En Elegy to Catalonia

 

I did not write (much) on the then-up-and-exploding crisis on the long-simmering Catalan independence-versus-self government-question, despite it being an island of labour and the occasional elegant sentence, and thus so greater the reason to recapitulate the question and its developments now that one (well...) term in office of the post-referendum Parliament of Catalunya has now passed. 

The result, in a way, needed no mention, and hardly got it outside the realm of old king Philippe - as he would be known, in the land of his Bourbon ancestors, if only he knew - and of old Francisco, now displaced from both his Jefatura and his eternal place of rest. Whether the unearthing and reburial of long-rotted carcasses can or should be undertaken for the purpose of vindicating those left in the soil, or unearthed under circumstances both more and less dignified, is a question I shall not even try to ponder, but rather waste my living breath on the question haunting successive governments to such an extent there is no ability, no ice-breaker, to break the bonds and deliver a new future by merely, well, stomping across it until the very bones are broken and eaten and only words remain. 

Given this array of problems, which would have seemed so comparatively small for most of the Francoist (or Franquist, paying homage to the trend of originalism in language) regime, one would think the fourty-five year-old carcass of a short and pitiful and now very, very dead man would face less priority to the Santos government than the Catalan issue the right-wing government . Or, as Nixon put it about Rajoy Brey's predecessor, now also Santos': "A loyal friend and ally of the United States. After a tragic and bloody civil war, he brought back Spain to economic recovery. He [re]unified a divided nation through a policy of firmness and fairness against those who fought against him." Is this, prays Santos, the hope for the future of the Catalans, who were at the end of so much "firmness and fairness"? 

The fairness of a fair and decent recovery, economically put, after years of war and famine and repression that saw not even a token legislature emerge - as it did in Portugal, and the Stalinist satellites - may have necessitated the firm brass of the garrotte, Nixon may have said if allowed (and properly prodded, as he later was) to go on. But if this past is to be addressed in such a fashion as to necessitate literal excavation, we may address - to this government of reconciliation and of apology and commutation to those who cannot even hear or rebuke such words - our discerning scepticism over the recent calamity in old Catalonia, whose token quasi-sovereignty was yet again rebuked and revoked only three and a half years past. This came not as a bureaucratic measure but as crown and rebuke following the accomplishment of ruining a plebiscite through the bussing in of Spanish (I should say Castilian with a risk of breaking sensitive emotions and adherence to Spanish unity in Leon, Galicia, Andalusia and so on) riot police in order to shut down polling stations and beating grandmothers' faces to a pulp. Following this slight infringement of Catalan, if not wholesale Spanish, democracy (the two being the same, according to the fuckers of Madrid). 

How, then, is a European community supposedly dedicated to the rule of law - and not in the sense of giving Francoist properly delineated punishments to trespassers of Francoist laws, or adhering to the core principle of broken necks for broken laws - deal with a government brutally repressing a democratic referendum, or rather the broken attempt at a democratic referendum and the exercise in popular sovereignty, with the purpose of breaking this sovereignty, indeed this populus, in two? There is, necessarily, only one available answer. 

The very question of popular, Spanish or Catalan - or, dare I call it now, Basque - sovereignty is not as simple as the purveyors of the referendum and of separation and republicanism, the Catalan republican left not the least, at least as far as international law is concerned. If a people is democratically sovereign, can it be forcibly kept in the bosom of a state which it does not want and which may - in all earnest brutal recognition of facts - does not want them? (That is, according to the old blood-stained adage; Wanting the territory, not wanting the people.) I cannot say, but I must, pinpoint the two cannot be separated. At the same time, as has been known for at least a century now, international law defines the state as subject and any derogation not explicitly permitted is read to permit the action, in view of the state's conduct and not an individual, organisation or province's desires to exercise similar rights, and any permissibility on the account of popular sovereignty as a principle would necessarily, if not too hastily, break down every country concerned to its smallest consenting building block. Catalonia or Catalunya, however, is not such a small and feckless hypothetical entity. If Algeria is permitted independence in spite of French designs and words of une et indivisible, your desires may be heard but the solution is ours, the majority, and history is a mere argument desiring a tear but not an exercise of rights, why cannot the Catalans - sorely oppressed, smashed and molded together by every measure short of outright genocide - as the phrase was used by Lemkin - and repeatedly held together by external and brutal efforts aimed at terminating that original freedom must necessarily be given a similar concern. If not, what is the difference? A small pond of water? A river insufficiently wide or salty? 

I would ask, given previous posts of French and otherwise defined European colonial rule, whether this principle can be invoked or must be practiced on request. If Spanish Morocco, once a quite larger thing than the twin cities of Ceuta and Melilla offering a scant passage to metropolitan Spain, was retained on account of the Spanish state's - as it was known - desire for it, eventually coalescing in a 92 % majority in Spain, opposite an even stronger majority in the opposite of any part of Morocco, would carry not far if the desires of Moroccans is that of paramount concern for their independence. That Catalans should have fewer rights, as a collective, on account of them being too much similar to their Castilian brethren? 

That being said, and not only with Catalonia in mind, there are numerous arguments put not only against the procedure - willingly diluted and destroyed by the authorities seeking by any means to quell it - but the underlying structural process and causes, as opposed to arguments, itself. For whereas as the political cause of Catalan independence - cultural, economic and linguistic as well as political - has reared its head in a startling roar more aggressively, the reasons behind it may not be as much of confidence as fear and desperation the designs of Francoist Spain - and before him, the Bourbons - be accomplished with peaceful means of intergration and absorption into a wider Spain and a wider Europe. 

Secondly, and not too much in line with the moral authority of Madrid, the European project is certainly not chided, or even questioned (quite humbly) by the Catalan liberationists, there is 

The case has aroused little homage in the cultural community, where Orwell once penned a passionate defence not only for liberty, for socialism, or for Spain, but the particular culture and circumstances making possibly its long-held resistance (being prioritised not quite so much as Madrid, and hardly even controlled by it) but some voices of fierce resistance. The most vitriolic, as well as not too eloquent, has been that of adopted Spaniard Mario Vargas Llosa, who did not steep to the depths of audacious eggshell with glasses Martin Schultz, who compared independentists in Britain to the attempt, then with steel and blood, of Germans to dominate Europe. Surely too, whatever the prospects of now-independent Britain, of Catalonia free of Spain but not of Europe, would be significant enough, but the hopes of Madrid pen on the notion that a fight will be too thorough and consuming and end the new country in a place where they simply are not, by their former masters as well as the wider European community and its interests, to act  

In this soup of toxins and unclear outcomes, there is no elegy easy of note to be sung. The demographic restructuring of Spain - there I used the term - will continue, and make the cause of independence feel all the more ancient, but then also a lot more relevant. The cause for independence did not flourish in the 1970s or 80s, when its promise should have been seen as more potent, let alone politically relevant and unlikely to face resistance of this kind. 

2021, 1912, and the future of the (not so) Grand, (no longer) Old Party

 

The increasing fragmentation of the old predominant party before our very eyes - one of the most influential since its founding, alongside the German SPD, the British Tory Party, as I myself remarked not too many years past - and now, without question, its degradation, is not one of having given birth to Trump, nor quite "enabling" him (53 % of GOP voters in 2016 wanted somebody else, I remind you) and not enduring, but rather "sticking with" the disgraced now about to be impeached without the boundaries of his office, physical and chronological, is a process only escalating towards a seemingly inevitable collapse or fatal (for its ambition to power) breaking. 

The question then is, would the GOP break? Rather than "will", the name associated with one of a handful of conservative ideologues getting off (to) the clanking of the Trump train, the party has uniformly - if not enthusiastically or, my attempt at Trumpian neologisms, "prettily" joined hands in facing the doomsday of the present-day Democratic party. Whereas this may also be considered 

The Trial, not involving John Grisham

The procedure waged against former president Trump, historic not only in the sense of being the first presided over not by a Chief Justice but a partner of Bruce Wayne (and declared foe of thugs), the last sitting of the Watergate Babies Patrick "Pat" Leahy of Vermont - scion of cheese and maple syrup and even the partial-birth abortion ban - but the second trial against the same president during the same term (half-term and year too) and one which has, aggressively if not numerically, transcended the solidity of partisan walls, in spite of expletives of the contrary. 

The rage that followed the rage of the mob, predictably aimed at removing the supreme executive magistrate of the republic, with himself having already stripped himself of any auctoritas and dignitas he had left (and very recognisably, the nuclear option) which would have seen articles being drafted even with a Republican majority, or so I believe, the incitement of a charge of the executive against the legislative on the sixth day of this newfangled year, a fortnight before the handover ultimately occurring in quiet solitude and poetry between the aggrieving and cordial parties, with a supposedly ultra-conservative Chief Justice inaugurating an alleged semi-communist mad dog arch-liberal, somehow someone had demanded this. Only the form, and the level of reprimand issued by the elephant leadership against the man they had permitted to ride him, at least through the instituting of open primaries and ballot-stuffing by appalling irresponsible grassroots already signalling their unrivalled hatred, was yet to be determined. 

And to be determined, it must also be said, is a question left to resolve. For nobody strongly believes, except those with minds so clouded by dread and desire in the short term, could possibly believe that this impeachment, for the same reasons as before - with the partial exception of 1868, when the GOP did possess a two-thirds majority required to usher in a parliamentary government, and did so, against the best efforts of Senator Ross of Kansas - would fail to meet, and for thus define, a required threshold since nearly two and a half centuries as "high crimes and misdemeanours". What are, once we liberate ourselves from the illusion of political impeachment constituting any sort of legal justice, these "high crimes and misdemeanours"? Well, as any jurist from Ulpian to Tribonian to Malik ibn Anas to Blackstone would have told you, that is a matter left for the judge, once all has been said and deliberated by, or eventually of, the views of the neurons inherent in the infallible legislator. This question, whether read by an originalist with a fetisch for eighteenth-century slavery, or a new-thinking , defining in the moment of a decision ad hoc a liberal ethos itself liberated from the individual selfish mind or intrapersonal desires and trends, 

Perhaps no better, or in the words of Lincoln regarding the immorality of slavery, put than if Trump is not guilty of these high crimes, they are yet to be tested by an unknown gargantuan entity of authoritarian audacity and as such, are likely never to be. I do not quite share the latter assertion, for while Trump may be finished - a prediction I merrily make yet again, now both cocksure and with lessons learned - the movement will unmistakably persist, in spite of efforts to suppress, silence or (literally) disarm it. All such efforts are now likely to ramp up, in the trial not just of the coup-minded ex-president, but of the entire Trump movement as well, and anything likely to seek replacing or supplanting it. With a blue house and, by a hair-thin threshold, senate and White House and a relatively sympathetic court (now to be filled by decidedly liberal justices, if almost as likely as replacement for existing ones) such efforts may seem likely to succeed; I am, however, in the face of an equally-divided Democratic party, led by increasingly incompetent and an administration poised to deliver "blue Bush-ism" and sunk into several crises both domestic and international, anything but a constitutional overhaul of Austrian proportions is unlikely to thwart this nascent, failing-while-succeeding Nazi movement. 

Ex-president Trump, best referred to with the prefix, is unlikely to be convicted, and while a gentle and conscientious slip into the night may seem appropriate and Nixon-like - he who did have a profound cause for complaint in 1960, but ultimately chose to heed the proverbial better angels of his nature, and anyway prove enough of a patriot not to burn the country in order to win it - but also unlikely. Short of a sudden stroke, or several strokes of further muddling of words and slips of the facts (here the Democratic victor is, again unbelievably, further down the road) he will rise again in 2024, should not constitutional procedure definitely slam his chances against a new-laid brick wall in a stunning bipartisan upset. Asides from principled arguments against this, the reasons of McConnell and others in the red against doing this are, of course, laden not only with a desire for a revanche in 2024, but ultimately of supplanting the leadership of the Trumpist or Bannonite movement while capturing its supporters. If the dethroned president's head in a guillotine was confined to his own health, the reciprocal loyalty from the Republican party would be measured in many pounds of cold steel. But this is not, no longer, in no credible sense their party, no more than it is the party of Lincoln. 

And with acquittal in the senate underway, and this dangerous or safekeeping precedent out of reach of a 67-vote majority, what rests in the future? Certain GOP voices have hollered and bawled to loudly they can surely not keep the peace again; a Trump resurgence in the 2024 primaries is sure to be contested, at least on principle, and face a disunited party even with the eclectics of a movement further duped by the great narrative of fraud and stolen ballots, but in the main of cordial adherence and, yes, sympathy, until his hour finally tolls. With this hour not too far away, let us say two presidential contests at the most, I would revert my original 2016 question in favour of this: If the internal struggles and authoritarian rebuke of the 2021 upset will spell the doom of the Democratic party as well, with(hith)erto doth the donkey want to carry us... and - for better or worse, but now seemingly universally endorsed, not the least in the country of my birth - the world? 

For the dragon will not, not alone.