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All right, you guys, introducing Thomas Harrington.
He's written a couple lately for antiwar.com about the situation going on in Catalonia, in Spain.
This one is entitled, Last Sunday in Catalonia, Pirates One, the Invincible Armada Zero.
Welcome back to the show, Thomas.
It's been, I don't know how many years, many.
How are you?
Maybe a couple, yeah.
How are you, Scott?
Good to be here again.
Yeah, I'm doing great.
Good to talk to you again, and good to read you.
So.
Oh, thanks.
Here's all I know about Catalonia.
I read Orwell in high school.
So in other words, I know basically nothing.
I know it's on the Mediterranean coast right there, I think right up against the French border, right?
Yep.
So the southeast, or I guess it's, well, you know, it's a weird shape.
Northeast, yeah.
Northeast of Spain.
Yeah.
All right, so, and of course, they had their big vote, and then everybody tried to vote, got their head beaten in or their fingers broken by the cops who'd been shipped in on cruise ships to come in and evade the place and suppress the vote.
And then we know that as a result, the secession vote won overwhelmingly.
Although I guess, was it your article where I read that they won 90% of the vote, but still with very low turnout?
Well, it's a hard question.
Yeah, first of all, why don't I begin at the beginning?
Catalonia is a classic case of a nation within a state.
I think one of the big problems we have as Americans sometimes is that we've never, we've always considered states and nations to be roughly overlapping and contiguous.
In Europe, as you know, there's a whole bunch of places where the state was in effect imposed upon a bunch of different ethnicities.
A lot of this went on at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th.
But in other cases, as I point out in the article that I just wrote for anti-war, this is a longer process in the case of Catalonia.
It's been going on for some 500 years now, which is to say Castile, which is what we recognize as Spain, which gave us the Castilian language or the Spanish language, has been gradually encroaching upon another kingdom on the peninsula, which is Catalonia, actually went under the kingdom of Aragon.
So what you have is a kind of remarkable situation in that the more military dominant kingdom has never been able to fully stamp out the culture of the more commercially successful, and I would argue culturally successful of the two.
And that's kind of the Catalan case.
And I can, if you want, get into how we've gotten back to a point where there's confrontation between the two.
As far as the vote count goes, it's very hard to see, to ask you, to determine whether that was a good vote count.
When you consider the conditions that this vote had, that Catalonians had been told for weeks and months that this vote is illegal and would be subject to sanctions or that the last time they voted in a non-binding fashion, the prime minister, the president of Catalonia was fined and sanctioned and separated from political life for two years.
It's pretty amazing that 40% of the people got out.
And then in addition to this time, we had goonery, thuggery going on at the polling stations.
One of the other questions that has not come up in the press is there were a bunch of ballot boxes that were simply taken away.
And it's estimated that in those ballot boxes, this is one I've heard on fairly good authority, there were another 700,000 votes, which would make turnout well over 50% in a situation where it was deemed repeatedly, the Catalonians were repeatedly told it was illegal and that there would be possible very serious sanctions for engaging in this behavior.
Well, yeah, I actually saw a video of some of that, the cops coming in and grabbing the boxes and leaving with them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's going around on Twitter.
So, all right, now, so yeah, let's see.
There's a lot to go back over here, but so obviously what you say about, well, just like the US, right?
Where there's, you know, states within a union here.
And so what is it that's so bad that the Catalonians want to secede from the central government there anyway?
Okay, well, again, to go back a little bit in history, this thing called Spain came about as the union, the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel at the end of the 15th century.
And it was meant to be a marriage of equals.
In other words, they were gonna have a joint kingdom in which they would work each, the laws of each kingdom would be kept intact and they would work jointly on certain issues.
When Columbus discovered America with Isabel's money, that ruined the balance.
And then Spain also then got into a situation where it was a major world power.
And as it became a major world power, the Catalan part of the kingdom was diminished in power.
Okay, so we come up to the 20th century, or actually the 19th century.
What began happening in the 19th century is that the Catalans began developing as an economic powerhouse in the 19th century relative to the rest of Spain.
And there's many reasons we could talk about for this.
They also have another language.
They also have another legal tradition.
They also have another economic tradition, which is entrepreneurship and trading in the Mediterranean.
So these are very stark, not stark, but the clear cultural differences.
The current situation has a bit of a different history in that one of the major reasons for the Spanish Civil War fought between 1936 and 39 was to crush Catalan autonomy or independence or the possibility of it happening.
So Franco and his troops won the war.
And for 40 years, the Catalan language and Catalan traditions were rigidly outlawed.
There was some break toward the end of that period, but for the most part, they were seen in a very folkloric fashion.
You could dance Catalan dances, but you couldn't do anything that was consequential in culture in Catalan.
Upon Franco's death in 75 and then the subsequent 1978 constitution, there was an autonomy statute given to Catalonia.
And that autonomy statute allowed Catalans to begin once again using their language as the first language within Catalonia and to have some control over their tax, not tax situation, but educational system, healthcare costs.
And that was that compromise document.
Most Catalans were pretty happy with that from about 1978 till about 1998 or 2000.
When in 2000, Jose Maria Aznar, who you might remember from being one of Bush's compadres in the invasion of Iraq, became prime minister.
One of his key goals was to roll back Catalan autonomy.
He's the son of a Francoist propagandist and this whole business of granting other languages and other cultures any say in the running of Spain was abhorrent to him.
And he set about to do exactly that.
And so he began a rollback of cultural rights, quite subtly at first.
And then the real thing that set things off this last time was in 2004 when Zapatero won the prime ministership with thanks to a lot of Catalan votes, the Catalan president said, okay, we want to renegotiate our statute of autonomy, which had been established in 1980 after the 1978 constitution.
Just stop me, Scott, if you want me to want to break in.
No, not at all.
I'm listening.
I'm taking notes.
Go ahead.
And what happened at that time was that the Catalans played by the book, which is to say they came up with a new statute.
They passed it in their parliament.
They sent the statute to Madrid.
It was passed by the Spanish parliament.
It was sent back to Catalonia.
It was voted on in Catalonia by privacy and was law, except for the fact that Aznar's government was not happy about it.
And what did they do?
They took the new Catalan statute to the constitutional tribunal in Madrid, which is a very weak and young institution and highly political one.
In fact, they were making quite clear once they made the objection to the constitutional tribunal, they would almost be bragging in public at times saying, well, our men will take care of it there.
We've got the right guys on the Supreme Court or the Supreme Tribunal Council.
And they did that.
It took four years of deliberations in which unseemly horse trading went on, where they were basically saying, hey, I wanna put this guy in because I know he'll vote down the statute.
And they finally got the team they wanted in.
And in 2010, they voted down important parts of that statute.
Most notably the symbolic one that would allow the Catalans to call themselves a nation.
And that's when the current drive for independence really kicked into high gear.
So most Catalans had been happy to be Spaniards with their autonomous statute.
After 2010, they felt they had been lied to, that the system was no longer trustworthy.
And that's where a series of mass demonstrations began.
And this is what has culminated in this vote this week.
So tell me if this is right.
Matt Purple wrote a thing at the American Conservative Magazine.
And I think I've read this a couple of other places as well, that actually if the central government, just in Spanish politics, in the political, like the gamesmanship of it, if they had played it cool and just said, come on, you guys don't really wanna do this.
And it just made an honest, non-panicked type case against it, that actually public opinion would have been with the central state.
And most of the Catalonians actually didn't want to secede.
But then, because of not the national interest of Spain, but because of the political interest of the people in charge of the central government, particularly, I guess it's the president or the prime minister, you help me, president.
It's in his interest.
Prime minister.
Oh, it's prime minister, okay.
It's in his interest to basically create a conflict and scapegoat, instead of making things okay, it's in his interest politically to make things worse.
And then, boy, did he make them worse, huh?
Is that right?
It's kind of right, and it's kind of not.
Now, the idea that they've played it cool is not really accurate.
No, no, no, that they, no, no, no, pardon me.
You misunderstood, or I said it wrong.
That what he said was that they very well could have.
And that if they had, and if the central government had said, come on, guys, you don't really wanna secede, and had played it like that, then they probably wouldn't have.
But because they had an interest in, the central government had an interest in inflaming the situation for the individuals, not for the Spanish national interest, but for the political interests of the individuals involved, they ended up exacerbating the crisis and making it much worse, and then guaranteeing a vote for secession.
I wish it were that calculated.
I fear it's even worse than that, Scott.
In fact, I'm sure it's even worse than that.
What happened is this, is that as of 2010, massive street demonstrations started taking place in Barcelona on every September 11th, which is their national day.
In 2014, actually late 2013, there was a vote, and the former non-independentist prime minister said, I'm now at least wanting to have a vote on the question of independence.
But at the same time, he was trying to negotiate with Madrid, and he was saying, you know, we really don't wanna go down this road.
We'd like to negotiate with you.
And what the Rajoy government said time and time again, nothing to talk about.
Absolutely nothing to talk about.
Each September 11th, the demonstrations get bigger.
The vote in September of 2015 gets more radical.
They actually elect a independentist majority by a very slim majority of seats in the Catalan parliament.
And they said, okay, we'd like to talk.
They said, well, there's still nothing to talk about.
And it's at that point that Puigdemont said, okay, well, we're having a referendum, whether you want it or not.
Whether they were doing this for political reasons, I think it's much cruder and simpler than that.
Rajoy and his party, and indeed much of the so-called left in Madrid come out of a real tradition of centralist authoritarianism.
Remember, these are the sons and grandsons of Francoist people in many cases.
And the way they look at it, that Spain is a sacred, that the unity of Spain is a sacred thing.
This has been a part of Spanish rhetoric for 500 years.
And that to break it is to break the body of Spain.
And that they simply cannot think of it in terms of negotiations in a very rational, hey, I'll give you this if you give me that.
They have sacralized the idea of unity so much that they say, this is just, this is what we are.
And if we're not this, we're nothing.
Therefore, we must crush you.
Yeah, well, that's too bad.
So, I mean, in other words, though, they only understand one thing for us.
And that's why it's come to this.
It's not really a matter of, hey, you guys have your interests and we have ours and let's negotiate.
Instead, it's this sort of almost religious dedication to high principle that cannot be compromised.
Exactly, well said.
And the saddest part about this is, the Rajoy government is a very weak government at this point.
But on the issue of Catalan independence or even negotiating with Catalonia, there is a pretty strong unity of purpose in all of the parties in Madrid with the exception of Podemos, which means that the socialists who like to pose as progressive leftists are almost as bad in terms of not wanting to negotiate as is the rightist party of Rajoy.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right, well, so what about all the 800-pound guerrillas like the USA and the CIA and the EU and NATO and all of their things?
I mean, obviously, I think this is pretty obvious.
All the headlines are the EU is denouncing the Catalonians and telling them that they better learn how to get along with Madrid and all of this and that.
And yet, I did see one blog where they had some statements from some NATOcrats saying, oh yeah, an independent Catalonia would be great because we could build them up a nice Navy and set them up as the police of the Mediterranean for us and this and that and why not?
So then, you know, you gotta wonder about, well, I gotta wonder about which all interests I'd never even heard of might be involved in trying to mess around.
What about Vladimir Putin?
What about, who all's interest is it in to see this secession go through other than the people of Catalonia?
It's a great question, Scott, and these are a lot of the things that are hard to put your fingers on.
I have some good contacts in Catalonia and one that I've heard that in many ways, and I think Trump's very ambiguous statement to Rajoy a few days before the election, he said, oh yeah, I would like Spain to stay together, but I'm not sure those Catalans are gonna listen to you.
I don't know if you heard that.
I was very surprised that the United States was being ambivalent in terms of its posture.
It didn't say, hey, we will back the Spanish government to the help.
So that makes you wonder about certain other things.
I have heard that the U.S. is a fan of the Catalan police force in terms of its fight against, or what they like to put in terms of their fight against Islamic extremism.
There's a fairly large Arab-speaking minority now in Catalonia, and apparently the Mossos, the Squadra have done well by it, and the United States is pleased by that.
As for NATO, wow, that's a hard one.
That one I'll have to play with for a little while before I say anything.
I think in general, NATO seeks stability, and I think they wanna be able to do their thing at any time.
I think if the Catalans were smart, and maybe I'm gonna get banned by prop or not for saying this if I haven't been already, is that if they were smart, they would show that they may have other geopolitical options.
I was just, I'm at a conference here, and I was actually talking with a fairly well-known Catalan writer, and he says, well, new geopolitical possibilities could open up.
After all, if they're gonna say that if you leave Spain, you have to leave the EU, well, then what's, the Catalans then to start thinking about new alliances that they might create to counteract their isolation.
Hmm.
Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
The American empire would have to really blow it if they let the Catalonians start buying weapons from the Russians and all of this, you know?
Yeah, right.
Although the Saudis, the Saudis just bought a bunch of anti-aircraft missiles from the Russians, so.
Yeah, what's that one all about?
I read that one today, and I was trying to figure out how that fit in, but that's another subject.
I'd say the Russians can have them.
I don't want the Saudis, actually, anymore.
Thanks, go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah, so now, oh, let's see, what was my great question gonna be?
Oh, yeah, the Pope.
What's he got to say about all this?
Well, one of the most annoying things about all of this is the role of the Madrid media establishment in creating an image of the Catalans as the intransigent people.
That's one of their means.
Another one is the idea that these, there are all sorts of people who love Spain feeling oppressed by this in Catalonia, and anyone who knows Catalonian, has lived there, knows that that's not true at all, that it's a place where people will switch easily between one language or another, and where there's been a great deal of tolerance.
In fact, should the republic arrive, be created next Monday, as it's being talked about, the plans are in it to have it be a bilingual republic where both languages are spoken.
So there's a lot of demonization that goes on in Madrid, and one of the frustrating things is that people in Madrid don't read Catalan papers because they're unavailable there, and most of them don't read Catalan, but everyone in Catalonia reads Spanish papers.
So they know what's being said about them, and yet the people in Madrid and who watch Spanish TV, Catalan TV's not available in the rest of the state, and they don't know what Catalan TV is really saying to the Catalans.
So that leaves all sorts of propagandists free to say that this is what the Catalans are telling their children, and riling them up against Spain.
Why do I say all of this?
Because Catalonia has been seeking interlocker, an interrelationship with Spain, have been seeking negotiation from the get-go in this process, and it's been the Spaniards who've refused to negotiate with them.
However, the media impression is that it's just the opposite.
So even now at this late date, there are calls for mediation, perhaps from members of the Catalan church or a member of the Catalan church or a member of the Spanish church, and Pope Francis' name has been floated.
To give you an idea, there's actually one minister in the Catalan government who yesterday wrote an article in the leading Catalan language newspaper, and he said, let's give negotiation one more chance.
So negotiation, I think, is on the table, and I'm not all that convinced that negotiation will not be the end of this.
The tragedy of it all will be that the Catalans had to go through this in order to have the negotiation that they should have been able to have as a matter of course.
Yeah.
Well, and now, so if they insist, is the national government, they use, I mean, boy, they sure send in the cops en masse and in force, and to use force with not much hesitation, is there a chance of an actual military conflict here?
Because again, everything that the Spanish government has done, like for example, showing up with all those cops, that just increased the sentiment for secession that much stronger as we've talked about here.
I mean, it sounds like you're hopeful, so I'm happy to hear that, but it doesn't sound like the Spanish government is ready to back down if it comes down to it.
No, it doesn't sound like that, and perhaps the most depressing news of the whole week was the speech that the king gave, I can't remember, was it Tuesday night, Monday or Tuesday night, in which people thought, well, the Catalans thought, well, he's all of our king, and they want us to stay.
Maybe he will adopt a position of above the fray and reaching out to our brothers and sisters in Catalonia.
Nothing further from the truth.
The king got on the TV, and for six minutes, he talked to the Catalans as if they were disobedient sixth graders, and said, well, either do the right thing or else.
And many people are seeing that speech, which apparently the government wrote, or wrote in some large measure, as a way to prepare the field for the invocation of Article 155, which allows the suspension of the autonomy in Catalonia formally.
They've already strangled it to death through financial means and others, but this would be saying you've lost your autonomy, pure and simple, for being disobedient children.
Yeah, it's amazing they still have a king at all.
My God, can you imagine having a king?
Well, it's amazing, and especially when you know- I mean, not that we don't, but still.
We don't call him that.
Yeah, well, it's even worse than you think, Scott.
This king is from a family that sided with the dictatorship in Spain between 1923 and 1931.
So this man-child who's the king now doesn't even know his own family's history.
His great-grandfather sided with the dictators in that period, and it was precisely because he sided with the dictators that he was discredited and had to flee the country in 1931.
And that's how we got the Second Republic.
And here we have this guy doing it once again.
Rather than adopting a posture as a force of referees among the aspiring groups, he comes out clearly on one side.
What are the Catalans to say now?
If they hated the king already, which most of them do because of the great- because of the Republican leanings in Catalonia, they hate him more even now.
They said, this guy is just another part of their team.
Yeah, and you're saying that this really, at the core, is because of this ideology of the sacred, holy Spanish state that they would basically be conceding too much to even talk to the Catalonians on anything like an equal basis to negotiate that.
That would be acknowledging far too much legitimacy on their behalf, even though- Well, so let me make sure I understand, though.
I mean, the local Catalonian regime there is they're all leading the secessionist movement, or it's really more of a popular movement that they also are kind of trying to get in the front of the parade, or what exactly is the politics of that?
This is a big question.
What we've seen, as I mentioned earlier, is a huge uptick in independentist sentiments since 2010.
And in the September 20, I believe it was 29th, 2015 elections, a coalition, a somewhat motley coalition came together and won 48% of the vote, which, according to the strange Spanish electoral laws, gave them a one-person majority in the Catalan House.
So you've got a Catalan society where it's hard to know, but probably around 55%, 58% are true independentists.
But 5% or 7% of those are uncomfortable with the idea of doing it without the okay of Spain.
So what you've had is a political establishment that decided in the absence of Spanish will to negotiate that we need to force the question.
And they forced the question by saying, well, we're gonna go ahead no matter what you say.
So there are many, there's probably about 20% of people in Catalonia who identify heavily as Spaniards, and then probably a bunch of people who want to have the right to vote, but may want to have the right to vote against it.
Right.
20 or 30%, I guess, to make my numbers square up.
Yeah.
Man, well, that sure is interesting stuff.
I wish I knew a lot more about it so I could ask you better questions, but I already picked up a lot here today, and I hope that as the story develops, we can have you back on to help explain what's going on.
Anytime you like, Scott, always a pleasure.
All right, thank you very much, sir, appreciate it.
Okay, bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that is Thomas Harrington.
Last Sunday in Catalonia, that's one, and here's Catalonia, Spanish centralism or self-defeating hubris of the authoritarian mind.
These are at antiwar.com, just go to original.antiwar.com.
I'm Scott Horton, thanks for listening, et cetera, et cetera.
No, I'll tell you, scotthorton.org, that's the audio archives there, 4,500-something interviews going back to 2003 for you there.
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