The power of SYMBOLS

I had fam­ily stay­ing this week, but be­fore they came out to us in the sticks, they spent a few days in Barcelona. It was their first time in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal, and they loved it. For a few days they were con­tent wan­der­ing around tak­ing in the sights and the at­mos­phere (al­though get­ting stung for €30 for three beers on La Ram­bla was a low point — my fault, I should have warned them).

De­spite cov­er­ing the whole city in their wan­der­ings there was one place they went back to - Mon­tjuïc. I can un­der­stand why, as the hill over­look­ing Barcelona has plenty to offer, such as the na­tional gallery, the Olympic sta­dium, the botan­i­cal gar­dens, the cable car, the cas­tle, and so on. The foun­tain, of course, was a high­light, and they later asked me about the four free-stand­ing columns in front of the palace on the hill.

While no ex­pert, I told them what I knew, that they re­place the orig­i­nal columns that once stood nearby that were de­signed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch for the Uni­ver­sal Ex­po­si­tion held on Mon­tjuïc in 1929. I told them what I’d been told, that they sym­bol­ised the four stripes on the Cata­lan flag and were de­mol­ished by the Primo de Rivera dic­ta­tor­ship.

As I say, I’m no ex­pert, as you will be able to tell if you read the ar­ti­cle on pages 36 and 37, which ex­plains the story of the columns in more de­tail - with how that tale turns out yet to come in an­other issue. One thing you’ll learn from the ar­ti­cle is that the columns were not ex­plic­itly meant to be a sym­bol of Cata­lan na­tion­al­ism - al­though it seems likely some­how - and the ar­chi­tect him­self did not refer to them as such until after they had been de­mol­ished and he was in exile. In other words, the columns came to sym­bol­ise Cata­lan na­tion­al­ism, to the ex­tent that Primo de Rivera wasn’t tak­ing any chances and had them re­moved be­fore the world turned up.

What­ever the case, it’s an ex­am­ple of the power of sym­bols, and how in­nocu­ous ob­jects can be seen as an ex­is­ten­tial threat. A re­cent ex­am­ple is the row over the yel­low rib­bon sym­bols to show sup­port for the Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence lead­ers being tried in the Supreme Court. Pres­i­dent Quim Torra was or­dered to take down a ban­ner with the sym­bols from the gov­ern­ment build­ing by the elec­toral board in the run-up to April’s gen­eral elec­tion. He com­plied, but after the dead­line, and now faces a trial for dis­obe­di­ence that could see him barred from of­fice. Once the elec­tion was over, Torra had the ban­ner put back, but fur­ther ob­jec­tions saw the courts order the “par­ti­san” sym­bols be re­moved for good.

A storm in a teacup? Per­haps, and if you look at such in­ci­dents in a ra­tio­nal way, it’s clear that sit­u­a­tions like the cur­rent po­lit­i­cal con­flict will be de­cided in the court­rooms, at the bal­lot box or the ne­go­ti­a­tion table, and a few yel­low rib­bons tied to lamp­posts are un­likely to be the de­ci­sive fac­tor.

But, we are human and we don’t (yet) think like com­put­ers. Even in an­cient times tribes would strike down or cap­ture the sym­bols of their en­e­mies when de­feat­ing them. That con­tin­ues today: the first thing Amer­i­can troops did after tak­ing Bagh­dad was pub­licly pull down a statue of Sad­dam Hus­sein even though his regime had been swept away.

So, we can ask how a few strips of yel­low plas­tic or how four columns meant to add grandeur to a venue can be a threat to the state, but they are signs of how we re­main very much human, and how sym­bols and the im­por­tance we give them are here to stay.