Political control of schoolchildren and police in Catalonia

The Catalan government is officially called the Generalitat. Unofficially it is widely known as the Genestapo. In this post we look at how it keeps political control of the schools and the police, two very sensitive areas for totalitarian governments.

Political control of schools 

We have already seen the way in which the Catalangovernment interferes politically in the lives of schoolchildren by spying onthem. Now the children are being asked for their political opinions.

The El Morell secondary school in Tarragona circulated a questionnaire from Lérida University to be completed by the pupils. It contained the questions:

To what extent do you feel:

1 Catalan

2 Spanish

3 Of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you feel proud of being:

1 Catalan

2 Spanish

3 Of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you identify with:

1 The Catalan language

2 The Spanish language

3 The language of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you identify with:

1 Catalan culture

2 Spanish culture

3 The culture of your country of birth (or that of your family)

To what extent do you identify with:

1 The independence movement

2 The non-independence movement

Answers to be given as a score from 1 (never) to 5 (always)

“We don’t understand why the pupils have to be asked these questions,” said one mother. The documentation in the study says that “Participation is voluntary, anonymous and confidential” but parents have said that that was not the case. The school is trying to row back, saying, “We didn’t know the content of the questionnaire,” (yeah, sure, pull the other one) and “We have proposed the individualised return of the questionnaires to the families who ask for them or else collective destruction.” The individualised return of anonymous questionnaire forms – now there’s a thought!

The questionnaire form shown here is presented in Catalan only. That is the only language that can be used in Catalan schools for any purpose at all. Why? Because it ensures that the lower classes will have poor Spanish and will not be able to leave Catalonia. The policy of linguistic immersion is not practised by the  Catalan bourgeoisie. The latest in a long line of hypocritical top Catalans to be discovered avoiding the policy that they impose on the lower orders is a well-known footballer called Pep Guardiola, who sends his children to the American Benjamin Franklin school in Barcelona, a “truly international school” where the teaching “is entirely in English, with language courses offered in Spanish, Catalan and French”. It must be said though that he hasn’t quite worked out quite what a international education is about: “My children go to school with Indian people, black people, normal people …”

Political control of the police

In 2016 Victor Tarradellas was the Secretary for International Relations of CDC, the name at that time of Carles Puigdemont’s party (now JxCat). He was a trusted confidant of former Catalan premier Artur Mas and of Puigdemont at the time when the 2017 illegal referendum was being planned. If a government is planning an illegal action on the scale of a referendum, it obviously has to have the police on its side. It was Victor’s job to find out which senior officers (“comisarios”, like superintendent) of the Mossos (Catalan police) could be trusted.

“Fainthearted separatist”, “comes from the Guardia Civil”, “red”, these are some of his comments, which were accompanied by positive and negative marks against the names. He kept his comments in a notebook that has come to light in the course of a judicial investigation into illegal funding of the party.

He had a list of 45 officers marked on three scales: patriotism and determination, management ability and charisma, and institutional loyalty. His notes praised recently promoted officers while criticising others for having come from the Guardia Civil or for their being close to the Spanish socialist party PSOE. The current chief officer of the Mossos Eduard Sallent had a top score on all three scales with a positive mention of his background in the nationalist student union FNEC. “Very separatist” was the verdict.

Sources

(Spanish)

Diari de Tarragona

Un estudio pregunta a alumnos de El Morell si son independentistas

(A study asks pupils at El Morell if they are separatists)

Mundo deportivo

La polémica frase de Guardiola: “Mis hijos van al colegio con gente india, gente negra, gente normal...”

(Guardiola’s controversial sentence: “My children go to school with Indian people, black people, normal people …”)

El Independiente

Un dirigente de CDC hacía listas de "buenos y malos" comisarios de los Mossos

(A leading member of CDC made lists of “good and bad” senior officers of the Mossos)

(English)

Benjamin Franklin International School

"I'd whip her till she bled," says the Guardian's chum

Pablo Iglesias is the leader of a Spanish far-left political party called Podemos. He has just done a deal with Spain’s acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to form a coalition government with himself as deputy PM.

Sam Jones for the Guardian welcomes this:

Spain’s ruling socialist party has reached a preliminary coalition deal with the anti-austerity Unidas Podemos to try to form a government after the country’s second inconclusive election in seven months.

And why not? The other day the Guardian, being British, had no hesitation in giving Dago Johnnie his orders about what future political arrangements he must ensure in Spain (progressive parties must unite) and Heaven’s command has been dutifully obeyed. Podemos’s "progressive" credentials are present in its very name – note the feminine form of Unidas (united). In a hagiography published when Iglesias first came to prominence, the Guardian quoted him: “I’m a normal person.”

Mariló Montero is a TV presenter and she has a different view from the Guardian of what is a normal person. In 2016 she managed to upset Señor Normal. His response was simple: “I’d whip her till she bled … [I’m] a perverted Marxist turned psychopath.”

She referred him to the Spanish Institute for Women. The Institute, not surprisingly, gave her its backing saying that the comment was "totally inadmissible as sexist, and because it incites violence." Iglesias said that he “was sorry”, thereby removing any suspicion that the affair might have been the result of hacking or a montage.

"I don't like children or the family, or walking in the park, or dressing well, or old women stopping me or bloody Francoists telling me to fuck off, and with majority politics it's the same for me as with majority sex ... it doesn't give me a hard-on ..." says the GuardiPodemos's Señor Normal.

Q. Does Sam Jones of the Guardian know this story?

A. You can bet your boots he does. It was all over the media at the time and he’s paid to read the Spanish media.

Q. Did he warn Guardian Central that their Señor Normal was a self-described perverted psychopath who fantasised about whipping defenceless women, whose willy was left flaccid by the thought of majority politics?

A. He’s paid to do that sort of thing too.

Q. Does Guardian Central give a flying fuck about this?

A. Of course not. It thinks that it controls the information that gets published about Spain in English, so if its hero turns out to be a self-confessed psychopathic street-fighter with misogynistic tendencies, it just has to keep quiet and say nothing and nobody will ever know. Just what happened with its backing for Arnaldo Otegi.

Well hard luck, Guardian. You’ve been rumbled!

Pablo the feminist displays his credentials

Other gems from the Guardian’s “anti-austerity” hero Pablo Iglesias:

The Spanish Constitution: “That scrap of paper from 1978”. As Deputy Prime Minister he will be required to swear loyalty to it. Hmmm. We can imagine what that oath will be worth.

“Venezuela is a model to follow.”

And inevitably, he supports Arnaldo Otegi, calling the ETA terrorist a “peacemaker”. Otegi is of course the GuETArdian’s best friend whom we discussed here.

Well now the GuardiPodemos editor Katharine Viner has a new best friend, a perverted Marxist psychopath who fantasises about using extreme violence against women. Isn’t she the lucky one!

GuardiPodemos editor Katharine Viner and friends

Sources

(English)

The Guardian

'Yes he can!' How Spanish indignado Pablo Iglesias aims to use a wave of protest to build 'a decent country'

Spain's ruling socialists strike coalition deal with Podemos

The Guardian view on Spain’s election: progressive parties must unite to defeat the far right

(Spanish)

El Mundo

Mariló Montero denuncia a Pablo Iglesias ante el Instituto de la Mujer por decir que "la azotaría hasta que sangrase"

(Mariló Montero refers Pablo Iglesias to the Spanish Institute for Women for saying that he “would whip her till she bled”)

ABC

El largo historial de Iglesias en apoyo de Otegi

(Iglesias’ long history of support for Otegi)

El Confidencial

El Instituto de la Mujer respalda a Mariló y Pablo Iglesias dice que "lo siente"

(The Spanish Institute for Women backs Mariño and Pablo Iglesias says that he “is sorry”)

Cope

Cuando Pablo Iglesias hablaba de la Constitución como "aquel papelito de 1978"

(When Pablo Iglesias described the Constitution as “that scrap of paper from 1978”)

YouTube

Iglesias and Venezuela

The Brussels Times, sedition and investigative journalism

The Brussels Times is one of those newspapers that cater for English-speaking people in a country that has a large expat community, a common and useful phenomenon. It has just started a weekly series called Brussels Behind the Scenes, which we are told is “a weekly investigative newsletter by The Brussels Times’ Samuel Stolton”. Well, that sounds interesting. There must be a lot that goes on in Brussels that is never told in public. So, what do we have?

The first article, dated 1 November 2019, is titled Call Me Boris. Yes, it’s about Boris Johnson and starts by using a whole truckload of adjectives to evoke his time as a journalist in the city:

A shock of blonde hair emerges through the doorway and the face underneath becomes blushed, enveloped by the damp heat of the room.

The man raises a plump, pink hand to his flaxen locks and ruffles them, disturbing the subdued colours of this musty Irish pub. Approaching the bar, a wry smile crawls over his face as heads, in mechanical unison, turn in his direction. It is the early 1990s and the future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, has entered Kitty O’Shea’s for a lunchtime drink. 

It is obvious that Sam himself did not witness this scene almost 30 years ago. It is equally obvious that this piece of “investigative journalism” required nothing more arduous than trawling around the Brussels watering-holes in search of gossipy reminiscences from those old-timers who did remember Johnson’s spell in the city.

Sam’s second venture into the risky genre of investigation was, in fact, even easier. All he was required to do was to reproduce an anti-Spanish sob story originating from the Catalan government’s propaganda department and masquerading as an interview with Meritxell Serret. She was the Catalan Councillor for Agriculture at the time of the seditious coup in 2017 and she is finding life on the run (“in exile” as the Catalan government puts it and Sam faithfully copies) to be rather tedious. She feels abandoned. She did a bunk with Catalan premier Puigdemont but gets no support from him because she is from ERC. Her party has now fallen out with Puigdemont’s JxCat party, and she isn’t the flavour of the month in ERC either because her own party leader Oriol Junqueras stayed in Catalonia to face the music, spent two years on remand, and is now serving 13 years porridge for sedition. While she’s in Brussels eating mussels.

A sob story we said, and we meant it literally. Sam’s purple prose style spares us no mawkish thrill:

“I am fighting for the values of Europe – integration, unity, diversity – these are also the principles of a free and independent Catalonia. The European institutions act as guarantors of these freedoms,” Serret tells me, when I ask her who she is doing all this for, having sacrificed so much for the mirthless mope of the Belgian climate.

Tears begin to bud from Serret’s eyes. The alternative, she says, does not bear thinking about. “To permit attitudes that support the imprisonment of democrats and the repression of our political movement is much worse. In Spain, this is too recent in our history to forget.”

There is no need here to parse the whole article. The EU has made it clear consistently that events in Catalonia are an internal matter for Spain and of no concern to its institutions. We will simply quote one downright lie:

Serret cannot return to Spain, for now. She is reportedly wanted on a charge of disobedience, an accusation that would normally not merit the issuing of a European Arrest Warrant.

Sam’s article is dated 8 November. On 30 October the Spanish media reported that the Supreme Court had decided not to proceed with an attempt to have her returned, precisely because the only charge would be “desobediencia” (contempt of court) and those of her comrades who had not scarpered had been sentenced to 20 months disbarment from public office and a fine. In the circumstances, it would not be in the public interest to proceed with the complexities of an EAW. It is still a lie of course that she cannot return to Spain. There is absolutely nothing to stop her doing so. Except the prospect of 20 months out of active politics and a fine.

So who is Samuel Stolton, the Bob Woodward of the Brussels Times? For a start, the shallowness of his knowledge of Spanish affairs is shown by his own remarkable admission of naivety:

Last week, during a dinner with Spanish diplomats in Brussels and naively assuming that the Catalan quandary could be a stimulating conversation topic, I allotted the subject into our discussion. Indeed it was, but not in the manner I had expected –yielding instead a wild and flippant response. “The media has got it all wrong,” one diplomat said. “The separatists are fanatic extremists – they are radicals.”

It goes without saying that we are facing the old British problem, a belief that merely being British confers a magical ability to understand the affairs of other countries and a divine right to tell Johnny Foreigner what he is doing wrong.

Sam tells us that he is:

the Digital Editor at the European news agency, Euractiv, and I cover issues ranging from continental politics to global technology news. I have also written for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Brussels Times and others.

Euractiv limits itself to:

Samuel Stolton writes on EU affairs in the fields of digital policy and technology. He has a particular interest in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and digital regulation.

The collection of his articles on the Euractiv site are almost exclusively to do with digital technology. The few political articles are about Brexit. There is nothing about Spain or any other European country.

His Guardian work consists of three very short pieces all published in less than 24 hours between 17.00 GMT on 17 February and 12.30 GMT on 18 February 2018:

• 120 words praising a Serbian photographer
• 50 words puffing a bookshop in Cardiff
• 300 words giving Elon Musk a boost

This looks more like PR work than suitable training for the minefield of Catalan affairs. Sam thinks that his admission of naivety will excuse him anything. But is naivety what is required in an investigative reporter? The editor of the Brussels Times may care to ponder the question.

Sources

(English)

The Brussels Times

Call me Boris

Tears in Catalonia

Samuel Stolton’s website

http://www.samuelstolton.com/

Euractiv

Samuel Stolton

The Guardian

Urban landscapes reimagined – in pictures

Browse a bookshop: Octavo’s Book Cafe and Wine Bar, Cardiff

Elon Musk’s dream ideas

(Spanish)

Crónica Global

¿Qué fue de Meritxell Serret?

(What became of Meritxell Serret?)

El Periódico

La fiscalía aplaza la reclamación contra Marta Rovira al haber huido a Suiza

(The Spanish public prosecutor defers the claim against Marta Rovira as she has fled to Switzerland)