Silicon Valley oligarchs are ushering in a new age of serfdom, aided by the left.

Jorge GONZÁLEZ-GALLARZA

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, by Joel Kotkin, (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 224 pages.

Few policy items have more ominously heralded the ongoing realignment of our politics than Universal Basic Income. That its proponents and detractors can’t seem to agree on what UBI is intended for in the first place is merely a measure of that omen.

Take Spain. The country’s far-left government was an early fan of the policy, and when it leaped on the unemployment caused by lockdowns to implement a version of it, the handouts were popularly mocked as la paguita—Spanish for pocket money. The derisive analogy was swiftly censured as xenophobic—the potential pull effect for illegal migrants deemed a red herring—or more creatively still, as aporophobic, a made-in-Spain woke neologism for aversion towards the poor. Yet it was fresh college graduates, not illegal aliens nor the destitute, that users of la paguita fretted UBI would put on the dole. UBI-skeptics fear this more than any potential loopholes for migrants or layabouts: namely, further untethering the over-credentialed young from the demands of the labor market, directing them instead towards “more creative pursuits” of dubious societal interest while turning the self-sufficient lower-middle classes into their unconsenting patrons.

The dissonance over who exactly UBI is meant to assist is extremely revealing. The policy was initially designed in Silicon Valley to make automation painless, but liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have hailed the insurance it provides against labor market disruptions. The reckoning with the need for a larger safety net is actually widespread, but the unalloyed welfare that UBI would afford entitled millennials remains a no-go across much of the right. By embracing UBI, the left seems to have made peace with our tech-induced drift away from self-sufficiency and towards generalized dependence. But creating a dependent class out of the supposedly “best and brightest” is still deemed profoundly perverse on the right.

This realignment around work and welfare is but one instance of what Joel Kotkin describes in his latest book as The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, the surreptitious supplanting of liberal capitalism—a blend of economic opportunity, pluralism and dispersed political power—with a new regime dominated by tech oligarchs, enabled by their legitimizers in the so-called “progressive clerisy,” and so far acquiesced to by most everyone else. The proposition that a class of tech overlords is infiltrating liberal institutions will sound far-fetched to most of Kotkin’s readers, but that’s only because our connotations of “feudalism” suffer from recency bias. This f-word often calls to mind pre-revolutionary France, where a monarchic nobility and a conservative priesthood united to preserve their privileges at swords’ point until 1789.

That late form of feudalism is displayed in Kotkin’s choice of cover—an engraving of a nobleman and a priest riding a peasant’s back printed two months before the storming of the Bastille. But what the book warns about is feudalism at an embryonic stage, one where the interests of nobility and clerisy may not jibe all the time, and where the third estate’s submission is still unknowing. Similarly, it took centuries after Rome fell for medieval feudalism to fully take shape, with the Church emerging first as a check on kings’ earthly power before becoming their geopolitical ally, and the servants toiling in the rural estates of the post-Roman nobility barely conscious of their evolving towards serfdom. Then as now, Kotkin argues our feudalization is slow but steady, with ever more power concentrating among fewer hands. Kotkin is better known as an urbanist than as a historian, which is precisely how he garners the historical savvy and prescience to discern the trend stealthily unfolding—for unlike in the early Middle Ages, cities and not rural areas are the microcosm of the neo-feudal order.

Big tech CEOs and the “progressive intelligentsia” form an unlikely coalition, corporate power being a classic progressive gripe. So what about today’s tech overlords makes them more palatable than the bankers and utility oligopolists they’ve replaced? Hipness and woke capitalism surely play a part, but their primary appeal to the wider society is in Kotkin’s view technical, grounded in the growing premium our economy places in technological skill. More than a technocracy, this is a technocratic ratchet—the techies hold the keys to an economy they’ve ushered in and keep making more complex. Progressive opinion-makers have largely acquiesced to the concentration of productive know-how in ever fewer hands, even as the less affluent are shut out of the pathways towards acquiring it. Worse still, the societal benefits from technological innovation reaped by everyone else keep diminishing—where innovation was once concerned with productivity, transport or housing, its link with improved living standards has all but broken under society’s hype over social media and artificial intelligence.

Atop the neo-feudal order sit these two powerful blocks, and the economic disruption their alliance portends is correspondingly far-reaching, not limited to a single set of policy wins for tech companies. Even if their tax evasion or greedy data collection practices are reined in with transnational digital taxes and ambitious privacy rules, for big tech these will amount to little more than inches on the margin, mere bumps on the road towards neo-feudalism. To work out the contours of the new economic order, Kotkin proposes instead to size up the larger tenets of liberal capitalism undergoing erosion. This starts with property, the ladder through which a majority could once reach middle-class prosperity but that is being pulled up before our very eyes.

Under feudalism, serfdom was the norm—toiling on the land of someone else who robbed you was the only path to subsist. Similarly, as the clustering effects of today’s knowledge economy keep driving capital and labor towards already cramped cities, property has concentrated in ever fewer hands, with home renters left similarly property-less. Cities used to be hotbeds of opportunity, today they are segregated dystopias. Where strivers could once take jobs that afforded spacey homes, amenities and savings, today the squeezed middle is driven out of cities altogether by skyrocketing housing, transport and childcare costs. Where suburbia once stood to pick up the pieces of our urban dysfunctions, today that last redoubt of the property-owning middle is reaching full capacity in turn, with the comfortable lifestyle it affords shunned by the environmentalist clerisy.

This crisis of property is behind the mantra that “today’s young are the first generation to face dimmer prospects than their parents,” borne out in endless surveys. A married couple of first-generation college graduates today struggles to buy a home even at the age their non-college educated parents did, effectively delaying the age at which the upward mobility both generations worked so hard to chase can take its effect. Even as it remains the only real launchpad to wealth accrual, homeownership is increasingly the monopoly of those lucky to inherit it, which further tilts a playing field at birth already more uneven than ever. And all this concerns only what Kotkin calls the modern “yeomanry” of financially insecure but credentialed professionals. Even grimmer are the prospects of the neo-feudal serfdom, that netherworld of low-skilled jobs in the service precariat. Devoid of technical skills, these neo-serfs live paycheck to paycheck in what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich once called the “share-the-scraps-economy”—a wordplay on the “sharing economy”—with not a whiff of any real economic opportunity.

But just like medieval serfs felt bound to the feudal system through the Christian hope of redemption, so is our neo-feudal order held together, as much as by economic relationships, by the cultural values evangelized from the clerisy downwards. Yesteryear’s societal ethos was one of dynamism, creative destruction and widespread opportunity for all, which, when sincerely embraced by those at the top, gave the entire system a buttress of legitimacy. For the managerial class holding the reins, living out these values and leading by example reinforced their position atop the system—creating jobs meant supporting middle-class livelihoods, reneging from corporate welfare and accepting the diktats of antitrust enforcement meant playing by the rules.

The values underpinning today’s neo-feudalism, rather than allowing for elites to be renewed through competition and merit, serve to entrench the ones we’re stuck with. Pluralism in online discourse is on the way out and any talk of breaking up the tech giants is defamed as antitrust heresy, effectively enshrining their natural monopoly over the digital space. As for philanthropy, today’s tech overlords truly see their lot as the kindest hearted in society, but their foundations no longer seek to align status with merit but to refashion our political economy entirely by normalizing dependence. UBI is to philanthropy what giving away fish is to fishing education.

Whenever economic opportunity is invoked by big tech’s allies in the clerisy, it is most often in the discourse of identity politics, which derives policy prescriptions that fail to create more of it, resorting instead to shoving ethnic minorities amidst the ranks of the technocracy. Instead of expanding access to high-quality education, vocational training or urban property, the siren song of identititarianism calls for numerical quotas and affirmative action. If anything, economic opportunity stands to lose even more ground if the shibboleths promoted from atop are pursued à la lettre, to the extent they pose further penalties on the less fortunate, such as through environmentalism or multiculturalism. And this is where policies such as UBI come back into the picture—their aim is to make the lack of economic opportunity less painful and politically costly, not to reverse our direction of travel towards neo-feudalism. Evangelized with the brimstone of religion, these values are ushering in a new regime of what Kotkin calls “oligarchic socialism,” with productive work increasingly the province of a fortunate few, while everyone is left to battle out for the scraps but numbed with progressive piety.

The alarm Kotkin sounds is all the more courageous and credible coming from an old-school progressive like him, and shows that the left’s realignment around the interests of tech oligarchs and the gospel of wokeism won’t go without internal pushback. Kotkin has even earned an audience on the right—the book is published by Encounter. If his Warning to the Global Middle Class is to be heard widely, it will need all the support it can get from conservatives, whom are undergoing a realignment of the kind Kotkin advocates for his own side. Which calls to mind the ominous words of the abbé Sieyès in 1789—“what is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been in the current political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something!”

theamericanconservative.com

The Catalan conflict is generating a constitutional crisis in Madrid with far-reaching implications for the future of the European Union. In a stunning and legally questionable move on January 3, Spain’s Central Electoral Commission voted to remove Catalan President Joaquim Torra from office immediately. In a speech the same evening, Torra rejected the legitimacy of the ruling, saying he responds only to the will of the Catalan people and the Catalan Parliament. The following day, the Catalan Parliament robustly backed him and his position on the matter. Meanwhile, during the investiture debate of Socialist Prime Minister candidate Pedro Sánchez taking place simultaneously in Madrid, the right wing parties Vox and PP called for Torra’s immediate imprisonment and the suspension of the Catalan statute of autonomy by way of Article 155 of the Constitution—as was done following Catalonia’s declaration of independence on October 27, 2017.

It his has been a turbulent ride for the 58-year-old Torra since he assumed the presidency in the spring of 2018. Until two years ago, Torra was a business executive and cultural activist who had never been involved in electoral politics. However, when the central government dissolved the Catalan Parliament after its vote to secede from Spain, and subsequently ordered new elections, Torra put his name forward as a parliamentary candidate from Together for Catalonia, the party led by exiled President Carles Puigdemont. To the surprise of many and the intense dismay of the Spanish government, the exiled president’s party won the most votes in the majority pro-independence bloc—and hence the right to form a new government.

Madrid was having none of this. In January 2018, when the Catalan Parliament was about to swear Puigdemont in by video connection from Belgium, the legislature’s president abruptly stopped the process in reaction to the threat of judicial sanctions he had received from the Spanish courts. After two other candidates were similarly scuttled, it then came down to the largely unknown Torra, who was eventually inaugurated as the head a pro-independence coalition government in May 2018. Since assuming office, he has repeatedly made clear that he believes that that his prime goal is to advance Catalonia toward independence in the most expeditious manner possible.

It has not been an easy ride. The Catalan independence movement, comprised of three main factions, Junts per Catalunya, Esquerra Republicana Catalana, and Candidatura d’Unitat Popular—which roughly correspond to the positions of center-right, center-left and far-left on the political spectrum—is wracked with internal divisions. In a seemingly strange inversion of roles, Torra has constantly seen his efforts to speed up the march toward self-determination checked by his center-left coalition partner, ERC, and embraced, though not without reservations, by the far-left CUP. He has also been repeatedly criticized by members of his own group’s traditional base for trying to move things forward too fast.

Torra does not seem to care. The only thing that appears to concern him is acting on what he sees as the Catalan people’s desire, as expressed in the October 1, 2017, referendum, to exercise what he sees as their legitimate right to self-determination.

My interview with Torra, conducted in Catalan late last year, took place in the Palace of the Generalitat (the Catalan Government) in Barcelona. The city was then 16 days into widespread and still ongoing acts of civil disobedience unleashed in reaction to the Spanish Supreme Court’s harsh sentencing of the politicians and civil society leaders responsible for promoting the 2017 independence referendum, 11 days before Spain’s fourth general election in as many years, and 19 days before Torra’s own trial, at which he would unapologetically plead guilty to disobeying Spanish government order to remove a banner hanging on the front of the Generalitat that made reference to Catalan “exiles” and “political prisoners.”

TH: How would you explain what is going on in Catalonia today to an Anglo-American reader who has little or no detailed understanding of the country’s history?

QT: A quick response would be to compare it with a case with which most English- language readers are familiar, which is Scotland. But beyond this loose comparison, I would speak of an ancient nation in Southern Europe that has always demonstrated a firm dedication to the pursuit of liberty, and that, after suffering a number of setbacks the last three hundred years—years during which it worked to fit into the Spanish state and gain its trust—has, over the last decade or so, chosen to initiate a democratic process aimed at gaining independence.

After thinking it over a great deal, people have decided that this, rather than a continuation of the current regime of autonomy, is probably the most viable way achieve an improved quality of life. This not about flags and borders. It is about better education, better health care, an improved infrastructure and, of course, greater protections for the country’s language and culture. But above all, it is about being able to face the challenges of the 21st century with all of the tools that any modern country can expect to have at its disposal.

You just spoke about the pursuit of liberty or freedom. Do you think Catalans have a special obsession with freedom when compared, say, with other cultures of the Mediterranean basin? Or other European cultures in general?

There are historians, such as Rovira i Virgili, who define the history of Catalonia precisely in terms of this special relationship to freedom. Others, such as Vicens Vives, link it more to a “will to exist.” Josep Benet, in turn, has summed it up in a marvelous phrase as centering on a “combat in the service of hope.” Others, of perhaps a more fatalistic cast, like Ferrater Mora, say that a people cannot live life always on the defensive, that it must arrive, or seek to arrive, to a state of vital fullness.

You are someone who has spent most of his working life outside of politics, getting involved in it only a very short time ago. How is it that someone with this profile came to be president of the Generalitat in the Spring of 2018? Did you have doubts about accepting the
challenge of becoming president in such turbulent times? Why, in the end, did you decide to do so? What did you see as being your key goals for your time in office?

As you say, I spent most of my life as a lawyer in private business, the last two years of that in Switzerland, an experience that allowed me get to know a country, the Helvetian Confederation, that I admire a lot. Returning to Catalonia, I founded a publishing house and got involved—and I say this with all due modesty—in historical research and writing. I’d always had strong cultural, civic, and political interests thanks to my work with voluntary organizations of the type that are, in my view, fundamental to gaining an understanding of the country. These entities are the basis of its strongly “associative” social fabric, and what provides it with very strong social cohesion from below.

I had the good fortune of working side by side with the late Muriel Casals at Omnium Cultural [Along with the Catalan National Congress, the country’s most important pro-independence civic organization], an experience that allowed me to participate, as it were, from the “second row,” in the last 10 years of the country’s fast-moving history. During the latter part of this time, the country’s government was forcibly dismissed by the Spanish state [in October 2017] while our elected leaders were either imprisoned or forced into exile. In the lead up to the December 2017 elections imposed by Spain, I received a call from President Puigdemont, during which he asked me to run as a candidate on his parliamentary list [Together for Catalonia]. When the President of the country asks that you get involved and serve in a key moment of its history, it is very hard to refuse. And as it turned out, our list was the winning list….

President Puigdemont entrusted me with the task of leading the government of the country. I accepted the challenge because I believed that in historical moments such as the ones we are living you cannot run away from the responsibilities that fate brings you. As a good liberal, I believe that any person, no matter what political position they might initially occupy, should be able to respond with responsibility and honesty to the challenges posed to his country in decisive moments of its history. And so, at the time, I honestly felt I could not say “no.” And I said “yes” in the conviction that we must continue the project designed to bring us to independence, that we must see ourselves as the heirs of what I view as the legitimate independence vote taken on October 1, 2017.

In practical terms, this means seeking the restitution of all the powers taken from us under Spain’s imposition of Article 155 of the Constitution, the effects of which are still very present, and putting the Catalan Constitution into effect. I say this fully cognizant of the fact that, owing to the recent handing down of the sentences against our imprisoned leaders, we are now entering into an entirely new set of realities.

In the year and a half since my swearing in, we have been immersed in a situation of political complexity that is probably as great any seen in the country’s history. We have people in prison and people in exile. And the repression has not stopped. Rather than engage in political discussions, the Spanish government has recurred again and again to the punitive use of criminal code, which of course only heightens the gravity of the situation and the sense of crisis surrounding it.

Have there been any positive surprises during your time in office?

Many. Above all, the contact I have had with the people of this extraordinary country, which I have visited from end to end. People always receive me with enormous warmth and with a sincere to desire to help and to keep things moving forward. There have been many difficult times, moments when you think that when you step out of the car you’ll be stoned. And it turns out that, on the contrary, that is the day they cheer you the most and encourage you in your work. The second thing has been getting to know truly extraordinary people—that is, people with exceptional cultural, artistic, professional, and human gifts. The country’s finest doctors and scientists, its best writers. The other day I was with Jaume Plensa, the famous Catalan sculptor, and Jordi Savall, the world-renowned Catalan musician. These are simply unforgettable experiences. I would probably have never met them otherwise.

Perhaps a third thing are the journeys I have taken outside the country, being able to talk, for example, with the Scottish prime minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and several U.S. congresspeople at the Martin Luther King Institute at Stanford University, and with Borut Pahor, the president of Slovenia. These and other high-level contacts are things that I’ll remember forever.

You’ve made reference to Catalonia’s distinctive “associative” cultural fabric. People who know and understand Catalan culture tend to speak a great deal about this particular social characteristic. How might you explain this strong tendency to what, in Catalan, is called “associationism” to someone who is unfamiliar with the culture?

I believe this is the most essential trait of Catalan culture and a key reason we have been able to remain a distinct people over the years. The country has always had a very strong sense of collective belonging and collective action honed over the years on objectives that go from being very strongly involved in saving immigrant lives in the Mediterranean to involvement in one’s neighborhood council or the enormous and highly organized collective effort that goes into castellers, where people come together festively to build human towers of several stories that extend 15 meters or more into the sky. We could also talk about the enormous importance of esplais(neighborhood civic groups) and hiking clubs among our youth. And all this, of course, in addition to our very strong trade union tradition and the pro-sovereignty groups like Omnium Cultural and the Catalan National Congress, referenced earlier.

From a very early age, Catalans are exposed to, and engage in, voluntary collective activities that are not rooted in either the family or the school. And this generates a widespread sense of fraternity and solidarity in the culture—bonds that make possible things like the citizen-led and organized referendum on independence that took place here in October 2017.

I think this tightly-woven social fabric, where people are very much in touch with others and where they debate and argue and at times get angry— but nearly as often end the disagreement with an embrace—generates a remarkable sense of collaboration. It is, I believe, what has allowed us, with all our turbulent history, to continue to be a country of peace with a long and proud history of receiving immigrants. It is what allows us to exist as a united people with very widely and deeply shared values regarding the importance of democracy and human rights. And in recent years we have seen a new consensus forged in this atmosphere. For example, somewhere around 80 percent to 90 percent of Catalans now look upon the Spanish monarchy as an institution with little or no relevance in their lives. There is a similarly high rejection of Spain’s judicialization of basic political questions and processes.

One last but very important by-product of this highly associative social fabric is our predilection toward criticism. Ours is a culture that expects and demands that one accept the criticisms of others. We are very given to protesting and criticizing. Maybe this is a more generally Mediterranean tendency. I don’t know. But I can assure you it is very prominent among our people.

Spain’s acting president Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said that the conflict in Catalonia is actually a conflict among Catalans, in which a minority, those in favor of independence, are seeking to impose their will upon a majority that wishes to have Catalonia remain part of Spain. Is this the reality of things?

No, it is a problem of democracy stemming from the fact that the people are not allowed to express their political desires democratically. If one thing has become clear over the last few years, it is our society’s capacity to engage in debate—often times under very difficult circumstances—while continuing to perform economically and culturally at perhaps its highest level ever. In other words, we have taken the debate to where it needs to be while preserving the traits, which I spoke about a few moments ago, that define us as a people. The question, I repeat, is whether the Catalans will be allowed to express their will democratically and decide on their future. And until Spain faces this question and recognizes Catalonia as a political subject worthy of face-to-face negotiations—and let’s not forget about the existence our exiles and political prisoners—it is impossible to speak about political normality in Catalonia.

Another often-heard interpretation of the Catalan crisis is that it is part and parcel of a more generalized crisis the Spanish constitutional order established in 1978. Other critics describe it as a symptom of a broader European, and perhaps even world-wide crisis of long-established ways of governing. How do you see it?

I think it is a mixture of all of these things. I believe the Catalan independence movement has laid bare the reality of the Spanish transaction—not the transition— that resulted in the adoption of the Spanish Constitution of 1978. This was made quite clear to me when I visited Portugal and held conversations with members of the National Assembly from across the political spectrum. From left to right, all have accepted a total break with [António] Salazar’s dictatorial regime [1932–1968]. The Spanish state’s problem is that this break did not take place. It carried out a reform that kept intact several important bastions of Francoism and an authoritarian way of approaching public life and politics, something we can see quite clearly in the comportment of the state judicial and police sectors. We can also see it in the very figure of the king, who is the inheritor of prerogatives derived directly from the Franco regime and whose presence has deprives all Spaniards of the right to decide whether they wish to live in a monarchy or a republic. All of this has become more evident as a result of the rise of the Catalan independence movement, which has brought this not always visible Francoism, which is profoundly rooted within the organs of the state, to the surface.

That said, there is an aspect of the independence protest that is related to the current global wave of political dissatisfaction. Here we are in the 21^st century in a globalized world where we no longer live in isolated outposts of the planet, but rather where we have global flows of information, and the people want to live in places where there is freedom and where they can be part of a social project defined by adhesion rather than repression. We must be very attentive to the will of the people. As I said, people want to participate in public life. But right now, there is widespread distrust of the political class in general, and the Spanish and Catalan political classes in particular. And this helps explain the large protests we are seeing in the streets of Catalonia today.

How would you describe the performance of the Spanish judicial system in the recently concluded trial of the Catalan politicians and civil society leaders in Madrid?

I would begin by reminding that person of the words of the president of the General Council of the Spanish Judiciary, Carlos Lesmes, when he said that the Spanish Constitution is based in the sacred and indivisible unity of the fatherland and that the judicial powers have the obligation of preserving this unity above all other things. Nothing about preserving the people’s will. We have, rather, the idea that Spain is based on an a priori notion—the unified fatherland—and not the desires of its citizenry. I think it sums things up perfectly. I think the Spanish Judiciary has appointed itself as the royal guardian of the indivisible unity of Spain, and for this reason gives itself the right to use any and all means achieve this end, including twisting decisions and opinions as they see fit.

Under these parameters, anything can be portrayed as suspicious and therefore all things are seen as potentially prosecutable. And when the police can’t achieve the desired end, the prosecutors are sent in. And when the prosecutors fall short, they revert to the full force of the courts. And when we talk about the objectives of their prosecution we are talking not only about expressions of democratic will like the vote on October 1, 2017, but also about ideas and even banners bearing messages they do not like. For example, they have prohibited, under threat of prosecution, any discussion about the right of self- determination from taking place in the halls of my government or in the Catalan Parliament.

Since the Supreme Court handed down the sentence in the case of the seven former Catalan government ministers and two civil society leaders on October 14^th the streets of Catalonia have been consistently filled with protestors. How would you describe what is going on?

It speaks of a sense of enormous anger about the fact that honorable politicians who were following a democratic mandate—the entire process that led toward October 1 was approved by an absolute majority of the Catalan Parliament—will each be spending 9 to 13 years in prison. It has unleashed an enormous wave of indignation in Catalan society. And this is what we are seeing in the streets. I will say it again, there is a very widespread consensus in Catalan society regarding the need to place democratic values, and with them civil and human rights, above all other concerns. Therefore, these sentences from the Spanish courts clash frontally with most Catalans’ way of being and thinking. This is why we are seeing these massive demonstrations and these marches for freedom all around the country.

Pedro Sánchez, the head of the interim Spanish government, suggested a few days ago that these protests are of an fundamentally violent character, and his interior minister, Fernando Grande–Marlaska, recently said, and I quote, “The violence in Catalonia has been of greater impact than that which took place in the Basque Country.” How do you respond to these comments? Are you, as Spanish government sources and certain members of the press have recently suggested, an apologist for this supposed violence?

This is the type of question that as president I—and I use the expression quite advisedly—have had to “put up with” constantly. Violence has never been representative of the independence movement. We have always condemned any and all acts of violence that have occurred. Always. I think it is important to call attention to the serious level of banalization at play here. And it is not only I who sees it. Spanish associations of terrorist victims have spoken out against these unfortunate statements and others like them. For me, to compare occurrences that have taken place in a given moment in Catalonia with deaths and assassinations in the Basque Country over years, is absolutely appalling. And this is why the Spanish associations of victims have called on the government to stop its banalization of their tragedy.

Throughout the 40 years of the present Constitutional system in Spain, there have been not infrequent tensions between the heads of the country’s 17 autonomous governments, especially those of the Basque country and Catalonia, and the executive of the central government in Madrid. Despite these tensions, communications have always been maintained at a certain level of fluidity. This, however, does not appear to be the case presently between you and the Spanish interim Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. Why?

What you say is true. We (Together for Catalonia) voted without conditions with Sánchez in the no-confidence vote—against the Rajoy government that suspended our autonomy through application of Article 155 in late October 2017 and was probably the most corrupt government in the history of Spain—that delivered him to his present position. We thought this might provide us with an opportunity to begin a serious dialogue with the Spanish state. We had staged the referendum and issued our declaration of independence and had people in prison and in exile. We said, “Lets sit down and talk… seriously.”

Sánchez and I had our first meeting at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid, and we seemed to agree on the fact that a political problem requires a political solution. And then we had another meeting at the Pedralbes Palace here in Barcelona, and we continued to make progress on the dialogue. But our side insisted that that if the dialogue was indeed to be serious it would have to be formalized in one form or another, that is, that the proposals of both the government of Catalonia and the government of Spain make their proposals known.

Toward that end, we proposed having an international rapporteur there to summarize the positions of both sides. We clearly stated our position, which is to have a referendum staged through an agreement with the state, which we see as a viable solution. However, since I have been in office, the government of Spain has not put forth any proposal whatsoever, and the mere mention of an international rapporteur generated a crisis within Sánchez’s government, when the old guard of his party, the Spanish Socialist Party, rebelled forcefully against the idea and forced the end to all negotiations. We continue to await his arrival at the negotiating table. We Catalans are there and will always be there.

Earlier, we were talking about some of the defining characteristics of the Catalans. One of them is “pactism” a vocation for the making and signing of pacts, something that is deeply rooted in our history, going all the way back to the power-limiting agreements between the people and the kings in medieval times. What we need is “a sit down and talk” [here Torra spoke in English]. But a serious and rigorous one, marked by a real desire to reach an agreement. And the dramatic reality here is that the Spanish Government has not put forth any proposal at all. Nothing at all. I’d accept anything as a starting point. It’s even worse. Yesterday, or the day before, we read that the Socialist Party had stricken any trace of federalist proposals from their official election platform for the upcoming [November 10] elections. So, it seems that, if anything, we are going backwards from the already very minimal concessions to the plural nature of Spain made in the past by that party. This drift toward centralism and authoritarianism in the Socialist Party is extremely worrying for us. As I have said, we believe the solution lies in sitting down and talking. But it has to be a dialogue between governments in which Catalonia is recognized as a political subject with the right to decide its future.

To what extent must the ongoing protests and disturbances in the streets of Catalonia be seen as a demonstration of the failure of the Catalan political class and/or the political class of the Spanish state? Can we speak of any large errors committed by one or both parts of this equation?

These critiques no doubt have some basis in truth. But the roots of the conflict can been found in in our not having had the opportunity, as should have been the case from the very beginning, to decide things in a frank and honest fashion, allowing those in favor of remaining in the kingdom of Spain and those in favor of independence to place their arguments on the table and to let the citizens of Catalonia would decide which solution is best. In this scenario, each would have their say and both options would be considered respectable. The citizens must decide.

I can assure you that if we were to have such a referendum and it were to show that a majority of Catalans would prefer to continue as part of Spain, I would resign immediately as the President of the Generalitat. This is the basis of the conflict. And there really is no other. The two million Catalans in favor of independence are not going to disappear. In the last four elections, counting local, Catalan, Spanish, and European elections, pro-independence forces have won. In short, Spain must realize that the institutional instability from which it is currently suffering will continue as long as it refuses to listen to the voices emanating from Catalonia.

But don’t we also have to talk about the instability present in your own governing coalition? Isn’t that also an important factor in all this?

Without a doubt. Governing in a coalition is obviously make things more complicated. But I think it is important to remember that we Catalans have been up to the challenges posed by these complications. We have been able to forge governing pacts between groups of widely differing ideological stripes. In contrast, [there has never been a coalition government in Spain. Yes? Never a successful or effective coalition?]] Surprising, no? Of course, to govern by coalition, you first have to sit down and come up with agreements and put them into action. Obviously, in a legislature like present one in Catalonia, shadowed by the reality of political prisoners and exiles, disagreements and controversies arise. But despite this my government engaged in, and survived, a no confidence vote about a month ago. And here we stand.

You have spoken about the presence of agents provocateurs from the Spanish police among the pro-independence groups engaged in and ongoing protest against the harsh sentences against the Catalan politicians and civil society leaders handed down from the Spanish Supreme Court on October 14. And recently videos emerged that appeared to confirm this general thesis. Have you seen these videos? Do you have any comment on them, or what they appear to demonstrate?

I hope there is a thorough investigation of the matter. I hope the Spanish police and the interior minister do what we have pledged to do here in Catalonia, which is an examination of all those practices, as well as all the visual images that point toward a failure to adhere to the protocols that must regulate a democratic police force.

You have been indicted by the Spanish state for actions you have taken during your presidential mandate. What is the crime that you are alleged to have committed?

My crime is that of defending the freedom of expression by refusing a Spanish government order to remove a banner placed on the balcony of the Palace of the Generalitat that spoke of “political prisoners” and that expressed a desire for the return of the “exiles.” And since I believe that there is no such thing as a small battle, I felt a need to press this struggle for the freedom of expression to its logical conclusion. So I disobeyed the stipulations that they had sent me. And I am now involved in a trial that, if I lose it, will result in my being barred from occupying public office for a specified amount of time.

I have read all sort of characterizations of you in the press, a number of them in publications opposed to independence, being quite negative. How would you define yourself as a political actor?

Ideologically, I define myself as a republican in the modern sense of the term, employed, for example, by Princeton scholar Philip Pettit. I see myself as a person with a humanistic bent interested in working for others, a person with a radical belief in democracy who is only capable of conceptualizing democracy as the practice of listening to the voice of the citizenry and respecting their decisions. I have always said that the only political obligation I have is to respect the decisions of the Catalan Parliament, the sole basis of the sovereignty for the people of my country.

Are you satisfied with the independence movement’s efforts to explain itself to the outside world? Are there filters that impede your ability to get the message out?

We need to work constantly to get better at this. We need to continue insist and persist in explaining the profoundly democratic values that are deeply rooted Catalonia’s long history and to underscore, again and again, that the Catalans are engaged in struggle for their civil rights. In other countries and other times, this struggle revolved around somewhat different issues. For example, there was the fight of the English suffragettes at the beginning of the last century, or the struggles of Afro-Americans to achieve their full civil rights a bit later on.

The Catalans are fighting for perhaps the most important civil right that a collective of people can seek, the right to self-determination. And they wish to do it in a democratic and peaceful fashion, a method, that a part of the population has now decided must also include civil disobedience, which, of course, is also a right that must be respected. This is where we are. And this is the message we seek to send to the world.

We are moving forward under the banner of dialogue and the banner of democracy in our effort to achieve the basic right to determine our future as a people. We realize that, since we are not a state in a world that functions as a “club of states,” it is quite difficult for us to get a hearing for our position in supra-national organizations. But what we can do, and do well, is explain our outlook on the citizen-to-citizen level, showing off our large and peaceful demonstrations, and now our large protests against the recently handed-down sentences of our leaders. We think this fraternal and solidarity-based message resonates quite strongly across the world.

Ours is a country on the move that is very conscious of the historic moment it is living. We must be on the side of the people and attentive to their desire for freedom.

counterpunch.org

There were several lessons to take from last month’s Spanish elections, some special to Spain, others that resonate continent wide. Since the 28-member European Union is preparing to vote on the makeup of the European Parliament at the end of May, those lessons are relevant.

On the surface the outcome seemed pretty straightforward: Spain’s Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) picked up lots of seats—but not enough to form a government—the country’s traditional center-right Popular Party (PP) took a pounding, the ultra-right edged into parliament and the center did well.

But Spain’s politics are as complex as the country’s geography, and certainly not as simple as the New York Time’s analysis that the outcome was a “strong pro-European Union vote” that will allow Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez “to tackle Spain’s neglected economic challenges.”

For starters, the majority did not vote for the EU, but, to the contrary, against the devastation the huge trading bloc has inflicted on Spain through a decade of austerity measures. The Spanish Socialists ran on a platform of jobs creation, implementing a US-inspired “Green New Deal,” a 22 percent jump in the minimum wage and greater funding for education and science, all issues that run counter to the tight-fisted policies of the EU.

Indeed, if the European Union had been on the ballot it might have gone badly for Brussels, not exactly a Spexit, but hardly a ringing endorsement.

Part of the Socialist victory reflected the profound ineptness of the opposition on the right.

For more than 40 years, the Popular Party has been an umbrella for the Spanish right, ranging from conservative businessmen and small farmers to unreconstructed supporters of the fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. But when the left-wing Podemos Party won 20 percent of the vote in 2015, it unleashed centrifugal forces that smashed up the old two-party system that had dominated the country since the death of Franco in 1975.

Besides opening the political landscape to multiple parties, including the center right Ciudadanos , or “Citizens” Party, it put immeasurable strains on the Socialist and Popular parties.

In the case of the latter, the PP’s extreme right jumped ship and formed “Vox,” whose policies are little different than Franco’s: opposition to abortion, equal rights for women, gay rights, immigration, and regional autonomy. The Party won almost 11 percent of the vote in a recent election in Andalusia, Spain’s most populous province. It is currently part of the province’s ruling coalition, which includes the PP and Citizens, but underperformed in last month’ vote.

The PP’s turn to the right as a strategy to peel off Vox votes was a disaster. Women, in particular, felt threatened by some of the Party’s anti-abortion talk, and the PP’s candidates handpicked by Party leader Pablo Casado were underwhelming.

The Socialists also had their divisions. In 2016 the PSOE’s rightwing engineered the ouster of Sanchez after he considered forming a government with Podemos and several small regional parties. The rightwing of the Socialists then allowed the PP to form a minority government, a move that did not sit well with the Party’s rank and file.

Sanchez barnstormed the country, rallying the Socialist’s left wing and taking back the Party’s leadership seven months later. In this last election the PSOE stayed united, a major reason why Sanchez is in a position to form a government.

Was the election a victory for the center? There is not a lot of evidence for that. While Citizens did well—it bypassed Unidos-Podemos to become the third largest party in the parliament with 57 seats—most of its votes came from former PP members alienated by the Popular Party’s sharp turn to the right and the profound corruption that has enmeshed many of its leaders.

The PP, Citizens and Vox all pounded away at the Catalan independence movement and immigration, two issues that did not resonate very strongly with the electorate. A poll by Spain’s Centre for Sociological Research showed that voters were most concerned with unemployment (61.8 percent), corruption (33.3 percent) and the state of the political parties (29.1 percent). Only 8.9 percent felt immigration was a major issue, and Catalan independence was a concern for only 11 percent.

In short, when the right was railing away at the Catalans and immigrants, most of the voters tuned out.

The leftist UP also took a beating, dropping from 71 to 42 seats, but that was partly due to a falling out between the two major Podemos leaders, Pablo Iglesias and Inigo Errejon, and disagreements on how closely the leftist alliance should align itself with the Socialists. In contrast, the leftwing Catalan parties did well.

The Socialists now face two major problems.

First, there is the PSOE’s program that, if instituted, would certainly ease the austerity policies of the EU and the PP that have inflicted such pain on the bulk of Spaniards. While unemployment has come down from its height during the years following the 2008 financial crash, many of those jobs are low paying, benefit-free, temporary gigs.

A Green New Deal would confront climate change and create new jobs. Repairing the social safety net that the PP and the EU have shredded would not only make people’s lives easier, it would stimulate the economy.

But the EU is pressing for almost $28 billion in government spending cuts, that, if agreed to, would make much of the Socialists’ program stillborn. Faced with the demands of capital, on one hand, and the misery of yet more austerity, many socialist parties—with the exception of Britain’s and Portugal’s—have gone along with the strictures of the EU.

When they do, they pay the price: center-left parties all over Europe have been decimated for buying into the debt reduction strategy of the EU. Socialist parties tend to run from the left and govern from the center, but if Sanchez does that, the Party’s support will evaporate.

Secondly, there is the Catalan problem. While Sanchez has pledged to open a dialogue with the Catalans, he has steadfastly refused to consider their demand for a referendum on independence. The Socialist leader argues that he is constrained by the Spanish constitution that explicitly forbids provinces from seceding. But the constitution was drawn up only a few years after Franco’s death and is deeply flawed on a number of different levels, including giving rural regions greater representation than urban areas.

The refusal of Sanchez to consider a referendum makes “dialogue” an empty phrase. It is not even clear if the majority of Catalans would vote for independence, although the policies of Madrid—in particular the brutal crushing of a referendum effort this past October, and the arrest and imprisonment of Catalan leaders—certainly seems to have increased separatist sentiment. In the recent election Catalan independence parties won a majority in the Provence.

Sanchez may try to construct a coalition without the Catalan parties, which would be a major mistake. Many of the Catalan parties are more simpatico to the PSOE on economic and social matters than some of the other regional parties the Socialists will try to recruit to form a government. And, as the recent election showed, people want some answers to their economic problems.

The Socialists will certainly be attacked by the right if they allow a referendum, but the PP labeled them “terrorists” in this last election and the majority of voters didn’t buy it. The referendum could require a super majority—maybe 60 percent—to pass, because it would be folly to take the province out of Spain on the basis of a narrow win.

But the Catalan question cannot be dispersed with tear gas, billy clubs or prisons, and constitutions are not immutable documents.

For European parties on the center-left, Spain’s elections had a message: the old days of campaigning on left social democracy when you’re running for office and ruling with careful centrism once you get into power are over. People want answers.

dispatchesfromtheedgeblog

In what seems a replay of recent German and Italian elections, an openly authoritarian and racist party made major electoral gains in Spain’s most populous province, Andalusia, helping to dethrone the Socialist Party that had dominated the southern region for 36 years. Vox (Voice)—a party that stands for “Spain First,” restrictions on women’s rights, ending abortion, stopping immigration and dismantling the country’s regional governments—won almost 11 percent of the vote. The Party is in negotiations to be part of a ruling rightwing coalition, while left parties are calling for an “anti-fascist front,”. It’s as if the old Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had arisen from his tomb in the “Valley of the Fallen” and was again marching on Madrid.

Actually, the results were not so much “stunning”—the British Independent’sheadline on the election—as a case of chickens coming home to roost, and a sobering lesson for center-left and left forces in Europe.

The Dec. 2 vote saw the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) lose 14 seats in the regional parliament and the leftist alliance, Adelante Andalucía, drop three. The conservative Popular Party (PP) also lost seven seats, but, allied with Vox and the rightwing Ciudadanos (Citizens) Party, the right now has enough seats to take power. It was the worst showing in PSOE’s history, and, while it is still the largest party in Andalucía, it will have to go into opposition.

On one level the Andalucian elections do look like Germany, where the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfG) took 94 seats in the Bundestag, and Italy, where the rightwing, xenophobic Northern League is sharing power with the center-right Five Star Movement.

There are certainly parallels to both countries, but there are also major differences that are uniquely Spanish.

What is similar is the anger at the conventional center-right and center-left parties that have enforced a decade of misery on their populations. Center-left parties like the Democratic Party in Italy and the Social Democratic Party in Germany bought into the failed strategy of neo-liberalism that called for austerity, regressive taxes, privatization of public resources and painful cutbacks in social services as a strategy for getting out of debt. Not only was it hard for most people to see a difference between the center-left and the center-right, many times the parties governed jointly, as they did in Germany. Andalucía’s Socialists were in an alliance with Ciudadanos.

However, the rise of parties like Vox and the AfG has less to do with a surge from the right than as a collapse of the center-right and center-left. The Spanish Socialists did badly, but so did the right-wing Popular Party. In Germany, both the center-right and the center-left took a beating.

In the aftermath of the Andalucian debacle, Susana Diaz, leader of the PSOE in Andalucía, called for a “firewall” against the right. But Diaz helped blow a hole in that “firewall” in the first place with politics that alienated much of the Socialist’s long-time constituency. In 2016 Diaz led a rightist coup in the PSOE that dethroned General Secretary Pedro Sanchez because he was trying to cobble together a coalition with the Leftist Podemos Party, the Basques, and Catalan separatists.

After ousting Sanchez, Diaz allowed Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to form a government and pass an austerity budget. Making common cause with the PP was apparently too much for the SPOE’s rank and file, and they returned Sanchez to his old post seven months later. The Socialist rank and file also seems to have sat on their hands in the Andalucian election. Only 58.6 percent of the electorate turned out and there were a considerable number of abstentions and blank ballots in traditionally Socialist strongholds.

The leftist AA took a hit as well, but that was in part due to some infighting in Podemos, and the Party did not mobilize significant forces on the ground. And because Podemos kept its distance from the crisis in Catalonia, it ceded the issue of separatism to the right, particularly Ciudadanos, which wrapped itself in the Spanish flag.

Podemos actually has a principled position on Catalan independence: it opposes it, but thinks the matter should be up to the Catalans. It also supports greater cultural and economic autonomy for Spain’s richest province. But when Rajoy unleashed the police on the October 2017 independence referendum, beating voters and arresting Catalan leaders, Podemos merely condemned the violence. The Socialists supported Rajoy, although they too expressed discomfort with the actions of the police.

Ciudadanos, on the other hand, enthusiastically supported the violent response, even provoking it. According to Thomas Harrington, a professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CN and an expert on Catalonia, Ciudadano members’ systematically removed yellow ribbons that Catalans had put up to protest the imprisonment of Catalan leaders, Harrington quotes Eduardo Llorens, a prominent member of the Ciudadano-supported unionist movement: “ ‘Violent reactions by the independentists must be forced. We’ve done a good job of constructing the narrative of social division, but violent acts on their part are still needed to consolidate it. In the end they will react. It’s just a matter of our being persistent.’ ”

The PSOE had a generally progressive economic program, but it appears many Spaniards don’t believe them. The Leftist AA had a much better program, but was hobbled by internal problems and downplayed the Catalan issue. That left a clear field for Ciudadanos, which hammered away at the Catalan separatists. Ciudadanos ended up getting 18.3 percent of the vote, more than double what it got in the last election. The PSOE and PP are still the two largest parties in the province.

As for Vox, it is surely disturbing that such an antediluvian party could get 10.5 percent of the vote, but it would be a mistake to think that Franco is back. In fact, he never went away. When the dictator died in 1975 the Spaniards buried the horrors of the 1936-39 civil war and the ensuing repression, rather than trying to come to terms with them: some 200,000 political dissidents executed, 500,000 exiled, and 400,000 sent to concentration camps.

Vox tapped into that section of the population that opposes the “Historical Memory Law” condemning the Franco regime, and still gathers at Valley of the Fallen or in town squares to chant fascist slogans and give the stiff-arm salute. But the party is small, around 7,000, and part of the reason it did well was because of extensive media coverage. Most the Party’s votes came from PP strongholds in wealthy neighborhoods.

Following the election, thousands of people poured into the streets of Seville, Granada and Malaga to chant “fascists out.”

Certainly the European right is scary, particularly in Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Austria and France. It has absconded with some of the left’s programs, like ending austerity, a guaranteed wage, and resisting the coercive power of the European Union. Once elected, of course, it will jettison those issues, just as the Nazis and fascists did in pre-war Germany and Italy. And removing them will not be easy, since their only commitment to democracy is as a tool to chisel their way into power.

The center-left and the left are still formidable forces in Europe, and their programs do address the crisis of unemployment, growing economic disparity, and weakening social safety nets. But the path to success will requiring re-thinking the strategy of the past 30 years and fighting for programs like those the British Labour Party adopted under Jeremy Corbyn: rolling back the privatization of public resources, a graduated tax scale based on wealth, investments in education, health, housing and infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, encouraging unions, and seriously tackling the existential issue of climate change.

dispatchesfromtheedgeblog

Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell recently revealed that Donald Trump suggested that the government of Spain build a wall across the Sahara desert to prevent immigrants from traveling into the country.

During one meeting, a Spanish diplomat reportedly pointed out that the Sahara desert was over 3,000 miles long, to which Trump replied, “The Sahara border can’t be bigger than our border with Mexico.”

However, Spain only occupies a small part of the border, so the wall would need to be built through many different countries.

It seems that Borrell may have revealed details that the agency was not comfortable with.

A spokesperson for the foreign ministry told The Guardian that “We can confirm that’s what the minister said, but we won’t be making any further comment on the minister’s remarks.”

In a transcript of a White House meeting that was leaked last year Trump reportedly told staffers and reporters that the proposed border wall in the United States should be transparent so that drug cartels don’t crush people with launched drug packages.

Regardless of theoretical concerns, government borders are a utopian idea to begin with, especially when considering areas as large as Europe and the United States. In most of the world (and especially in Western countries), governments can’t even secure their own prisons and airports, which increasingly resemble fortresses.

Furthermore, creating an effective and staffed wall for the border of the U.S. is barely even physically or financially possible. Over the course of a three-year project, the U.S. government spent $2.4 billion to build 670 miles of very unimpressive fencing along the Mexican border.

Considering the U.S. shares roughly 6,000 miles of international borders, it would cost $19 billion to construct a small, unimpressive fence along that entire border. This figure does not include the cost of staffing the fence, or the costs that would come along with making a fence large enough, the barbed wires, weapons, and a buffer zone. These additional expenses could easily double or triple the cost of the project.

Additionally, this militarized border would require an expansion of the already bloated police and surveillance states. Currently, most of the U.S. border is not even fenced or staffed with military, and there have been no major disasters as a result. Some would argue the violence along borders, particularly the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico, is an example of a major disaster that could be remedied with tighter border controls. However, it is the state and the insistence on intervening in free humans movement and exchange of goods which fuels the cartels and gangs that cluster around distribution points along the border.

themindunleashed.com

Puigdemont, who had been living in exile in Belgium since being deposed by Spain’s right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in October 2017, was arrested on March 25 by police in Schleswig-Holstein. Puigdemont’s detention by German police was based on a European arrest warrant issued by Spain, a warrant that had been conveniently ignored by authorities in Finland, where Puigdemont had spoken after traveling to Helsinki from Brussels by automobile; Denmark, where Puigdemont was transiting en route to Belgium; Sweden, via which, Puigdemont transited by ferry to and from Finland; and Belgium. The Spanish arrest warrant was similarly ignored by Denmark, during a previous trip by Puigdemont to Copenhagen, and by Swiss authorities when Puigdemont traveled there to address a conference. The Spanish extradition request for Puigdemont was based on Spanish government draconian charges of “rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds in relation to Catalonia’s declaration of independence from Spain following a plebiscite in the region that favored separation from Spain.

“Rebellion” is not a crime under German law. If it were, Germany would have long ago extradited several of secessionists based in Germany wanted for “rebellious” activities in their home countries. These include Kurds, who are members of groups favoring independence from Turkey and Iraq and who are strong in Berlin and Frankfurt; Chinese Uighurs, whose secessionist World Uighur Congress is based in Munich; Tibetans, whose exile organization is based in Bonn; Chechen separatists, who are numerous in Berlin; members of the Baloch National Movement, numerous in Hamburg and Berlin; members of the Ambazonia Liberation Movement; and Oromo secessionists, mainly found in and around Frankfurt. Many of these secessionists are wanted by their homelands for sedition and rebellion in, respectively, Turkey, China, Russia, Pakistan, Cameroon, and Ethiopia. More recently, these separatists have been joined in a welcoming Germany by Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar, West Papuans, and a few Zanzibaris from Tanzania and Rehoboth Basters from Namibia.

What separates the diverse secessionists receiving asylum and support in Germany from Catalan leaders like Puigdemont is the fact that the US Central Intelligence Agency, for years, has relied on Germany to provide a base of operations to Uighur, Tibetan, Chechen, and others it sees as “freedom fighters.” Catalonian independence has never been on the “approved list” of independence movements at CIA headquarters in Langley or at the German Federal Intelligence Service or “Bundesnachrichtendienst” (BND).

Given the close cooperation that exists between the US National Security Agency, the BND, and the Spanish National Intelligence Centre (CNI), the geo-tracking of Puigdemont’s traveling companions’ mobile phones and the homing device attached to the Renault Espace, in which Puigdemont was traveling, put a very large “FIVE EYES” signals intelligence bullseye on the Catalan leader.

The UK “Guardian” reported that twelve CNI agents were involved in tracking Puigdemont and his party of from Belgium to Helsinki and on the return trip. The paper reported that the vehicular tracking device was placed on the Renault in Waterloo, Belgium, where Puigdemont had been living in exile. Arrested in Germany with Puigdemont were his confidante, Josep María Matamala Alsina, a Catalonian businessman; Josep Lluis Alay Rodríguez, a commissioner for international relations of the city government of Barcelona; and Xabier Goicoechea Fernández and Carlos de Pedro López, members of the Catalan “Mossos d’Esquadra” police force.

Spanish Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena, a modern-day version of the Spanish Inquisition’s infamous grand inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, at least when it comes to prosecuting Catalonian freedom seekers, was considering charging Puigdemont’s four companions with rebellion and sedition and seeking their extradition by the Germans to Spain. Llarena has imprisoned five former members of the Catalonian government, including ex-Vice President Vice President Oriol Junqueras, for sedition and rebellion and he plans to charge as many as 25 Catalonian political leaders for what he considers crimes against the antiquated Bourbon monarchy and the Francoist prime minister, Rajoy, who governs Spain on behalf of King Felipe VI. The King, who ascended the throne after the 2014 abdication of his corrupt father, King Juan Carlos I, accused the Catalonians of violating the “rule of law and national sovereignty.”

Felipe was really accusing the Catalonians of violating “lèse-majesté,” the feudalistic legal concept that the Catalonians had committed an offense against the “dignity of a reigning sovereign.” The French revolutionaries set the stage for relegating “lèse-majesté” to the dustbin of history when, in 1793, they guillotined the French King Louis XVI, a distant ancestor of Felipe.

Germany placed Puigdemont in a 97-square feet jail cell in Neumünster prison in Schleswig-Holstein, a detention center once used by the Gestapo. Puigdemont’s cell had only a dingy cot; a toilet, shower, and sink; a television; a desk and chair; and a small wooden chest of drawers/wardrobe combination. Internet and outgoing phone calls are prohibited.

On April 6, a court in Schleswig-Holstein ruled that the Spanish charge of “rebellion” did not constitute grounds to either hold Puigdemont or extradite him to Spain. It should be noted that in ordering Puigdemont freed on a usurious $90,000 bail, the German court stipulated that Puigdemont’s extradition to Spain was only “suspended,” not vacated. The court ruled that Spain’s charge that Puigdemont used public funds to hold the Catalonian independence referendum could still constitute a reason to extradite him to Spain. In addition, the German court said it would consult with Spanish and federal German authorities on this point.

The German Foreign Ministry has cited the “independence” of the Spanish judiciary in the prosecution of Catalonian leaders. Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that she hopes Puigdemont’s extradition to Spain “goes ahead.” It appears that some in Germany still treasure past German support for the Francoist traditions of Spain’s court system and other anti-Catalan and anti-Basque “instruments” of government in Madrid. Spain’s national police force, the “Guardia Civil,” took lessons from Heinrich Himmler and the Gestapo during and after the Spanish Civil War. The “Guardia,” feared under Franco’s dictatorship, preserves many of the Nazi SS’s basic surveillance traditions in its age-old battle against the Catalonians and Basques. It is the “Guardia” upon whom the modern-day Torquemada, Judge Llarena, relies upon to round up Catalonian leaders for prosecution and imprisonment. Under the Hendaye Agreement of 1940 between Nazi Germany and Spain, German intelligence helped keep tabs on members of the Spanish Republican government-in-exile, as well as veterans of the International Brigades who fought for the Spanish loyalists during the civil war. German Abwehr military intelligence agents identified members and supporters of the Spanish, Catalonian, and Basque governments-in-exile in places as far afield as Havana, Mexico City, Montevideo, Bogota, Santiago, Panama City, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Santo Domingo (then called Ciudad Trujillo), and New York City.

When France fell to the Germans, the Gestapo scoured French police files for information on Spanish expatriate residents in France who supported the loyalist government. These included many Catalonians and Basques, some of whom had fled to France after the brutal suppression of the Catalonian rebellion of 1934, as well as the Basque government-in-exile in Paris. Franco’s intelligence service also sent agents to Axis Power-occupied and neutral territory to “neutralize” or arrest Catalonian and other dissidents. Spanish nationalist agents fanned out to Rotterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Toulouse, Zurich, and Geneva in search of Catalonian, Basque, and Spanish enemies of Franco and his Falangist Party.

Spanish Republican President Manuel Azaña, exile in France, was arrested by the Vichy authorities after the Nazi occupation of France. Azaña died while under arrest at the Montauban internment camp. Merkel and her government, who support the arrest and extradition of Puigdemont, have much in common, and not in a good way, with the Vichy authorities who arrested Azaña.

Instead of Franco and his spies, it is now Rajoy and CNI that sends agents out across Europe. In the case of Puigdemont’s delegation, these Spanish agents were dispatched to Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany to apprehend the Catalonian leadership. Adolf Hitler assisted Franco in tracking down enemies of the Madrid government. Today, it is Merkel who is providing similar assistance to Rajoy.

Other Catalonian leaders were imprisoned in Madrid, where they await trials on sedition and rebellion charges. The leader of the pro-independence Popular Unity Candidature (CUP), Anna Gabriel, attained political asylum in Switzerland, where she told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, “I will not go to Madrid . . . Since I will not have a fair trial at home, I have looked for a country that can protect my rights.” As with the loyalists imprisoned under Franco, the Catalan independence leaders, who enjoy a majority in the newly-elected Catalonian parliament, face decades in Spanish prison cells under Madrid’s EU-supported regime.

Rajoy, like Franco, appointed not a Catalonian but a Spanish Castilian, Deputy Prime Minister María Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría Antón, as acting President of the Generalitat in Barcelona. Rajoy, as was the case with Franco, has Galician roots. Franco’s rule was infamous for stamping out Catalonian government, language, culture, and national identity and Rajoy, whose Spanish People’s Party is the ideological and chronological heir to Franco’s Falangists, does his very best to emulate his party’s ideological forbearer. Unlike 1936, when Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini came to Caudillo Franco’s side, in 2018, it is European Union Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk who rally to Rajoy’s ranks.

The Spanish government-in-exile was recognized by only a handful of nations, including Venezuela and Mexico. Although France did not recognize the exiled government, it did provide sanctuary for only a few of its leaders. Overall, France was as opposed to the Spanish Republicans in 1939 as it is with the Catalonians today. Two successive French leftist Popular Front prime ministers, Leon Blum and Edouard Daladier, ordered Spanish Republican military personnel and civilians seeking asylum in France interred at “assembly centers” in St. Cyprien, Gurs, and Le Vernet soon became concentration camps. When the Nazis took over France in July 1951, the Spanish Republican internees were transferred to German concentration camps and their deaths. Ironically, among those transferred along with the Spanish Republicans to Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau were the two French prime ministers – Blum and Daladier – who ordered the Spanish loyalist refugees to French internment camps. In not putting out the welcome mat for Catalonia’s exiled government, French President Emmanuel Macron followed the precedent set by Blum and Daladier. Puigdemont and his ministers were, instead, welcomed in Belgium, where the politically-strong Flemish independence bloc ensured they would be safe from Spanish-initiated INTERPOL arrest warrants.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was one of the few world leaders to support the Catalonian independence cause, declaring, “Resist, Catalonia! Latin America admires you.” However, Mexico, which supported the Spanish Loyalist government, was not as generous with the Catalonians. Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray Caso told the Spanish newspaper El Pais, “If Catalonia goes for becoming independent from Spain, the Government of Mexico will not recognize it as a sovereign state.” The National Assembly of Quebec issued a statement supporting the Catalonian cause, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a typical Canadian Liberal Party milquetoast call for Spain’s constitution to be respected, a de facto nod to the Madrid authorities for their actions.

From the Vatican, Pope Francis I, doing his very best to emulate the pro-Nazi Pope Pius XII, who acceded to the papacy in 1939 — the same year the Spanish Loyalists were driven to exile — condemned Catalonia’s nationalism and backed the European Union. It is no secret that the Vatican sees the European Union as a modern-day Holy Roman Empire. Pius XII raised no objection when, in 1943, Franco’s personal priest, Josemaría Escriva, founded the pro-fascist Catholic order, Opus Dei. According to his personal assistant, Escriva is recorded as saying, “Hitler couldn't have been such a bad person. He couldn't have killed six million. It couldn't have been more than four million.” Escriva gave the stamp of approval of the Catholic Church to Franco’s policy of cultural extermination of the Catalan and Basque peoples.

Opus Dei has given succor to fascist regimes around the world, including the juntas of Argentina, Pope Francis’s home country. As Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Francis has been accused of handing over two priests to the security forces of the Argentine junta during the Dirty War of the 1970s. Pro-Vatican propagandists have attempted to whitewash Bergoglio’s dalliances with the Argentine fascist regime. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the current Pope stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Opus Dei-infested government of Rajoy; his proto-fascists in Madrid, which include Spain’s corrupted Borbón monarch, King Felipe VI; and the modern-day Holy Roman Empire that rules from EU headquarters in Brussels.

Just as was the case during the Spanish Civil War, Breton and Corsican nationalists in France have rallied to the side of the Catalonian independence, just as their forefathers supported the Spanish Loyalists, including the Catalonians and Spanish Basques in the late 1930s. Although Macron’s coalition won a majority of seats in France’s July 2017 parliamentary election, it took not a single seat in Corsica. Jean-Guy Talamoni, the president of the Corsican Assembly, vowed that in ten years Corsica would follow Catalonia’s lead in declaring independence. Catalonia and Corsica are not independent today thanks to deals worked out by European monarchs hundreds of years ago. Today, instead of Spanish and French monarchs solely determining the future of Catalonia and Corsica, it is a Rothschild family creation in the Elysées Palace in Paris and a proto-fascist prime minister in the Moncloa Palace in Madrid who call the shots in suppressing the cultural and political identities of Europe’s aspirant nations, including the Basque people on both the Spanish and French sides of the Pyrenees mountain range.

Just as Franco’s troops patrolled the Pyrenees range during the civil war looking for Loyalists sneaking in and out of French territory, Spain’s current Interior Minister, Juan Ignacio Zoido, an Andalusian, ordered patrols increased on the Spanish-French frontier to prevent Puigdemont and his supporters from clandestinely entering Catalonia from France. Zoido was quoted by the UK’s Daily Telegraph as ordering Spanish security forces to be on the lookout for Puigdemont and other exiled officials returning to Catalonia “by helicopter, microlight, or boat.” Zoido could have been channeling any of Franco’s generals during the 1930s civil war.

Unlike the Rajoy regime, which has misused the Spanish courts and constitution to imprison Catalonian political leaders on arcane and trumped up charges of sedition and rebellion, the Catalonian independence movement has been open and transparent about its aims. A clear majority of the Catalonian people want to be free of the shackles of Castilian imperialism and cultural and political superiority. The Catalonian independence leadership, exiled in Belgium, Switzerland, and other countries, does not have some hidden agenda nor, as some Western lunacy suggests, Russian puppet strings. The Catalonian cause reminds one of the passage by the famous Catalonian poet Joan Salvat-Papassei: “the jailers of this world would not catch my shadow, if I were a thief and a bandit they would not know my flight.”

The Spanish government said on Nov.10 that it had noted news manipulation about the Catalan crisis on social media originating from Russia’s territory. Spain's government spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo said disinformation on social networks was a "serious issue." According to Spanish Defence Minister Maria Dolores de Cospedal, the government had established that "many messages and interventions via social networks come from Russian territory." She did not offer any specific examples to confirm the affirmation. Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis said there was evidence of activity by Russian networks and hackers. The trolls are said to be spreading misinformation across social media to further "destabilize" Spain and the EU.

The issue was even raised at the EU foreign and defense ministers meeting on Nov.13-14, where Spain briefed the EU on the alleged interference. The debate comes after eight member states urged EU foreign service chief Federica Mogherini to build up the counter-propaganda cell in her service.

Spanish media have many times attacked Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik Spanish language services for instigating tensions in Catalonia, supporting the separatist movement. El Pais daily wrote an editorial on Nov. 10 denouncing "the intense campaign by Russian media that are close to the Kremlin," whose "propaganda machine" it accused of siding with the pro-independence movement.

NATO leadership chimed in. On Nov.9, US General Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of NATO forces in Europe, called on Russia to stop “meddling” into European elections. He was concerned over Russia’s “malign influence’ in other countries. The Atlantic Council, a US-based think-tank close to NATO, has published a report suggesting that Russia was seeking to meddle in support of Catalan independence and to discredit the Spanish central government's position that the referendum on independence held on Oct. 1 was illegal. El Pais, the Washington Times and Politico all issued publications alleging that an army of Russian bots had perfected their techniques of online influence and thus ensured the October 1 vote went down the path of separation.

If the accusations were true, it would mean that Russia-backed media networks operate to undermine Russia’s official position on the issue made clear in a Foreign Ministry’s statement. Russia has consistently voiced its respect for Spain’s territorial integrity.

Can anyone of sane mind believe that Russia’s “meddling” is the real reason to make over 40 percent of Catalans support independence? Has Russia been behind the 95-year-old independence movement in Catalonia? Has Russia made the Catalans’ language and culture distinct? Did Russia make Francisco Franco oppress the Catalan people? Has Russia provoked the economic crisis in Spain, which has served to magnify calls for Catalan independence? Has Russia made Catalans believe that the current tax structure is unfair? Has Russia made Madrid unwilling to renegotiate Catalonia’s autonomy agreement? Has Russia written Spain’s constitution, which expressly prohibits a region from breaking away unilaterally? Did Moscow order Spanish police to use brutal force, while preventing the unconstitutional vote? If it didn’t count, why take such pains to stop it?

Several world leaders and political figures condemned the violence specifically. Did Russia make them do it? Did Russia make the EU abstain from mediation effort? And, finally, does Russia stand to gain from an independent Catalonia?

With many publications on the issue, no evidence has been produced to demonstrate a link between the Russian government and Catalonia vote. Obviously, the use of the "Russian meddling" narrative seems to work as a distraction from the wrongdoing of the Spanish government. The fantasy provides a convenient scapegoat to avoid responsibility of the Spanish government for missing opportunities to launch meaningful political dialogue with Catalonia and mishandling of the vote. Spain is by far not the only country to use the narrative to its own advantage. As Karl Sharro, a well-known British architect and satirist, commented on the results of UK elections, “The most disappointing thing about the UK election is there wasn't even a hint of Russian interference. It's like we don't matter at all.”

Things are in unchartered waters, crisis conditions a long way from resolved.

Both sides have polar opposite values. Pro-independence Catalans want their democratic rights upheld.

Madrid wants them denied, forcefully if separatists resist. UK-based lecturer in politics and Spanish Caroline Gray accused pro-independence activists of living in a “parallel universe of the new republic…(t)he situation…unpredictable if Spain moves in to take control.”

Catalan separatists still consider Pugdement president despite removal from office by Madrid. He urged peaceful resistance.

Lawlessly jailed activist Jordi Sanchez called for “Gandhi-style resistance.”

Most Catalans celebrated the new republic. Spanish PM Rajoy says it doesn’t exist. A constitutional crisis threatens to become much more serious.

Puigdemont and other Catalan officials face possible arrest on sedition charges. A Rajoy regime tweet said his call for peaceful resistance is “very serious.” His “irresponsibility…has no limit.”

Separatists wanting libertad won’t accept losing what they’ve long been struggling for.

Pro-independence Republican Left of Catalonia party member Josep-Maria Terricabras blasted Brussels, saying:

“The European Union is not exactly a union…It’s a club of states and they protect each other.”

“They’ve done this again and again over history when in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they said ‘no, you are not new countries. We are not going tor recognize you.’ “

“Then, some weeks later, they recognized them, and accepted them as a member of the union.”

“When our leaders in Europe say ‘yes, perhaps tomorrow’, they will say no. I’m not afraid about that and I am not surprised at all.”

Senior lecturer in Hispanic and Catalan Studies Sally-Ann Kitts said “substantial European pressure” is needed to get Rajoy to negotiate.

Brussels may be forced to intervene, she believes, calling its failure to condemn referendum day violence “a really big mistake and quite shameful.”

The current situation won’t be easily resolved as long as Madrid remains hardline. The international community calling the crisis an internal affair is unacceptable.

At some point, Madrid will “have to face up to” reality that negotiation is the only way to resolve things, said Kitts. Millions of Catalans wanting separation from Spain can’t be ignored.

Both sides need to talk. Otherwise protracted crisis conditions will continue, likely violent street clashes and bloodshed.

European Council president Donald Tusk dismissively saying “nothing change(d)” after Catalonia formally declared independence is unacceptable.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker admitted “more cracks” in the fragile union.

On Sunday, deposed Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras said “(w)e cannot recognize the coup d’etat against Catalonia, nor any of the anti-democratic decisions that (Rajoy’s regime) adopt(ed) by remote control from Madrid,” adding he remains “vice president of the government of Catalonia.”

Belgian minister for asylum and migration Theo Francken said Puigdemont and other Catalans “who feel politically threatened can apply for asylum in Belgium. This includes the minister-president Puigdemont. It’s completely legal.”

On Saturday, Madrid’s orders against Catalonia and its officials became effective, usurping control over the new republic.

If separatist politicians boycott the December snap election, they’ll cede power to Madrid, able to assure puppet governance representing its interests.

On Saturday, veteran activist Marti Olivella began teaching Catalans passive resistance techniques, saying:

“I think it’s an illusion to think that people who have led us this far and declared independence are going to just walk away because a law is published.”

If deposed Catalan officials remain united in parliament and other government buildings, and pro-independence activists protect them by forming a human shield, “it will be complicated for” Madrid, he said, adding:

“(T)wo million people put their physical safety on the line to go out and vote in the referendum” – accomplishing what they set out to do, despite police state viciousness.

One activist likely spoke for many others, saying “(t)oday we are a republic.” Madrid “want(s) our territory and our wealth.”

Most Catalans reject its rule. Will they continue struggling for liberty no matter how tough the going gets?

Will Madrid unleash police state violence against them? Will the international community continue supporting Rajoy or demand resolving things through dialogue?

Answers to these questions will explain the course of future events, very much unknown so far.

stephenlendman.org

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose Popular Party is a direct political descendant of Franco’s fascist Falangist Party, wasted no time in invoking, for the first time, Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, which allows the Spanish Kingdom to impose direct rule on regions not adhering to the whiplashing from Madrid. Catalonia is the first, but possible not the last victim, of Spain’s neo-fascism on display for the entire world.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Catalans and Basques fought with bravery on behalf of the Spanish Second Republic against the fascist forces of Franco and his fascists. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini provided all-out support for Franco, much like the European Union, NATO, and the United States have fully backed Rajoy in his confrontation with Catalonia. Spain’s King Felipe VI October 3 speech, in which he condemned the Catalan referendum’s pro-independence results, was seen by many Catalans, as well as other groups like the Basques, Galicians, and Andalusians, as an unnecessary involvement in politics. Not only Catalans, but others across Spain, began calling for the scrapping of the Bourbon family’s monarchy and the establishment of the Spanish Third Republic. The Bourbons have little respect among the working peoples of Spain and France. After all, it was an ancestor of Felipe VI, Louis XVI of France, who lost his head to a French revolutionary guillotine after ignoring the poverty of the French people.

Spain’s reaction to Catalonia’s independence was swift and reminiscent of Hitler’s extinguishment of Austria’s independence in his infamous “Anschluss” (union) between Nazi Germany and Austria. Rajoy ordered the sacking of Catalan First Minister Carles Puigdemont; his entire Cabinet, chief of the Catalan Mossos d’Esquadra police Jose Luis Trapero, Catalan representatives in Madrid, Brussels, Strasbourg, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, Berlin, Vatican City, Lisbon, Rabat, Warsaw, Vienna, Zagreb, and Geneva; and even Catalan schoolteachers. Catalan government ministers were replaced with lisp-talking Castillian apparatchiks sent to the Catalan capital of Barcelona to administer, by fiat, all Catalan government institutions. Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria took over Puigdemont’s job, while Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido took over the Catalan police functions from Trapero. Police duties in Catalonia were largely transferred from the Mossos d’Esquadra to the feared “Guardia Civil,” the notorious political enforcers for Franco’s fascist regime that were created by Franco as a Spanish version of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo.

The Madrid regime announced that new Catalan elections would be held on December 21 of this year, however, it is far from clear whether Catalonia’s pro-independence parties will be permitted to field candidates. Madrid may proscribe all of Catalonia’s pro-independence parties and groups, including “Junts Pel Sí” ("Together For Yes") and the Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), leaving only pro-Spanish parties like Rajoy’s neo-fascist Popular Party and the accommodationist Socialists, Ciudadanos, and George Soros-financed Podemos on the ballot. Moreover, Madrid has threatened to put on trial all of Catalonia’s independence leaders for sedition. Sedition convictions under Spanish law carry a maximum 15-year prison term.

Madrid also ordered shut down a Catalan government special commission that was investigating Spanish police brutality against Catalan citizens during pro-independence demonstrations following the October 1 referendum. Ominously, the Madrid authorities ordered sacked police chief Trapero to turn in his passport, a sign that Madrid is contemplating seizing the passports of all of Catalonia’s independence leaders to prevent them from operating a Republic of Catalonia government-in-exile. The precedent for such action was the anti-Franco Spanish Second Republic’s government-in-exile established in Paris in 1939 after Franco’s seizure of Spain. After Nazi Germany’s invasion of France in 1940, the government-in-exile moved to Mexico City, where it was recognized by Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, Venezuela, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania until its dissolution in 1977 after Spain’s so-called “constitutional monarchy” was restored after Franco’s death. The seizure of passports from Catalan officials and the closure of Catalan foreign missions abroad by Madrid is clearly aimed at preventing a Catalan government-in-exile from being formed.

Today, Rajoy and his junta have the support of all the major corporate periodicals in Spain, El País, El Mundo, ABC, El Razón, and Barcelona’s quisling newspaper La Vanguardia. However, no newspaper endorsements or messages of support from Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Theresa May, and Jean-Claude Juncker that will enable Rajoy’s thugs to keep Catalonia under his boot heel. Catalonia’s future will be determined by its own people and their friends abroad, many of whom have rallied to Catalonia’s cause.

No sooner had Catalonia declared its independence, messages of support began streaming into Barcelona. Jean-Guy Talamoni, the president of the National Assembly of Corsica, a French island where independence sentiment is strong, praised the “birth of the Republic of Catalonia.” Carole Delga, the president of the French region of Occitania, where Catalan is spoken in the Pyrenees-Orientales department, recognized Occitania’s strong ties to Catalonia and called for urgent talks between Spanish and Catalan authorities to maintain the civil peace.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has promised a second Scottish independence referendum, voiced support for Catalonia. The leader of the Scottish National Party government in Edinburgh said, “The right to self-determination is an important international principle, and I hope very much it will be respected in Catalonia, and everywhere else." There is every reason to believe that Rajoy is seizing the Spanish European Union passports of Catalan leaders to prevent them from establishing a government-in-exile in either Edinburgh or Glasgow, two cities from which they could have at their service satellite communications links and direct air access to Europe’s major cities. There is a great degree of support among Scots for Catalan independence. The new Catalan Defense Committee Scotland is organizing opposition to Madrid’s aggression against Catalonia. It has stated, “The brutality and repression that has been visited upon the people of Catalonia cannot be allowed to continue, or to be legitimized.” The committee is not only confining its activities in Scotland and is vowing to spearhead a Europe-wide movement.

Catalonia’s cause is also supported by Jan Peumans, the speaker of the Flemish regional parliament. Citing the example of Scotland, Peumans said of Catalonia and his own region of Flanders, that independence of such regions is an “evolution that no European government can avoid.”

Regional leaders in Italy’s Lombardy and Veneto regions, which both voted in favor of more autonomy in recent referendums, rallied to Catalonia’s side and condemned Spain’s arrest and intimidation of Catalan leaders. Separatist leaders in the Faroe Islands, which voted in 1946 for independence from Denmark only to see the Danish government bow to pressure from Washington to keep the islands Danish, hope to repeat the 1946 vote in an April 2018 referendum for a new constitution for an independent Faroes. The declaration of the Republic of Catalonia has provided encouragement to not only the Faroese but those in Greenland who want to see a total break from Danish (and NATO) control.

Rajoy’s junta’s crackdown in Catalonia could also re-ignite the Basque region’s desire for independence. The Basque guerrilla group ETA declared a unilateral cease fire in 2010 but it never fully disarmed. If the Spanish suppression of Catalonia succeeds, the Basques may see themselves as next on Rajoy’s list. Unlike the Catalans, the Basques have shown Madrid that they are quite capable of bringing a war home to the very center of the Spanish state in Madrid. The Galicians may also see their autonomy at risk and a mobilization of the armed “Restistencia Galega” would force Madrid to face multiple fronts in not only Catalonia and the Basque region, but Galicia, as well.

Señor Rajoy and his proto-fascists would do well to listen to the Catalan protesters singing from the streets of Barcelona their traditional Catalan songs and one from the musical “Les Misérables” that should worry the puppet minister for the Bourbon king of Spain: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people Who will not be slaves again!.. Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Beyond the barricade. Is there a world you long to see? Then join in the fight. That will give you the right to be free!”