan government of seeking to impose Catalan language, culture and identity. Under the "lie of linguistic unity", that government wants to end what were the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Mallorca, where they have their own languages. How truly odd, especially as the Kingdom of Mallorca was but a shortlived independent phenomenon that was emasculated more than 650 years ago.
But this oddness, both in defence of Catalan independence and Mallorca as a relic from the past Crown of Aragon, is the legacy of history that cannot be shed. Old battles and old wars are constantly being refought, though now the battlegrounds are schools turned polling stations, if mayors agree, they are print shops preparing the voting papers and they are the Constitution, the model for democratic Spain. Ah yes, Spain. It is not Catalonia, and Catalonia is not Spain.
A modern, a sophisticated prescription might be federalism, of the kind advanced by PSOE, which has no more wish for Catalan independence than the Madrid PP government. But federalism sounds too cosy when compared with the stridency of nationalism, with the three hundred years of hurt, with the occupation by the Bourbons and with the celebration of defeat.
It was Felipe V who was responsible. It took 300 hundred years for the next Felipe to ascend to the throne. The Bourbon dynasty in Spain was the creation of Felipe V. The Bourbons occupied Catalonia, took away its institutions. The Bourbons occupied Mallorca as well and cast the island adrift from the old Crown of Aragon. The Crown was dismantled by the Bourbons, an act of geopolitical regicide. Felipe VI stands to be the Bourbon monarch who witnesses the Catalan redemption: Catalonia lost and found.
If only there hadn't been the War of the Spanish Succession and the eventual consequences for Catalonia. But there was that war and there were those consequences. National days aren't typically celebrations of defeat. In Catalonia the national day remembers the fall of Barcelona. There are those who will argue that the Catalans have lived according to a culture of victimhood ever since. In Mallorca this sense of the victim is likewise said to characterise Catalan sentiment and its fellow political travellers - Republicanism and the odd claims of sovereignty.
In times past, the act of defiance, nay disobedience by Carles Puigdemont and his government would have meant only one thing. Times change. A Bourbon army will not march on Barcelona. Instead we have mayors being instructed to make polling stations available, some mayors saying they will do no such thing, the Madrid government issuing its warnings of dire consequences, and a sense that Catalan nationalism has descended into social division - contrary to the integration it has so long espoused - and even into racism directed towards the lazy Spaniard who seeks to oppress and steal a "nation's" riches.
It is said that, based on a 50% turnout, there will be a 72% majority in favour of independence. The Catalan government is not giving any indication as to what the turnout will need to be in order to validate the vote. Fifty per cent would do. What are the other fifty per cent thinking? Are they indifferent? Or do they assume that regardless of what happens on 1 October nothing will actually happen? Perhaps they are right to do so. What would be the outcome? A rogue state (nation) within a nation and within Europe. A nation defined by an act of unconstitutionality and with no recognition internationally. A vote for independence would be on the basis of a wing and a prayer. Yet it may not fly. Like experimental flight of more than a century ago it will lift off briefly and then crash to earth, caught by the branches of a tree, thrashing around in prayer of rescue. It is bizarre, even if it is understandable.
Meantime in Mallorca, the Republicans, the Pan-Catalanists and the advocates of sovereignty gather in a Palma square. Some two hundred of them lend support to Catalan independence. Members of Més, harbouring a desire of insular nationalism (Més envisage a Mallorca "republic" by 2030), join the small ranks. Numbers at a rally are not true indicators of sentiment, but they are indicators nonetheless. Mallorca harbours no desire for this nationalism, except in the view of Més and minority groups, and certainly not one that delivers itself into the clutching arms of the Catalan Lands.
Weirdly, the Crown of Aragon persists. It has a coordinator to tie together associations in Aragon, Valencia and the Balearics but not Catalonia. The coordinator accuses the Catalan government of seeking to impose Catalan language, culture and identity. Under the "lie of linguistic unity", that government wants to end what were the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Mallorca, where they have their own languages. How truly odd, especially as the Kingdom of Mallorca was but a shortlived independent phenomenon that was emasculated more than 650 years ago.
But this oddness, both in defence of Catalan independence and Mallorca as a relic from the past Crown of Aragon, is the legacy of history that cannot be shed. Old battles and old wars are constantly being refought, though now the battlegrounds are schools turned polling stations, if mayors agree, they are print shops preparing the voting papers and they are the Constitution, the model for democratic Spain. Ah yes, Spain. It is not Catalonia, and Catalonia is not Spain.
A modern, a sophisticated prescription might be federalism, of the kind advanced by PSOE, which has no more wish for Catalan independence than the Madrid PP government. But federalism sounds too cosy when compared with the stridency of nationalism, with the three hundred years of hurt, with the occupation by the Bourbons and with the celebration of defeat.
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Ozzy Osborne And The Missing Horns
Start the year as you mean to go on. Or finish the year as you have been doing during the year. And the year before. I feel really sorry for the Osborne bull. What's it ever done to anyone? It stands in a field, minding its own business, and what does it get for its trouble? Some berk goes and paints it or commits other atrocities on its noble presence. Now the statue has had its horns lopped off. A kind soul will probably make sure it gets the horns back, just like someone made sure it got its tackle back when it went AWOL, but restoration can't compensate for the distress. Leave it alone.
Whenever some group or other has a political, cultural or gender beef, it heads off in the middle of the night and gives the bull a good dose of Dulux, drapes flags over it, cuts bits off and then glories in the publicity for about as long as it takes for everyone to forget (about a day, if that) or for some other group to come along and subject the bull to further propagandist indignity. The latest lot is a bunch called Arran, the name given to the youth organisation that has succeeded the Maulets. Arran, Maulets, it's the same and it's bloody angry that Catalonia and the Catalan Lands don't have independence. So angry, it has gone and de-horned the Osborne bull.
Arran timed its attack on Ozzy to coincide with the annual demo in Palma that doesn't celebrate Mallorca day. Arran, and others, would prefer that it did celebrate Mallorca day, but as it was decided some years ago that Mallorca day would be the anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Mallorca and not when Jaume I invaded, 31 December isn't Mallorca day. I hope that's cleared that up. Nevertheless, or probably because, there is, every year, this demo, which occasionally gets out of hand. It seems to have passed off without too much incident this year, but probably only because more radical elements were off in the Mallorcan countryside vandalising the statue of a bull.
Arran had staged a grand demo as part of a "platform" that comprised most of the usual Catalanist suspects. Its poster for the demo made it clear that it wasn't only about independence. It was also about socialism and feminism and possibly some other isms that there wasn't space for on the poster. I'm sorry but what has feminism got to do with independence? Indeed, what has socialism got to do with it? It's not as though Artur Mas is a card-carrying Trot or even vaguely red.
Anyway, everyone might well simply forget about the business with the bull were it not for our good friends, the Círculo Balear. For a load of Catalan independentists, be they Arran or Maulet or whoever, to mess around with the bull, protected for its artistic and heritage status (Spanish, that is), is like a red rag to a bull where the Círculo are concerned, and they, or at least their founder and restored president Jorge Campos, have had many a run-in with the Maulets in the past. And these run-ins typically end up with a "denuncia", something in which the Círculo specialises where the Maulets are concerned. The bull is no different. The Círculo has fired off a denuncia to the Guardia. It is all, I'm sorry to have to say, rather predictable. Naughty independentist boys get up to some mischief and no good, and outraged defender of all things Castellano and Spanish, Sr. Campos, drags the law in, and they, the law, must be getting pretty brassed off with being dragged into such puerility - by both sides. I don't know about the Guardia, but personally I wish a plague on both houses; they are as bad as each other.
One does wonder, given the regularity of the vandalism that the bull has to endure, whether it might not get some form of protection. It is pretty vulnerable, stuck in a field on its own, but the field might give a clue as to the security the bull could get. How about half a dozen proper bulls? All of them extremely bloody angry themselves, so that when some angry Arrans or Maulets or whoever other lunatic decides to go on a spot of nocturnal decorating, the miscreants might get rather more than they bargained for. Not a docile, inanimate animal, but some distinctly animate animals with horns that are definitely not for tampering with. Olé.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Whenever some group or other has a political, cultural or gender beef, it heads off in the middle of the night and gives the bull a good dose of Dulux, drapes flags over it, cuts bits off and then glories in the publicity for about as long as it takes for everyone to forget (about a day, if that) or for some other group to come along and subject the bull to further propagandist indignity. The latest lot is a bunch called Arran, the name given to the youth organisation that has succeeded the Maulets. Arran, Maulets, it's the same and it's bloody angry that Catalonia and the Catalan Lands don't have independence. So angry, it has gone and de-horned the Osborne bull.
Arran timed its attack on Ozzy to coincide with the annual demo in Palma that doesn't celebrate Mallorca day. Arran, and others, would prefer that it did celebrate Mallorca day, but as it was decided some years ago that Mallorca day would be the anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Mallorca and not when Jaume I invaded, 31 December isn't Mallorca day. I hope that's cleared that up. Nevertheless, or probably because, there is, every year, this demo, which occasionally gets out of hand. It seems to have passed off without too much incident this year, but probably only because more radical elements were off in the Mallorcan countryside vandalising the statue of a bull.
Arran had staged a grand demo as part of a "platform" that comprised most of the usual Catalanist suspects. Its poster for the demo made it clear that it wasn't only about independence. It was also about socialism and feminism and possibly some other isms that there wasn't space for on the poster. I'm sorry but what has feminism got to do with independence? Indeed, what has socialism got to do with it? It's not as though Artur Mas is a card-carrying Trot or even vaguely red.
Anyway, everyone might well simply forget about the business with the bull were it not for our good friends, the Círculo Balear. For a load of Catalan independentists, be they Arran or Maulet or whoever, to mess around with the bull, protected for its artistic and heritage status (Spanish, that is), is like a red rag to a bull where the Círculo are concerned, and they, or at least their founder and restored president Jorge Campos, have had many a run-in with the Maulets in the past. And these run-ins typically end up with a "denuncia", something in which the Círculo specialises where the Maulets are concerned. The bull is no different. The Círculo has fired off a denuncia to the Guardia. It is all, I'm sorry to have to say, rather predictable. Naughty independentist boys get up to some mischief and no good, and outraged defender of all things Castellano and Spanish, Sr. Campos, drags the law in, and they, the law, must be getting pretty brassed off with being dragged into such puerility - by both sides. I don't know about the Guardia, but personally I wish a plague on both houses; they are as bad as each other.
One does wonder, given the regularity of the vandalism that the bull has to endure, whether it might not get some form of protection. It is pretty vulnerable, stuck in a field on its own, but the field might give a clue as to the security the bull could get. How about half a dozen proper bulls? All of them extremely bloody angry themselves, so that when some angry Arrans or Maulets or whoever other lunatic decides to go on a spot of nocturnal decorating, the miscreants might get rather more than they bargained for. Not a docile, inanimate animal, but some distinctly animate animals with horns that are definitely not for tampering with. Olé.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
