Friend or Foe?
Jan Hamminga
In Ukraine a passenger plane is taken down. Immediately, Russia is held responsible, whether directly or indirectly, and economic sanctions are imposed. Yet a year later no conclusive evidence has been presented. Given that black boxes usually offer all the information one needs, it is odd that no cockpit recordings have even been included in the investigation. In Syria, the state is under attack by US backed rebels. When civilians are shelled by nerve gas grenades, the government is immediately blamed by the western press, though independent reports hold its responsibility for highly unlikely. Although no conclusive evidence is ever presented, no correction is made either. Rather, the attack is reason for USA to demand Assad step down before any solution to the conflict will be considered. In Greece investment bankers Goldman Sachs secretly help the government to cook the books to make entry into the EU possible. When the scam breaks and Greece slides into unpayable debt, the public is held responsible and the ensuing austerity regime only aggravates the country's suffering. People in Europe are fed the lie that it's all due to the Greeks' proverbial laziness and greed. In Libya undercover British troops stage a rebel uprising against the Gaddafi regime with the help of al-Qaida affiliates imported from Iraq. NATO bomb the president's tents and when he tries to escape he is slaughtered on live camera. The immediate result is the spread of terror to Mali and Tchad, giving the French an excuse to send in their troops. Etcetera. Events like these are called psychological operations, or psy-ops, and they are staged to influence public opinion. Psy-ops are a direct result of the spread of the internet. People can no longer be lied to through newspapers and the church's pulpit. They want proof, so proof is invented. The mother of all psy-ops of course was 911, which set the stage for the continuous state of war the planet has been living under ever since.
With this in mind, it is perhaps interesting to take a look at the situation in Catalunya. It has been five years this summer since the people of Catalunya took to the streets to protest the constitutional court's decision to drop the Catalan statute in the dustbin, leading to calls for independence from Madrid's insensitive and oppressive rule, a call quickly taken over by the region's main political party, CiU. Ever since, the Catalan question has been on the newspapers' front pages almost daily, yet no constructive progress has been made. One wonders how this can be possible. Are Spanish politicians really that stupid, or is something else at play?
As I have come to understand, Spanish history can be characterised by a triple struggle. There's the all-powerful catholic church fighting people of other faiths or no faith at all, never sure which is to be considered more dangerous and therefore to be prosecuted more severely. There are the all-powerful moneyed elites suppressing the destitute and the working poor with the help of army and police brutality. And finally there's all powerful Madrid's ongoing effort to turn Spain into something which it is not, ignoring both logic and human decency in its quest for submission of the entire peninsula. More often than not, these struggles converge in the hands of the same old few. It is abundantly clear that PP is anti moral freedom, anti people and anti regional development all at once. Its former loyal ally CiU, now reduced to CDC, coincides on the first two points yet has always favoured a special status for Catalunya. Parties on the left usually promote individual freedom and an honest division of labour and income, while their stance towards self-determination has everything to do with where they are based. In principle, we can say that all nationwide parties seem to adhere to the idea that subjugating the coast to the whims of one town far away in the centre is totally normal. Out of town, this is regarded as both ridiculous and utterly despicable.
Back to our case. We have a central government which is anti everything, opposed by an old ally which is still following its rule regards the oppression of freedoms and dignity, yet differing on the minor subject of wanting to break away 10% of the country's territory, consisting of 15% of its population and responsible for about 20% of its turnover. When it all started, everybody thought the old buddies would come to some sort of agreement, a bit more money and a bit more self-rule perhaps, just enough to keep the angry mobs at bay. Yet, every year the Catalans took to the street in their millions, up to 30% of the overall population coming together in the streets of Barcelona, all the central government ever did was press its feet in the sand, refusing even to listen to the most modest of proposals. Step by unfortunate step, the old buddies became enemies, the people watching the show on their tv screens. To be sure, no tv station outside Catalunya has ever presented any Catalan proposal in a serious manner and never has Catalan tv shown any consideration for Madrid's point of view, so it should be clear that on either side of the divide people have very different opinions on what is actually going on. We are now in the fifth year of the fateful dustbin throw and all we have achieved is that tensions have reached a climax. By presenting election upon election, the Catalan people are made to believe that independence is still very much possible, yet the only visible results so far have been the central government adopting two new laws, la ley de la seguridad ciudadana and la ley de la seguridad nacional which render unlimited powers to the police and the country's president respectively to do as they please. As long as these laws have not been cancelled, there is no way Catalunya can reach independence through lawful means, as its current president Artur Mas has always claimed he was going to achieve. So what has this independence movement really been besides a theatre play with no other goal in mind than to justify passing of those ridiculous, draconian and totally unconstitutional laws? Considering CDC are still as much anti people as they have always been, it is difficult not to consider Catalunya's uprising as anything else but an elaborate psy-op staged to make the public accept full recentralization of state and policing powers, basically taking Spain back to the pre-constitutional days of repression and arbitrary rule. And let us be clear, this is not only a defeat for Catalunya but for the whole of Spain. If Catalunya's autonomy can be suspended at will, then the same applies to every other region. People should be careful what they choose in the coming months.
