Joe BREW

My story is typ­i­cal: I fell in love with a Cata­lan girl. Amer­ica is a coun­try of 330 mil­lion peo­ple, with a high level of cul­tural ho­mo­gene­ity and I was fas­ci­nated by this lit­tle coun­try, with its own lan­guage and its own cul­ture.

I knew it ex­isted. I used to live in Granada with two Cata­lan room­mates, and I heard them speak­ing this un­de­ci­pher­able lan­guage. They some­times used to lis­ten to Cata­lan rock music, and I was sur­prised that it even ex­isted, and this didn’t fit with my idea of a coun­try within Spain, with its own lan­guage, this very na­tion state con­cep­tion. I was very fas­ci­nated with it, and I re­main fas­ci­nated. Just human cu­rios­ity brought me into the world of this coun­try where there are peo­ple who don’t bull­fight and don’t dance fla­menco, they were just break­ing the stereo­types I had as a re­cently ar­rived Amer­i­can. Then I got mar­ried to a Cata­lan girl from Santa Coloma de Quer­alt in Conca del Bar­berà, I think that’s a good mo­ti­va­tor for learn­ing a lan­guage and we have two half Cata­lan chil­dren.

I’m rad­i­cally pro-democ­racy and it seems that the re­sponse of the Span­ish state to what is a le­git­i­mate re­quest is short sighted, cruel, and in­ef­fec­tive, which com­pels me to speak in­ces­santly about this issue be­cause it’s not a ques­tion of in­de­pen­dence — the ques­tion of in­de­pen­dence I think should be de­cided by Cata­lans — but a ques­tion of democ­racy, and we all have a duty, whether cit­i­zen of Cat­alo­nia, Eu­rope or the world, to de­fend it. Just the other day, the Turk­ish in­te­rior min­is­ter came out to jus­tify the re­moval of three Kur­dish elected politi­cians, say­ing they were just doing what Spain is with Cat­alo­nia, and that’s the kind of thing that mo­ti­vated me.

Be­cause the tools for vi­su­al­is­ing, pro­cess­ing and analysing data are the same, I apply the skills and tools I have from my pro­fes­sional life to my per­sonal life, which is how I un­der­stand what’s hap­pen­ing around me. I have a Cata­lan fam­ily now and I look at Cat­alo­nia and de­pend­ing on which news­pa­per you read you get one nar­ra­tive or an­other. I don’t want to take that in­cor­rect equidis­tance thing, like “the truth is prob­a­bly be­tween the two”, I want to un­der­stand for my­self what’s ob­jec­tive and true and that’s why I like to do what sci­en­tists call ’hy­poth­e­sis test­ing’, that is, to come up with a hy­poth­e­sis and gather data to con­firm or re­ject it. For ex­am­ple, that Cata­lans are racial or eth­nic su­prema­cists or that there was vi­o­lence on Oc­to­ber 1 di­rected at the po­lice: you look into the data and see that it’s the op­po­site. But de­spite that ob­jec­tive re­al­ity, there are nine peo­ple in prison and half a dozen in exile, for hav­ing car­ried out a sup­pos­edly vi­o­lent re­bel­lion. So when your per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence con­tra­dicts so much of what’s hap­pen­ing around you, you have to go to the data, be­cause that’s the only thing to pro­vide ob­jec­tiv­ity.

A whole bunch of things, I am con­stantly sur­prised! The high fre­quency of the word ’di­a­logue’ among so­cial­ist lead­ers, they re­peat it in­ces­santly de­spite car­ry­ing out no di­a­logue. How can you be the gov­ern­ment of di­a­logue it you refuse to speak to your po­lit­i­cal ad­ver­sary? The si­lence of a lot of Span­ish and Eu­ro­pean de­moc­rats on the issue sur­prises me. Right now, the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment is three seats short, so it rep­re­sents some Eu­ro­peans, not all of them. In my mind, any de­ci­sion taken by the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment, when three of the elected mem­bers are being stopped from vot­ing, is not a le­git­i­mate de­ci­sion. It cre­ates a toxic in­sti­tu­tion and right now the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment is not rep­re­sen­ta­tive. I’m sur­prised that this whole Cata­lan su­premacy nar­ra­tive sur­vives, be­cause it just doesn’t exist any­where in the data. Sur­vey after sur­vey shows that Cata­lans are very pro-im­mi­gra­tion, also that pro-in­de­pen­dence Cata­lans are more pro-im­mi­gra­tion than anti-in­de­pen­dence Cata­lans. And the vi­o­lence issue: it is an ob­jec­tive re­al­ity that the peo­ple being charged never com­mit­ted, nor called for, en­dorsed or ac­cepted, any sin­gle act of vi­o­lence. You can’t put some­one in prison for vi­o­lence when there is no vi­o­lence. This is ob­vi­ous from any basic analy­sis of the data. Vir­tu­ally all of Oc­to­ber 1 was about po­lice vi­o­lence against vot­ers, that’s the re­al­ity.

I am so con­sis­tently sur­prised at how ab­surd and dis­con­nected from re­al­ity the Span­ish state’s ac­tions have been since the be­gin­ning of this po­lit­i­cal con­flict. So what I want to think is that there will be a rea­son­able sen­tence that will be an amnesty or say­ing no crime com­mit­ted. I would like to be­lieve that Pedro Sánchez will re­alise that ex­er­cis­ing true lead­er­ship means in some cases ac­cept­ing the in­evitable, that major Span­ish po­lit­i­cal par­ties do not want to hold Cat­alo­nia cap­tive and want it to be part of Spain out if it’s own vo­li­tion not oblig­a­tion, so I would like to be­lieve that this fall there’s going to fi­nally be a break­ing down of these blocs. But prob­a­bly not: the fact that pris­on­ers are still in pre­ven­tive prison sug­gests that they are going to be con­victed of crimes of vi­o­lence, sedi­tion or re­bel­lion. De­spite never hav­ing com­mit­ted or called for any acts of vi­o­lence. How Cata­lans will react to that, I’m not sure. It would be a mis­take to ac­cept those sen­tences as le­git­i­mate, and it was a mis­take to ac­cept the pre­ven­tive prison as le­git­i­mate. I think these are il­le­git­i­mate ac­tions taken by the state against peo­ple who have not com­mit­ted any vi­o­lent crimes. I also think that Cata­lans have been con­di­tioned over the past two years to get used to re­pres­sion. Now it feels nor­mal, but this is how op­pres­sion works, this is how Franco sur­vived as a dic­ta­tor for 40 years, be­cause Span­ish peo­ple got used to it, while the rest of Eu­rope was flour­ish­ing in democ­racy and free mar­kets. I only say that be­cause it’s a re­cent ex­am­ple of peo­ple ac­cept­ing very high lev­els of re­pres­sion and tak­ing al­most no ef­fec­tive ac­tion. So the pes­simistic part of me says that we’ve al­ready ac­cepted the il­le­git­i­mate ac­tions against our elected politi­cians and now we just have to live with it. The more op­ti­mistic part says that any sen­tence that con­victs them for a crime is only going to be a spark for fur­ther peace­ful, non-vi­o­lent po­lit­i­cal con­flict. But con­flict can be good in the sense that it’s pro­duc­tive, it brings you closer to a so­lu­tion. The past two years have been un­pro­duc­tive, no­body’s closer to a po­lit­i­cal so­lu­tion — let’s wait for the tri­als to hap­pen. I think that there needs to be a bit of a ten­sion be­cause it’s a good thing in the sense that it forces peo­ple to act, and I want to make it clear that I am talk­ing about a non-vi­o­lent, peace­ful con­flict.

I stand by that, it seems ob­vi­ous. Using just a lit­tle bit of his­tory, can you think of any ex­am­ple of coun­tries where half of the pop­u­la­tion of a large area wanted in­de­pen­dence and three quar­ters of the pop­u­la­tion wanted self-de­ter­mi­na­tion and did not achieve it? There’s al­most no ex­am­ples. And now we can go to a hun­dred ex­am­ples of places where they did achieve it: any for­mer British, French, Por­tuguese, Span­ish colony, at some point, achieved it, and East­ern Eu­rope is a good ex­am­ple as well. When peo­ple want in­de­pen­dence, they gen­er­ally get it. There are ex­am­ples of vi­o­lent or peace­ful paths to in­de­pen­dence, but there’s very few ex­am­ples – maybe Tibet– of over a very long pe­riod of time peo­ple as­pir­ing to in­de­pen­dence and not achiev­ing it. So ei­ther Spain is going to con­vince a ma­jor­ity of Cata­lans not to want in­de­pen­dence – and I’ve seen no ac­tion in that di­rec­tion – or as a ma­jor­ity of Cata­lans want in­de­pen­dence, they will achieve it. These seem like the ob­vi­ous out­comes, and the sec­ond seems far more prob­a­ble. In terms of the data, there’s a very im­por­tant de­mo­graphic el­e­ment in Cat­alo­nia, which I’m sur­prised peo­ple don’t dis­cuss more: there is a higher pro­por­tion of the el­derly in Cat­alo­nia, the over-60s, born in other parts of Spain com­pared to the young. As the el­derly die off, they will be re­placed by peo­ple born in Cat­alo­nia or abroad. This has an ob­vi­ous ef­fect on vot­ing trends. Among those el­derly Cata­lans who came orig­i­nally from An­dalu­sia or Ex­tremadura, there’s very low sup­port for in­de­pen­dence. Among those young Cata­lans born out­side of Spain, there’s slightly higher sup­port for in­de­pen­dence, and among Cata­lans born in Cat­alo­nia there’s much higher sup­port for in­de­pen­dence. It’s re­plac­ing a gen­er­a­tion that is very op­posed to in­de­pen­dence with a gen­er­a­tion very much in favour. If they don’t change their minds, the num­ber of peo­ple op­posed to in­de­pen­dence will go down and the num­ber of those in favour will go up. It’s just a mat­ter of time.

Equally in­ca­pable. If you want to solve the Cata­lan issue, it has to be through a ref­er­en­dum. That’s the only way to have recog­nised le­git­i­macy from all sides, and right now, both sides claim that they are the ma­jor­ity. Just set­tle that ques­tion and based on the re­sult, you come up with a so­lu­tion. But the So­cial­ist po­si­tion on the ref­er­en­dum, in the words of Pedro Sanchez, is “No es no, nunca es nunca”. It is such an ab­surd way to solve a po­lit­i­cal issue. They have re­peated the word di­a­logue so many times, and you can quan­tify it, but what does it mean when you refuse to meet with the lead­ers of your op­pos­ing par­ties? The word di­a­logue is mean­ing­less.

When you think of the case of Valtonyc, who was sen­tenced to three years for some lyrics, again, the si­lence of Span­ish de­moc­rats and dou­ble stan­dards is so dis­ap­point­ing. When peo­ple be­come aware that the Span­ish state is will­ing to take legal ac­tion over the lyrics of a song or for a peace­ful protest in which zero peo­ple were harmed, against fun­da­men­tal rights, that has an ef­fect on so­ci­ety. It goes with­out say­ing that free­dom of speech is under at­tack. What kind of state se­cu­rity is threat­ened by the lyrics of a song? What kind of state sees them as a vi­o­lent threat to order? These are not the acts of a strong, con­fi­dent state that feels good about the le­git­i­macy of its in­sti­tu­tions. The rea­son Cuixart and Sánchez are in prison after par­tic­i­pat­ing in a sup­pos­edly vi­o­lent re­bel­lion is be­cause the state is so un­con­fi­dent, basic de­mo­c­ra­tic prin­ci­ples like free­dom of speech and free­dom of protest are in dan­ger.

Al­most every Amer­i­can I talk to is aware of Oc­to­ber 1 and as­so­ci­ates the word Cat­alo­nia with in­de­pen­dence. In fact I’m sur­prised how fre­quently I’m asked “Are they in­de­pen­dent yet? Are they a new coun­try?” Even though peo­ple are not fol­low­ing it closely, the im­pres­sion is that some­thing hap­pened. When they hear about the po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers and ex­iles, it’s a shock for them.

For my job, I travel a lot in the de­vel­op­ing world, but my base is Cat­alo­nia, it is a very open so­ci­ety and I feel very at home here. I’ll re­main very en­gaged in the ques­tion of Cata­lan self-de­ter­mi­na­tion be­cause I think it’s a ques­tion of democ­racy. It’s very im­por­tant for me that my chil­dren live in a de­mo­c­ra­tic so­ci­ety where de­mo­c­ra­tic prin­ci­ples like rep­re­sen­ta­tion, free speech, and protest are re­spected fully.