Haseltov

On the 16th of last month, a 32-year-old man who had bar­ri­caded him­self in­side Lleida Uni­ver­sity was de­tained by Cata­lan po­lice act­ing under the or­ders of the Span­ish Na­tional Court, which had sen­tenced him to two years in jail (at the time of writ­ing, he is cur­rently be­hind bars). His ar­rest sparked off angry demon­stra­tions in some 80 Cata­lan towns and cities. At the same time, artists, writ­ers and mu­si­cians from Cat­alo­nia and Spain – and all of Cat­alo­nia’s major the­atres (from the Cata­lan Na­tional The­atre to the Liceu Opera House), not to men­tion the Cata­lan om­buds­man – con­demned the ar­rest of the man in ques­tion, who goes by the nom de guerre Pablo Hasél (real name: Pau Ri­vadulla) and is an an­ar­cho-com­mu­nist whose 46 rapped songs are all avail­able on free plat­forms, and in­clude homages to Che Gue­vara and the Red Army Frac­tion (often with ironic ti­tles, such as ’A gin and tonic with An­dreas Baader’). Also in­cluded are de­scrip­tions of the for­mer King Juan Car­los as a ‘monar­chic mafioso’, which, given that said for­mer King is now holed up in Abu Dhabi hav­ing laun­dered tens of mil­lions of un­de­clared euros through a Pana­man­ian shell com­pany (and hav­ing other un­de­clared monies de­liv­ered to his Madrid palace in cash from a Swiss ac­count), isn’t too wide of the mark, al­though this hasn’t stopped Hasél from being charged with ’at­tacks on the dig­nity of the King emer­i­tus’. And Hasél’s de­scrip­tion in an­other song of the Civil Guard as ‘shoot­ing im­mi­grants’ – crim­i­nalised by the Na­tional Court as ’a den­i­gra­tion of the dig­nity of the forces of law and order’ – is also pretty ac­cu­rate, given that nine Africans drowned while try­ing to swim to Spain’s North African en­clave in Melilla in 2014, their deaths caused in part by the pot shots taken at them with rub­ber bul­lets by Civil Guards. Hasél has also been con­victed for ’ex­al­ta­tion’ of ter­ror­ism’ due to 64 tweets, most of which are taken di­rectly from news items and crit­i­cise the dou­ble stan­dards ap­plied by Span­ish judges to those who crit­i­cise the forces of law and order on the one hand, and to mem­bers of said forces who have com­mit­ted ac­tual crimes, on the other. Hasél has some­times been ac­cused by mem­bers of the pub­lic for going a bit over the top, but that doesn’t make him a ter­ror­ist. I call Nig­gers With At­ti­tude as my wit­ness: back in 1988 they rapped: ’A young nigga on the warpath/And when I’m fin­ished it’s going to be a blood­bath/Of cops dying in L.A./Fuck the po­lice, fuck fuck/Fuck the po­lice...’ This track made it into Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 great­est songs of all time.

Three days be­fore Hasél’s ar­rest, an or­gan­i­sa­tion called Ju­ven­tud Pa­tri­ota or­gan­ised a homage in Madrid to the Blue Di­vi­sion: the vol­un­teers who went to fight along­side Hitler’s armed forces on the Russ­ian front in WWII (one of the very few cases in which the Span­ish mil­i­tary fought against peo­ple who weren’t Span­ish pass­port hold­ers). Dur­ing the rally, which con­sisted of much arm rais­ing and Fran­coist an­them singing, a keynote speaker said, as her young lips curled with ha­tred: ’The Jew is guilty. The enemy is al­ways the same, no mat­ter how many masks it wears: the Jew!’ I have no idea what’s going to hap­pen to this in­di­vid­ual, but I would bet my bot­tom euro it’s not going to be two years in jail.

Spain may not be the to­tal­i­tar­ian state that Hasél claims it is, but a large chunk of its ju­di­ciary – ob­sessed with the sanc­tity of both roy­alty as well as the mil­i­tary, para­mil­i­tary and na­tional po­lice forces (not to men­tion with what it re­gards as the na­tional apos­tasy of a ma­jor­ity of Cata­lan vot­ers) – is most def­i­nitely ben­e­fit­ing from the pro­tec­tive shade of the fully-fledged Fas­cist na­tion that Spain was less than half a cen­tury ago.