Few days ago, amid the flow of big shocking headlines about the Catalan process, a delicious episode appeared: Jordi Sánchez, the ANC leader, requested to be moved to another prison cell-block because an inmate shouted “Long Live Spain!” to him. The anecdote, elevated to a category, as suggested by Eugenio D’Ors, has a very revealing power. This Jordi Sánchez is the same guy in charge of arranging the coven of August 26th to turn the demonstration against jihadist terror [following the terror attacks in Barcelona] in a barbaric ambush against the King and Mr Rajoy, sieged by grim-faced people with insidious banners. Indeed, the same unscrupulous leader of the masses who was at the September 20th riots [when the Regional Ministry of Economy was searched], always ready to carry out or justify offenses to the Spanish symbols —from burning flags to whistling the anthem in the stadiums— as a sacred act of freedom of speech. As it turns out, this agitator got scared, in sorrow, because of a Long Live Spain. Surprisingly, not for a brutal cry against Catalonia, but for a modest Long Live Spain. A whole allegory of the nationalist moral pharisaism: an iron fist and a crystal jaw.
The pro-independence movement went trough the Catalan process, until the declaration of independence last week, charging against the state as its please, as if they had an unlimited legitimacy, but now, of course, tearing their hear out after each response from the state. This is a manifestation, very characteristic of nationalism, of Pascal Bruckner’s “temptation of innocence”, the social infantilism consisting in enjoying all the benefits of freedom while avoiding all of its drawbacks. And, of course, without assuming any responsibility at all. The independentists act as if challenging the state should be absolutely free, endorsed by the fraud of the October 1st, or by fictions as their annexation in 1714. They are making to come true the old joke by Francesc Pujol, “someday, the Catalans, just for being Catalans, will be able to go around the world with all expenses paid”. “The aim is to humiliate Catalonia”, they claim when there is a response. They perpetrate a coup, but denounce that it is they who are suffering the coup through the Article 155. “It’s a topsy-turvy world when an elected leader enforcing a democratic constitution gets accused of staging a coup, but then that’s Catalonia this month”, wrote The Wall Street Journal in an editorial last week.
The secessionist lies are unsustainable —from the right to decide to the permanence in the EU and the increasing of the tax collection while hundreds of companies are fleeing—, but it is easy to build a narrative about Spain’s blame, and even clinging to Francoism and selling “a coup by Spanish nationalism”. And they strike the old opportunist fallacies: using the Article 155 as a cause to break the law, not as a consequence of breaking the law. But, after all, victimhood is the fuel of nationalism, as Tzvetan Todorov alerted in The Abuses of Memory. Everything is someone else’s blame. And this is how, from the “Spain steals us” to the police baton-charges —shamelessly nicknamed as Bloody Sunday by Mrs Puigdemont— are legitimated. This has been crazy. In the end, the Catalan process will indeed go down in History. It will be studied in colleges across the world as a delusional excrescence of old nationalism in the thriving democratic Europe of the 21st century, a case of collective derangement.
