Ethnic cleansing and Catalan nationalism

Josep Sort is a professor of politics at Barcelona University. He is a candidate for Puigdemont’s party JuntsxCat in this spring’s Catalan parliamentary election. He proposes a policy of ethnic cleansing.

“We will cleanse the Spaniards from Catalonia, promise.”

He has form. He has called for the immigration holding centre to be used for the internment of Spaniards.

 

 

Source

Dolça Catañunya
Candidato de JuntsxCat amenaza: “haremos limpieza de aspanyols”
(JuntsxCat candidate threatens: “We’ll cleanse the Spaniards”)
https://www.dolcacatalunya.com/2021/01/candidato-de-juntsxcat-amenaza-haremos-limpieza-de-aspanyols/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fear and censorship in Catalonia

Julio Valdeón, writer

Julio Valdeón is a Spanish writer. He kept a daily record of the trial of the Catalan secessionists in Madrid and thought that it would be a good idea to publish them as a book to coincide with the verdict, expected in October. On the recommendation of a friend he approached the Barcelona publishing company Carena. He received this encouraging reply:

For us it would be a pleasure and an honour to receive your proposal. Our publishing house has 27 years of history and we are expanding.

A little later he received this, confirming a schedule:

Thank you, Julio, The project looks very good and very attractive. [We would like the complete text to be] finalised in the last week of August so that we can start the presses in September. I’ll be up to it. We’ll keep in touch. Many thanks.

And now, with the book completed and with an introduction and epilogue by other well-known writers, there is this:

Add caption

I have received your book and, while I am basically in agreement with it, publishing it like this would mean putting the company at risk, given the way things are here. It is complicated for any publisher in Catalonia to take on the publication of the book like this, if you like I can approach some publisher in Madrid. Even within the publishing team we have we have made an agreement of moderation and encouragement of dialogue.

I will offer to look for some publisher who isn’t based here who can publish it without the demonstrations and siege that it would receive.

With my best regards and personal support in anything that I can do.

Carena deny having received any pressure to reject the book. There is no reason at all to doubt them, but that is not the point. Everybody in Catalonia who opposes independence knows that acting in a way that is counter to the policies of the regime is a recipe for trouble. In a general climate of fear, nobody needs an explicit warning to keep their mouth shut. Crónica Global, the online news site that reports this story, was the victim of an attack on its HQ by nationalist thugs in January 2018.

Crónica Global criticised the Catalan government

Valdeón has received an offer from Roger Domingo, editorial director of Ediciones Deusto, saying that the book “must be published so that the truth and freedom can prevail over any attempt to hide it or skimp on it.” However, Deusto is a part of the giant Planeta media group, which moved its corporate HQ from Barcelona to Madrid in protest at the bid for Catalan independence. They can afford to upset the Catalan government. However, it is all too easy to understand that a small publisher like Carena should perceive a threat that could literally ruin the company.

Sources (Spanish)

Julio Valdeón’s website

Crónica Global

Una editorial veta un libro sobre el juicio del 'procés' por miedo al "asedio" independentista

(A publisher vetoes a book about the trial for fear of the secessionist “siege”)

Dircomfidencial

Planeta cambia su domicilio social de Barcelona a Madrid

(Planeta moves its company HQ from Barcelona to Madrid)

ABC

Tres encapuchados atacan con martillos y 'sprays' la fachada de Crónica Global

(Three hooded people attacked the façade of Crónica Global with hammers and paint sprays)

Carrion-eaters, vipers, hyenas and beasts in human shape

This is a translation of an article written in 2008 by Quim Torra, who is now the Premier of Catalonia. The racism and hatred of everything Spanish is now the guiding thread of his government.

* * * * *

At home there was an old copy of a book that all my brothers and sisters had read When the beasts could talk by Manuel Folch i Torres. Father was unbending and, like The Rose and the Ring by Thackeray and Bolavà by Josep Maria Folch, he felt that nobody could grow up without reading them. It was a delightful book in which lettuces, bears, elephants, deer and bumblebees could talk, a collection of fables intended for the education of children.

Now look at your country and the beasts are talking again. But they’re of a different type. Carrion-eaters, vipers, hyenas. Beasts in human shape but who savour hate. A disturbed, nauseating hate, like mouldy false teeth, against everything that the Catalan language represents.

They are here, among us. They find any expression of Catalan-ness repugnant. It is a sick phobia. There is something Freudian in these beasts. Or a small blip in their DNA chain. Poor individuals! They live in a country of which they know nothing: its culture, its traditions, its history. They move around impermeable to any event that represents Catalan reality. It brings them out in a rash. They are repelled by anything that is not Spanish and written in the Spanish language.

The beasts are well known. We all know one of them. There are lots of them, the beasts. They live, die and multiply. The other day one of them caused an incident that hasn’t got to Catalonia and is worth explaining as an extraordinary example of the beastliness of these beings. Poor beasts, they can’t help it.

One of the few airlines that accept the Catalan language as normal is Swiss. If you have taken any of their flights to the old Confederation, you will have noticed that they use our language on take-off and landing. An exception since unfortunately, with the other companies, we are treated exactly as what we are, the last colony in Europe.

Well, a couple of weeks ago one of these beasts was travelling on a Swiss flight. On arrival, there was the typical announcement in Catalan prior to landing. The beast, automatically, foamed rabidly at the mouth. A stench like a sewer came from her seat. She stirred restlessly, desperately, horrified at hearing four words in Catalan. She had no way out. A mucous sweat, as of a flu-ridden toad, poured from her armpits. Just imagine her, the beast, after so much time (!), those however, can live in their Spanish world with no problems, hearing four words in a language that she hates. Indignant, she decided to write a letter to a German newspaper in Zurich, complaining about how she had been treated as "her rights had been violated", Spanish being the "first official language of Spain ", and the beast’s complaint was published on a full page.

Thank God, the good friends of the Catalan Centre in Zurich replied putting the matter straight, just a small centre acting thanks to the decency and dignity of its members.

But why should it be necessary to take action every time? When will the beasts stop attacking? In 2008 how can we put up with so much strife, so much humiliation and so much disdain?

* * * * *

The Catalan original can be found here.