Pork pies in bulk

Michael aka Miquel Strubell has more de­grees than you can shake a stick at, what with the ones in Psy­chol­ogy and Phys­i­ol­ogy from Ox­ford Uni­ver­sity, in the Psy­chol­ogy of Ed­u­ca­tion from Lon­don’s In­sti­tute of Ed­u­ca­tion, and in Psy­chol­ogy from the Au­tonomous Uni­ver­sity of Barcelona; to say noth­ing of his ex­pe­ri­ence as teacher at the Open Uni­ver­sity of Cat­alo­nia and his work for the Coun­cil of Eu­rope, the Or­gan­i­sa­tion for Se­cu­rity and Co-op­er­a­tion in Eu­rope, the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment as well as his en­dur­ing non-party grass roots work in favour of a de­mo­c­ra­tic so­lu­tion to the on­go­ing con­flict be­tween Spain and Cat­alo­nia. Qual­i­fi­ca­tions which are clearly on show in his new book, fol­low­ing a con­cise and pre­cise ex­plana­tory pref­ace from Henry Et­ting­hausen (Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor of Span­ish at the Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton) which puts us pain­lessly into the Cata­lan po­lit­i­cal pic­ture. Strubell then rolls out the ex­tra­or­di­nary range of un­truths which have been used by dif­fer­ent Span­ish gov­ern­ments and their af­fil­i­ated media to dis­credit the Cata­lan pro-in­de­pen­dence move­ment, as soon as the lat­ter got off the ground in 2012.

Not a stone is left un­turned: Madrid’s at­tempts to pre­vent an aca­d­e­mic de­bate in 2013 about the Cata­lan-Span­ish con­flict (by threat­en­ing to cut off all ne­go­ti­a­tions with the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment, which hadn’t started and never would); the re­peated ef­forts on the part of a writer on El País news­pa­per to ac­cuse the in­de­pen­dence move­ment of being backed by clan­des­tine Russ­ian agents, to the ex­tent that in a What­sApp mes­sage, the same jour­nal­ist claimed (pre­sum­ably as a joke?) that the Rus­sians were pre­pared to send 10,000 troops into Cat­alo­nia to guar­an­tee the suc­cess of the 2017 ref­er­en­dum; the CIA forg­eries pub­lished on more than one front page of the El Periódico de Catalunya news­pa­per which pur­ported to be from the CIA (de­spite gram­mat­i­cal mis­takes typ­i­cally made by Span­ish speak­ers and the use - pointed out by Ju­lian As­sange - of non-CIA punc­tu­a­tion) say­ing that the Cata­lan po­lice aka the Mossos d’Es­quadra, had been tipped off about the Au­gust 2017 ter­ror­ist at­tacks in Cat­alo­nia, im­ply­ing that they had known about them all along yet done noth­ing to pre­vent them; the sus­pi­ciously over-non­cha­lant at­tempts by the then For­eign Min­is­ter Al­fonso Dastis to con­vince a BBC jour­nal­ist that the count­less scenes of peace­ful vot­ers being beaten by Span­ish po­lice on Ref­er­en­dum Day were ’fake news’ even though those same im­ages had been filmed by the BBC it­self; Dastis’s fur­ther lie - less pub­li­cised - to an­other BBC jour­nal­ist, that Spain was con­sid­er­ing con­sti­tu­tional changes to allow in­de­pen­dence ref­er­en­dums in the fu­ture; the de­nial from var­i­ous Span­ish media sources that there was any Cat­alono­pho­bia in Spain (de­spite well-re­searched charts that showed they were the most dis­liked pop­u­la­tion group in the state) but that, on the con­trary, there was a great deal of His­panopho­bia in Cat­alo­nia (a fact be­lied by those same charts); the ac­cu­sa­tions of out­ra­geous pro-in­de­pen­dence bias on Cata­lan pub­lic media (re­ported by four union­ist news­pa­pers, in­clud­ing La Razón and La Van­guardia) de­spite a sub­se­quent re­port from a media watch­dog group that on Span­ish chat shows, 97% of the par­tic­i­pants were anti-in­de­pen­dence and only 2% were pro (the fig­ures for com­pa­ra­ble Cata­lan radio and TV shows were 38% and 55%, re­spec­tively); the de­c­la­ra­tions from the Madrid rep­re­sen­ta­tive on the Eu­ro­pean Coun­cil on For­eign Re­la­tions that Cat­alo­nia’s in­de­pen­dence move­ment was ’a threat to democ­racy’ (al­though ac­cord­ing to the Amer­i­can His­panist Thomas Har­ring­ton: ’far from being a threat to democ­racy in Eu­rope, the scrupu­lously peace­ful and peo­ple-dri­ven move­ment…is per­haps, the best hope we have for spurring [democ­racy’s] re­newal’). On top of which, of course, we have the count­less claims that the Cata­lan move­ment is pop­ulist, with all that en­tails, mean­ing that it is Brexi­tish, au­thor­i­tar­ian, Nazi etc. (the pro­file of pro-indy sup­port­ers does not match, in the least, that of the sup­port­ers of pop­ulist lead­ers in the rest of Eu­rope or abroad, and com­par­isons with Brexit and much less Nazism do not hold a sin­gle drop of water).

Strubell also looks at some (even) weirder ac­cu­sa­tions levied against the pro-in­de­pen­dence camp: that it was fi­nanced by the Soros Foun­da­tion and the US, that it sup­ported the Russ­ian an­nex­a­tion of Crimea, that Venezuela has had a hand in it (some­how, some­where) or that the in­de­pen­dence of Cat­alo­nia would have ne­ces­si­tated the bomb­ing of Madrid…

What stands out most starkly, hav­ing read all this, is the ex­tent to which the Cata­lan pro-in­de­pen­dence move­ment gave a very bad case of the willies to the Span­ish state, if not ac­tu­ally scar­ing the be­je­sus out of it. Ever since the early 18th cen­tury, when Spain made its first con­certed (and vi­o­lent) ef­fort to be­come a uni­fied state based on sim­i­lar Eu­ro­pean mod­els (es­pe­cially the French one) it has never man­aged to con­sol­i­date any­thing ap­proach­ing a com­pre­hen­sive, vol­un­tary sense of na­tional unity on its own ter­ri­tory. Strubell’s book shows, then, to what ex­tent it still gets the hee­bie-jee­bies when this in­her­ent, in­trin­sic lack of gen­uine na­tional co­her­ence is laid bare for all to see, as the Cata­lans have done over the last decade.

If any crit­i­cisms are to be made of the book, they are not so much to do with the au­thor’s po­lit­i­cal lean­ings (he never fails to re­mind us when he is bi­ased as re­gards this or that opin­ion), but with cer­tain tech­ni­cal glitches. Every book suf­fers from a cer­tain amount of grem­lins dur­ing the pro­duc­tion process, but here they would seem to have gate-crashed the text with­out much let or hin­drance: some sur­names are miss­ing, some foot­note in­di­ca­tors are given in large not small num­bers, ital­ics some­times seem to be used at ran­dom, and some of the trans­la­tions into Eng­lish of Span­ish, Cata­lan or texts from other lan­guages con­tain gram­mat­i­cal er­rors; on top of which there is - not al­ways, but on oc­ca­sion - a ten­dency to take for granted the reader’s fa­mil­iar­ity with all the ref­er­ences used. I for one, had no idea what the Real El­cano In­sti­tute was, and al­though it is men­tioned fre­quently through­out the text, we get no ex­pla­na­tion of what it re­ally con­sists of until to­wards the end; sim­i­larly, the im­pact of Joan B.​Culla and Francesc Serés aban­don­ing their columns in El País news­pa­per be­cause of its anti-in­de­pen­dence pro­pa­ganda would not nec­es­sar­ily be ap­pre­ci­ated by some­body who wasn’t aware that they were a major his­to­rian and a nov­el­ist ditto, re­spec­tively. Etcetera. In short, a stricter proof­read­ing and an even stricter con­trol of lay­out would have im­proved this nec­es­sary and well-doc­u­mented book. Which doesn’t mean it still isn’t well worth read­ing.

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