Propaganda in Catalan schools

 

One picture is genuine and one is a fake. Of course, anyone with the slightest knowledge of Britain will know that it is unthinkable for political propaganda to appear on a school gate. In fact, in the utterly expected absence of any such genuine image I have cropped it from what is an obvious montage that had no intention to deceive.

And equally of course, anyone with the slightest knowledge of Catalonia will know that it is absolutely normal for schools to have pro-independence propaganda at their gates. This picture is of the Enxaneta primary school in Valls. It is a public (state) school run by the Catalan government.

Sources

(English)

Express

UKIP row school BANNED pupils from voting for party in mock election saying it is 'RACIST'

(Spanish)

Dolça Catalunya

Por aquí han de pasar cada mañana los niños de este colegio de Valls

(The children of this school in Valls have to walk over this every morning)

Catalan government reported to the UN for “infringement of rights"

The United Nations Human Rights Council

A report is being made to the United Nations Human Rights Council denouncing the state of human rights in Catalonia.

The Asamblea por una Escuela Bilingüe warns of

“numerous examples of infringement of rights, lack of democratic guarantees and abuses” in policy areas under the control of the Catalan government, especially cases of “repeated flouting of court rulings” by the regional and local authorities and “the use of schools as a tool of identity-building”.

Impulso Ciudadano describes

a breakdown of “essential” democratic values that affect fundamental rights of people who do not share the positions of the nationalist parties that exercise power in Catalonia.

Their report explains in detail that

“the regional government and Catalan local authorities discriminate against people who do not share nationalist points of view” in a number of fields.

It also denounces:

“arbitrary arrests” of people who remove pro-independence yellow ribbons placed illegally in public spaces;

“interference in private life” by accessing personal data to make the roll for the illegal referendum in 2017);

“infringement of the right to honour and reputation” (essentially, libel and slander) by describing dissidents as fascists or falangists;

And a failure to guarantee such basic aspects as:

“freedom of opinion and expression” by disrupting events held by constitutionalist organisations and parties; “freedom of assembly”; the “right to education” by banning Spanish as the language of teaching and political indoctrination in classrooms.

Source

(Spanish)

ABC

Denuncian a la Generalitat ante la ONU por «vulneración de derechos»

(Catalan government reported to the UN for “infringement of rights")

Catalonia’s Education System: Indoctrination, Victimization, and Linguistic ‘Spies’

Indoctrination in a Catalan school

I have mentioned Carlos Conde in my post about the European Court of Human Rights. He has published another article, this time a damning denunciation of how Catalan nationalism exercises iron control over education. I have mentioned myself how a child ended up in hospital after being literally thrown out of her classroom for drawing a Spanish flag and children were spied on in school playgrounds; the Catalan government itself has admitted “incognito observation”

Carlos deals with these scandals and goes on to describe the pernicious effect of nationalist policy on the administration of education, which is entirely a regional power at primary and secondary levels:

When it came to teaching staff, the “selection” process was helpfully streamlined: while Catalan speakers could apply for a vacancy anywhere in Spain, only speakers of Catalan are likely to apply for vacancies in Catalonia. The effects of the policy were mutually reinforcing: attracting a carefully defined educational profile to the teaching profession; contributing to the departure of “uncomfortable” professionals; and ensuring that the focus of the Catalan education system remained militantly localistic, exempt from Spanish “contamination.”

Nationalist pressure presents itself at every stage of education: in the most recent university access exams, invigilators only issued students with the Catalan version of the exam. Despite being entitled to both and to choosing which one to attempt, candidates who preferred the Spanish script were forced to raise their hand and ask for it in examination halls hosting hundreds of fellow students. Invigilators were instructed to take note of their names and to mark such requests as an “incident” in their reports.

He also describes the scandalous case of Francisco Oya.

Oya is a professor of history at the Joan Boscà college in Barcelona. In January 2019, following a secretive investigation, he was sentenced to ten months of unpaid suspension by the Catalan education authorities. When Oya asked the inspector about the reasons for his “gross misconduct,” he was told that the class materials that he used “made Catalan nationalists look bad.”

…

In 2015, Oya wrote a painstakingly rigorous report about the Catalan History curriculum. In it, he exposed hundreds of cases of manipulation, deliberate omission, and false facts. These ranged from consciously avoiding the term “Hispania” when referring to the Iberian Roman Empire to anachronistically referring to Catalonia as far back as in the Pre-History section of the syllabus. In the medieval and modern history chapters, all historical events were presented as a confrontation between virtuous, civilized Catalans, and oppressive, ignorant and violent Spaniards, often visually illustrated with grotesque caricatures.

Sources

(English)

The GlobePost

Catalonia’s Education System: Indoctrination, Victimization, and Linguistic ‘Spies’

(Spanish)

El Mundo

El Govern admite que se "observó de incógnito" a niños en los recreos

(The Catalan government admits “incognito observation” of children in school playgrounds.

Spying on judges

Police vans outside the Catalan Supreme Court

The body that represents the interests of the Spanish legal profession (CGPJ) has received reports from judges in Catalonia that the Catalan government has had undue access to their computers for purposes of inspection, control and monitoring. Such access is not allowed by law.

A number of judges reported that a message from the Catalan government appeared on their computer screens informing them of possible access to their computers. In order to remove this message they had to click on a confirmation that they had read it and were expressly aware of the terms and conditions which this access was taking place.

The CGPJ has ordered the Catalan government to provisionally suspend “all activity of inspection control and monitoring of judicial affairs” and to provide within 15 days “a detailed report of all cases of access that have taken place in Courts in Catalonia”.

It has opened a formal investigation into any possible illegitimate access to judicial proceedings. These computer records obviously contain a large amount of sensitive personal data of people involved in court cases. Legal access to them is limited by law to the CGPJ and is strictly controlled within the profession.

Source (Spanish)

Libertad Digital

Jueces catalanes denuncian ante el CGPJ que la Generalidad accedió de forma indebida a sus ordenadores

(Catalan judges complain to the CGPJ that the Catalan government had undue access to their computers)

Spying on schoolchildren

The paranoid obsession
"Don't touch our Catalan language"

The language battle in Catalonia has reached the stage where a publicly funded organisation can spy on children in school playgrounds to discover which language they are speaking to interact with each other and with teachers. This is part of a campaign to eliminate the Spanish language entirely from Catalan schools, even in children’s free time. A member of the Catalan parliament, Sonia Sierra Infante of the Liberal Ciudadanos Party, reports that the pro-Catalan-language pressure group Plataforma per la Llengua (PplL), which receives a hefty subsidy from the Catalan government, was secretly observing language use in schools.

According to figures published by the Catalan government itself, Spanish is the usual language of 50.73% of the population of Catalonia  compared to  only 36.29%  who speak Catalan. The Catalan-only policy in schools is a blatant attempt to engineer language use away from reality towards the nationalist fantasy world.

PplL reached these conclusions after making “incognito observations” in 50 Catalan primary and secondary schools of the “language behaviour” of children and teachers. It recognises that “the schools were not informed of the full reality of the activity” and that “it was not possible to tell anybody of the purpose of the research to avoid of risk to the reliability of the data.” The schools where the observation took place are not identified, calling into question the methodological reliability of the study.

The schools did not know that they were being analysed because they had been asked for permission to do research “from a game activity during playtime that had nothing to do with language”. In each school, 15 children and one teacher were observed (the one on playground duty) through a game activity in which, in fact, the only purpose was to find out what was the usual language that the pupils and teacher used “spontaneously” with each other without knowing that they were being investigated. According to the authors, “nobody” was informed of the real goal of the research in order not to prejudice the reliability of the data, although the Catalan Education Ministry “knew what we were doing” And it was not vetoed.

PplL concluded that Catalan was spoken in only 24% of school playgrounds in Catalonia and 27% of secondary teachers spoke Spanish with children at playtime, with the use of Catalan by children  falling to 13.8% “in the areas where it is most necessary”. It describes this as an “anomalous situation” that is not in line with the legal requirement that Catalan should be the only language used at all in schools. Catalonia is the only place in the world where children are denied education in the official language of the country.

The Catalan Education Minister Josep Bargalló, of the extreme Catalan Republican ERC party, denies all knowledge of the matter, claiming to have had no contract with Plataforma per la Llengua since a previous matter.

“I have no idea about it. I can assure you that I have no idea of where this comes from”.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

How the spies acted.

• Incognito. The language spies carried out “incognito observation” because “if the subject of the study is aware, it is highly probable that they will not act naturally”.
• In English. They pretended not to speak either Catalan or Spanish in order not to condition the class. They spoke to the teachers in English and then went on to do the observation.
• Notes. Then they withdrew to “a corner”, where they “made a note of the language in which the interactions between each pupil and between teacher and pupils took place.”

Sources

(Spanish)

El Mundo

Torra permite espías en los recreos para comprobar si los niños hablan catalán

([Catalan premier] Torra allows spies at playtime to check whether the children are speaking Catalan)

ABC

El castellano supera al catalán en 14 puntos como lengua habitual en Cataluña

(Spanish esxceeds Catalan by 14 points as thge suual language in Catalonia)

El Español

‘Topos’ en el recreo de los niños catalanes: así les espiaban cuando hablaban castellano en el patio

(“Moles” at playtime for Catalan children: how they were spied on when they spoke Spanish in the playground)

(Catalan)

The 29-page PplL report (pdf)

Update 17.20 CEST 19 July 2019. This link now returns a 404. The report has already been pulled by PplL. It certainly  existed. I have a pdf file.

An old-school Catalan racist

La Vanguardia, 27-02-01
Barrera says that the inflow of immigrants is endangering the survival of Catalonia.

• In America the Negros have a lower IQ than whites.
• People with genetic mental deficiencies should be sterilised.
• It’s more important to save Catalonia than democracy.
• Immigration is the main threat to Catalonia, we have managed to overcome the wave of Andalusians but now the Catalan language is in danger. I’d like a Catalonia like with the Republic: without immigrants.
• No-one will convince me that a Rambla is better with mixed-race people than one with only white people walking on it.
• When Haider [the Austrian far-right leader] says there are too many immigrants, he’s not being racist, he’s telling the truth.
• I’m not against the death penalty, this debate should be opened.
• I have more respect for an ETA murderer than for a common criminal because the etarra kills for noble convictions, not for money.
• The waves of immigration are a plan to decatalanise Catalonia.
• The solution for unemployment is to expel the immigrants who are stealing our work.
• There is a genetic distribution in the Catalan population that is statistically different from the sub-Saharan.
• What substantially complicates things is that it is more difficult to integrate a Latin American than an Andalusian.
• I do not claim that a country should have a pure race but there is a genetic distribution in the Catalan population that is statistically different from that of the sub-Saharan population for example.
• I am not a racist or a xenophobe.

JEREC, the youth movement of ERC

The quotations above are from a man called Heribert Barrera. He was no minor player. On the contrary, he was a leading figure in Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the Catalan Republican Left. And if ever a party was wildly misnamed, this is it. It springs originally from the Catalan fascist movement Estat Català that flourished in the 1930s after asking Mussolini for advice on how to be good fascists.

"Escamots" in Barcelona. The shorts were green.

Barrera was the first President of the Catalan Parliament from 1980 until 1984 after the restitution of democracy, and was President of ERC from 1991 to 1995. When he died in 2011, the Catalan political class gave him the nearest thing to a state funeral that could be arranged, with symbols of official mourning in the Parliament. The then Catalan premier Artur Mass described him as a “master of patriots” and presented him as an example for young Catalans to follow.

A ceremony in the Catalan Parliament was led by its then President Núria de Gispert, who said, “The mark that he made was very, very deep, much deeper than would ever have been imagined.” She described him as “a politician of capital importance coming from service to the people and a tireless man in the fight for liberty.”

Jordi Pujol, another former Catalan premier and self-confessed mega-scale tax fraudster, described Barrera as “a gentleman who was sometimes hard, but was a respectful politician.” He continued his eulogy, “As a young man you chose a commitment that you have maintained for 75 years because you are a man of sound, consistent values, and you have been an example … at such a difficult time, subjected to economic, social and demographic pressure that could affect cohesion, memory of e Barrera and his warnings cane serve us to face the future.” This last comment is a clear reference to Barrera’s views on people from elsewhere moving into Catalonia.

Catalan nationalism has a nasty racist streak, as does any kind of nationalism. I have already mentioned examples of it: A posh Catalan racist, Catalan language and racism, Beyond the smoke and mirrors. I will return to the matter again.

Sources:

The quotations from Barrera are from different reliable sources. I do not list them individually here but they can be found easily on the internet by searching for the Catalan or Spanish text, which is shown below.

La Vanguardia

La clase política catalana despide a Heribert Barrera

(The Catalan political class says farewell to Heribert Barrera)

El Parlament de Catalunya despide con todos los honores a Heribert Barrera

(The Catalan Parliament says farewell to Heribert Barrera with full honours)

El País

El último adiós a Heribert Barrera

(The last farewell to Heribert Barrera)

 

El Periódico

El Parlament acogerá este lunes el funeral de Heribert Barrera

(The Catalan Parliament will host Heribert Barrera’s funeral on Monday)

 

On the connections of ERC and fascism in the 1930s.

Stanley G. Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic.

Javier Barraycoa. Historias ocultadas del nacionalismo catalán (LIBROSLIBRES)

* * * * *

• A Amèrica els negres tenen un Coeficient Intel•lectual inferior als blancs (En América los negros tienen un coeficiente intelectual inferior a los blancos).
• S’hauria d’esterilitzar als dèbils mentals d’origen genètic (Se debería esterilizar a los débiles mentales de origen genético).
• Es més important salvar Catalunya que la democràcia (Es más importante salvar Cataluña que la democracia).
• La immigració es la principal amenaça de Catalunya, varem aconseguir superar les onades d’andalusos, però ara el català està en perill. A mi m’agradaria una Catalunya com la de la República: sense immigrants (La inmigración es la principal amenaza de Cataluña, conseguimos superar la oleada de andaluces, pero ahora el catalán está en peligro. A mí me gustaría una Cataluña como la de la República: sin inmigrantes).
• Ningú em convencerà que és millor una Rambla amb gent mestissa que una on tan sols hi passegi gent de la raça blanca (Nadie me convencerá que es mejor una Rambla con gente mestiza que una donde tan sólo pasee gente de la raza blanca).
• Quan Haider diu que hi ha masses immigrants, no és racista, diu la veritat (Cuando Haider [líder ultraderechista austriaco fallecido] dice que hay masas inmigrantes, no es racista, dice la verdad).
• No estic en contra de la pena de mort: s’hauria d’obrir aquest debat (No estoy en contra de la pena de muerte: se tendría que abrir este debate).
• Em mereix més respecte un assassí d’ETA que un delinqüent comú, ja que l’etarra mata per conviccions nobles, no per diners (Me merece más respeto un asesino de ETA que un delincuente común, puesto que el etarra mata por convicciones nobles, no por dinero).
• Les onades migratòries son un pla per descatalanitzar Catalunya (Las oleadas migratorias son un plan para descatalanizar Cataluña).
• La solució per l’atur es expulsar els immigrants que ens roben el treball (La solución al paro es expulsar a los inmigrantes que nos roban el trabajo).
• Hay una distribución genética en la población catalana que estadísticamente es diferente de la subsahariana (Hi ha una distribució genètica en la població catalana que estadísticament és diferent de la subsahariana)
• Lo que complica bastante la cosa es que es más difícil integrar a un latinoamericano que un andaluz (Lo que complica bastante la cosa es que es más difícil integrar a un latinoamericano que un andaluz)
• no pretendo que un país haya de tener una raza pura, pero hay una distribución genética en la población catalana que estadísticamente es diferente a la de la población subsahariana, por ejemplo
• Jo no sóc racista ni xenòfob (Yo no soy racista ni xenófobo).

Guardian propaganda

Every day the Guardian has an article “From the archive”, one that was published on that date in a previous year. It’s a good idea to look back on previous events. What did it celebrate on 4 July? The anniversary of Spanish prime minister Adolfo Suárez agreeing that the Generalitat (Catalan government) should be restored as part of the system of regional government that would be implemented in all of Spain.

Why did it choose that article to remember? And why this photo of a flag that was hardly known then? Who can say? Was it at the behest of Diplocat, the external propaganda wing of the Catalan government? Very probably. The Guardian has shown great willingness in the past to weigh in on the side of the Catalan coup d’état against an EU member state, having on one memorable occasion described the Generalitat offices as the presidential palace of the new Catalan Republic.

The article commemorates what was certainly an important date; even so, Suárez’ recognition of the Generalitat on 28 September of that year was surely a greater event, as certainly was the return of Josep Tarradellas on 23 October of that year. Why did Diplocat choose to have it published on Thursday? Because it has other things up its sleeve for the autumn with the verdict of the trial, and anyway the coincidence of the date with American independence is a fine subliminal message.

Incidentally, the article repeats the old canard that Franco “tried to obliterate the Catalan and Basque languages”. As these images show, the dictator was welcomed to the Catalan city of Lérida with a sign in Catalan (1963), and a plaque from an irrigation community honours his name in that language (1964).

The Guardian is of course free to choose which archive articles it publishes, though this choice does bear the murky footprints of placement by Diplocat. On wonders too why they chose to commemorate this rather than other 4 July events:

1914: The funeral of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie.

1934: The death of Marie Curie.

1943: The Battle of Kursk.

1946: The Philippines attains independence.

1947: The Indian Independence Bill is presented to the House of Commons.

1976: Israeli commandos raid Entebbe airport in Uganda.

1987: Former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie is convicted of crimes against humanity.

2012: The discovery of particles consistent with the Higgs boson.

What is certain, however, is the Guardian’s own editorial decision to illustrate the article with the rebel flag, the estelada. The Guardian knows perfectly well that the estelada is not the Catalan flag and captioning it as a photo of a demo against the suspension of Catalan autonomy in 2017 simply won’t wash when the article carries an illustration of Tarradellas’ return in 1977 showing the constitutional flag, which is what happened at the time. As I have described, that suspension of autonomy has been ratified by the European Court of Human Rights in pungent terms (describing the appeal as “manifestly ill-founded”). The Guardian knows that perfectly well too.

Yes, the Guardian knows these things perfectly well and has nevertheless acted as an agent of the propaganda department of the rebel Catalan government. A powerful news source of the size, scale and global reach of the Guardian is deemed a priori to know perfectly well what it is doing. It does not get the benefit of the doubt.

Sources (in Spanish)

El País

El día que Suárez reconoció a la Generalitat

(The day that Suárez recognised the Generalitat)

El País

Suárez-Tarradellas: primer paso para el restablecimiento de la Generalitat

(Suárez-Tarradellas: first step to the re-establishment of the Generalitat)

A posh Catalan racist

Xavi Boada Vila is a racist.

That is the conclusion to be drawn from his tweets.

Hitler killed Jews, all Spain has to do now is kill the Catalans because everything that Hitler did with the Jews Spain has already done to the Catalans.

Most of you who insult me don’t have 1% of my followers, you mean I’m stupid and you are VERY INTELLIGENT. Then why don’t you have so many thousands of followers? Can it be because you only know how to insult people? Or because you’re really dumb?

In Catalonia we don’t need more Andalusians, stay at home and work at what you know about, waiting for your dole money that the Catalans pay, if we need proper labour the Latinos and Moroccans can run rings round you.

The crude language and ideas, and the unorthodox punctuation, reflect the quality of the Catalan original. The man is a writer with three novels to his name, though they have fared dreadfully on Amazon. But that doesn’t matter. He is a rich kid. He lives in Matadepera near Barcelona, a small town of 8,841 inhabitants that is the second richest municipality in Spain. Its inhabitants declare an average gross income of €54,113 per year. This is neither surprising nor coincidental. Catalan independence has always drawn its support from the wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie who run Catalonia (as we have seen) for themselves and despise those whom they regard as the racially inferior types from the south.

This sort of thing is nothing new in the world. We have seen the same crudeness in the UK. Boada may be posh socially, but morally he is on the same level as this.

Sources (in Spanish)

El País

Los municipios más ricos de España, según la declaración de la renta: Pozuelo, Matadepera y Boadilla

(The richest municipalities in Spain by opersoanl tax declaration: Pozuelo, Matadapera and Boadilla)

El Diestro

Así insulta a los andaluces el separata racista de Xavi Boada

(How the racist seprartist Xavi Boada insults the Andalusians)

A coward dies a thousand times

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Julius Caesar Act II, scene 2

On 10 October 2017 Carles Puigdemont, premier of Catalonia, declared the unilateral independence of Catalonia. Eight seconds after making the declaration, he withdrew it.

The difference that eight seconds can make!

On Friday 27 October 2017 the Catalan parliament declared the unilateral independence of Catalonia. Over the weekend Puigdemont told his associates to be in their offices to start work on Monday. On Monday 30th his Instagram account posted a photo of the inside of the Catalan government building. It was an old photo. By then he was already in Brussels, having fled Spain in the boot of a car driven by a sergeant of the Mossos (Catalan police). Five associates ran away with him, leaving a dozen others, including his effective deputy Oriol Junqueras, ignorant of events and left to face the music by themselves. They are the ones who have just completed their trial in Madrid.

Since then he has been leading an increasingly isolated, ineffective and ridiculous life on the run under the official protection of the Belgian courts and the personal protection of a number of Mossos detached there on special duty on their free days. He has a mansion in Waterloo, while his financial support is murky; it may be from a private backer, or from a reptile fund under the control of the Catalan government, or a bit of both.

He got himself elected to the European Parliament and wanted to take his seat yesterday. That would have required his prior attendance in person at the Electoral Commission in Madrid to be sworn in. He didn’t go there because he would have been arrested. He is evidently not the stuff of which martyrs are made.

He bottled out again yesterday. Having announced that he would attend the opening session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and with a few thousand of his faithful acolytes in attendance, he failed to cross the Rubicon Rhine and enter France, where a Spanish arrest warrant would certainly have been executed by the French courts. Instead he stayed in Kehl on the eastern bank of the river, safe in Germany, a country where he can travel freely since the German courts take a relaxed view of anyone who runs a putsch against the democratic government of his country and rams an enabling act through parliament allowing him to overrule his country’s constitution and laws in a way to suit his personal dictatorial whimsy. Puigdemont saved his skin, or at least his personal freedom, but his followers are beginning to become disillusioned with this sort of behaviour.

In a word, Puigdemont is yellow.

 

Sources (in Spanish)

Crónica Global

El Govern rompe la prohibición de Interior y tiene a 14 'mossos' protegiendo a Puigdemont

(The Catalan government breaks the Spanish interior ministry’s ban and has 14 mossos protecting Puigdemont)

El Correo

Puigdemont insiste en llevar el pulso soberanista «hasta las últimas consecuencias»

Puigdemont insists on taking the independence showdown “to the final consequences”)

eldiario.es

La fuga de Puigdemont: su mujer, cuatro mossos y un todoterreno sin papeles

(Puigdemont’s flight: his wife, four mossos and an SUV with no papers)

Galiciapress

Un martes nada aburrido para el respetable

(Not a boring Tuesday for respectable people)