Immediately following Strasbourg’s slap in the face for
the Spanish judicial system, and coinciding with the Spanish deputy
PM’s extremely aggressive public statements, a police operation, more
symbolic and headline-grabbing than practical in nature, took place in
the offices of the presidency of the Catalan government and the
headquarters of the cultural association Òmnium Cultural.
The message is clear: faced with what they call the ‘secessionist
defiance’, the Spanish state has objectives that it refuses to give up,
not even due to international pressure —which so far has been weak—
whatever the response from the pro-independence movement. The state
believes this defiance offers the possibility of solving the Catalan
problem once and for all. And such a solution obviously doesn’t involve
persuasion, or even defeating it, in the strictest sense of the word. It
involves destroying its roots. This means humiliating it to start with.
Secondly, dismantling or debasing what it considers to be the
instruments of Catalanism: the Catalan police force, the public
broadcasting corporation and the school system, but above all, the
Catalan government itself as a self-governing institution, upon which
everything else depends. And finally, politically deactivating –even if
it means ruining their lives– a whole generation of pro-independence
political and social leaders.
The message is that
it’s underway and that they have no intention of stopping. I don’t think
they’ll get away with it, but a lot of people are bound to suffer in
the meantime.
