No. The Independence of Catalonia is not the response to the repression of the State, as they want us to believe, because the procés started, and speed up, much before the state responded in any way.
No. Catalonia hasn’t earned the right of independence due to the police actions (clumsy and ineffective, intentionally exaggerated) in October 1st, because what was being voted in that farce of a referendum was the immediate Independence itself.
No. Who has destroyed the self-government of Catalonia is not that evil Madrid, but those in the government of the community that decided to blow up the statutory and constitutional legality. The error of the central government, if any, was passivity, not provocation or precipitation.
No, the article 155 is not a coup d’état. If there has been a coup d’état here it is what took place in the nights of the 6th and 7th of September, when the Parlament voted the two rupture laws (the term “disconnection” is quite corny) with the opposition absent from their seats. The 155 could have been activated then, but the government waited to see if it could avoid the voting, then it waited for a formal declaration of independence, then they exchanged the two letters, and a request for a call for elections which would have been the only non-traumatic exit was made.
No. The responsables of this disaster can’t present themselves as the victims. If the goal was to defy the state and start a revolution, it was required to measure the forces available to win it. It is not sensible to cry when you are hurt if you started the fight. They knew what they were doing when they voted that there would be a binding referendum even if it was prohibited by the Constitutional Court, that there would be results even if nobody verified them, that in 48 hours the republic would be declared.
No. It wasn’t enough to say within the minute “I assume the mandate” and “now I put it in suspension” to make us believe that we are back to normality.
No. Spain is not an authoritarian state (much less totalitarian as an undocumented Junqueras has said) for suspending the self-government of Catalonia. Any democratic state, with any Constitution, would take action against an attempt of forceful secession. Neither Canada nor the United Kingdom would have ever allowed it either. Tony Blair suspended no less than four times the self-government of Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, until he managed to force a consensus between unionists and nationalists, which helped to move forward that difficult peace process. Now Theresa May threatens to do the same.
No. Europe has not bought the nationalist narrative, only those who also want to break up Europe. The international quality press is doing an exercise of self-criticism for the fake news they have been fed these days. The EU has to support the Spanish government because the contagion of the secessionist fever would destroy it.
No, there wouldn’t be peace in a continent of unstable frontiers, immersed in a spiral of fragmentation.
No, self-determination is not a human right, nor a right of the peoples that have not been colonized, occupied or subject to genocide.
No. Don’t look for similitudes with the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the bloodiest episode in Europe since the Second World War. No, Catalonia is not Kosovo nor Slovenia. May it never be Bosnia.
No. They are not political prisoners those who are brought to justice to answer for their actions against the law, never for their ideas.
No. We are not going back to a centralist state. The intervention of the self-government, as announced by Mariano Rajoy, is total but has a defined temporal limit, six months until a new Parlament is elected. It is reversible, what the independence would have not been. Catalonia would have kept intact all its attributions if the laws had not been broken; it will recover them as soon as that via is abandoned. There is no backtracking in the decentralization. But the federalism, or whatever we call it, can only be based in the loyalty of the institutions. No political system allows inside governments rebellious to the rule of law.
No. This is not Spain versus Catalonia. It is above all half of Catalonia against the other half, as Joaquin Sabina said. It is an internal fracture, loaded with hate, which will take a lot to heal.
No. What is yet to come will not be easy. An intervened administration is not going to work properly. It’s going to face resistance inside and outside, in the street. It is a situation as extraordinary as inconvenient.
No. This was not the ideal solution. No. There wasn’t other alternative to save the rule of law. This disaster has well known parents. Who destroyed the Catalonia that has enjoyed the most self-government in modern history? Exactly. Them. The ones pretending to be martyrs.
