Originally published in Spanish. Arcadi Espada. El Cultural
In the autumn of 1950, the psychologist Leonard W. Doob published an important article systematizing the 19 principles of Nazi propaganda. The whole analysis, classic and strict, is highly interesting. The 16th principle stands out: “Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level”. This is how they have done it. The nationalist thriller started five years ago and the crescendo has been rigorously maintained thanks, above all, to a clause that they have applied to the letter: what gets said, gets done. Considering that this was a delusion, the circumstance has an unquestionable merit. And considering that politicians fail to do what they say, even when their purposes are realistic, can be understood the obtained credit. Which takes us to the 7th principle of the Gobbelsian doxa: “Credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false”.
The Catalan nationalism’s post-truth operation has been the greatest that I had ever known. Maybe its relevance might end up lower than the Brexit’s or Trumpism’s, but the distance between fact and false is, to my opinion, far larger in the Catalan case. The truth of the case is that the Catalan process has been plainly a propaganda operation. And as Goebbels says trough Dobb, is credibility which determines the narrative’s truthness or falseness. It has been decades since Catalan nationalism started to amass credit granted by Spanish institutions and a large portion of its citizens, among other agencies. Now the trust is gone for many years ahead, but it was a highly effective vector for the virus. So powerful that, in its last but dangerous breaths, it was on the verge of even dictate that the October 1st a referendum took place and that the Spanish police unleashed a bloodthirsty repression. It was not the facts what counted, but the impression left on it by the serious, trustworthy, civilized, friendly Catalans, raised in decades of deceit and self-deceit.
