Originally published in Spanish. Enrique Krauze. El País «There are no more people than the physical ones. It is always the first person in the singular who speaks as the first person in the plural. It’s always an I who says us » Gabriel Zaid Isaiah Berlin, one of the greatest liberals of 20th […]
Categoría: In English
The Credit
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 […]
Foucault in Teheran: Revolution Makes Strange Bedfellows
Originally published in Spanish. Ramón González Férriz. El Confidencial. The consideration of any imaginable alternative as a better scenario than the real, present one is a constant feature of human psychology. Interestingly, so is the opposite —preferring the mediocre certainty of the present to the uncertainty of breaking its balance—. In political terms, the former […]
The Catalan Question and the Contradictions of Prosperity
Originally published in Spanish. Luis Abenza. Politikon. Where does the support to nationalism come from? Is this the result of a clash of legitimacies, of conflicting ideas about democracy, of a constitutional crisis? Or is this the expression of antagonisms structured by deeper factors? The 2006 Estatut, the “Scam Theory” and the “Clash of Legitimacies” […]
The Revolution of the Rich
Originally published in Spanish. Ignacio Vidal-Folch. The Objective While we are busy with our trifles, real life goes past. Then, as the years go by, we look back and say: “How could we be so thoughtless! How could we be so blind!” Now, while Galicia and Portugal burst into flames, deepening the ecological disaster and […]
The Nationalisms that Poisoned Europe
First published in El País (print edition) on October 15th, 2017. Online version. Guillermo Altares. El País. The whole history of Europe runs in a sense: the construction of states where rights are political and therefore correspond to all citizens, against those nations in which rights depend on belonging to an idea, an ethnicity, a […]
Seditionaries and the future we all know
Originally published in Spanish. Roger Senserrich. Politikon. This piece will probably change nothing. The preventive imprisonment of Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart is one of those events (one more) for which I could tell the most beautiful story ever heard and still not get anyone to change his previous opinion. No matter how much I […]
Missing the Party
Originally published in Spanish. Santiago Roncagliolo. El País A couple of months ago, I went from Barcelona to Madrid to attend the presentation of Carlos Germán Belli, the Peruvian poet. I did it because of my admiration of him, but also in solidarity, because I thought that a foreign, demanding poet would not be an […]
The Rhetoric Path to Independence
Originally published in Spanish. Ricardo Dudda. Letras Libres As always happens with the process, nothing is a big deal, until the adversary reacts. Mr Puigdemont’s speech in the Catalan Parliament the October 10th, where he declared Catalonia’s independence only to put it on hold, and the subsequent clandestine signing of secession in a Parliament’s room […]
This is about Winning
Originally published in Spanish. Pablo Simón. Politikon. 1.- At this point, the sequence we could anticipate since before the October 1st is working as a clock. Last Tuesday, a chameleon UDI took place, since every one saw in it what wanted to see. Some saw a call to dialogue, others, a unilateral declaration. To me, […]