Being civil

Hearsay has it that some read­ers of this mag­a­zine have com­plained to the man­age­ment that it dwells in un­nec­es­sary depth on the issue of Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence. So, spe­cially for those grousers, here is yet an­other piece on the same sub­ject. But be­fore they rip this page out and line the cat tray with it, I should add that this ar­ti­cle sim­ply wishes to pro­vide some re­li­able in­for­ma­tion about a lit­tle known but cu­ri­ous as­pect of the said issue. As most res­i­dents know, the prime mover of the in­de­pen­dence move­ment is a non-party, mul­ti­lin­gual and multi-eth­nic grass roots as­so­ci­a­tion called the Cata­lan Na­tional As­sem­bly (ANC). It has just over 80,000 mem­bers, about half of whom pay dues (the rest are vol­un­teers). Since 2012 it has or­gan­ised the three biggest demon­stra­tions in post-war Eu­rope (be­tween 1.5 and 1.8 mil­lion peo­ple, de­pend­ing on the year, from a base pop­u­la­tion of just 7 mil­lion). Until re­cently, Cata­lan union­ists had no grass roots move­ment at all, until some­thing call­ing it­self Cata­lan Civil So­ci­ety (SCC) emerged in April of last year. Among the at­ten­dees at the the in­au­gural cer­e­mony in Barcelona were del­e­ga­tions from the Fran­cisco Franco Foun­da­tion, the So­cial Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Move­ment (a party partly made up of neo-Nazis) and the xeno­pho­bic Plataforma x Catalunya. In­deed one of the founders of the SCC is also a far-right­ist: Javier Bar­ray­coa, a mem­ber of the ul­tra­catholic Carlist Com­mu­nion. And the SCC's pres­i­dent – Josep Ramon Bosch - is a de­clared ad­mirer of the late Fas­cist leader Blas Piñar. De­spite these far-right ties, mem­bers of per­fectly re­spectable union­ist par­ties – in­clud­ing the Cata­lan So­cial­ist Party - have been seen at SCC ral­lies, such as the one or­gan­ised in Tar­rag­ona on Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2014 to coun­ter­bal­ance the ANC's one and a half mil­lion strong demon­stra­tion in Barcelona. (3,600 peo­ple turned up in Tar­rag­ona). The SCC claimed that the con­sid­er­able costs of its rally – not least coach hire - had been paid out of the pock­ets of its mem­bers, which, given that there are just 72 of them, had per­force to be of a depth most won­drous; in­deed, the SCC has later ef­fort­lessly set­tled other hefty bills in­curred by its ac­tiv­i­ties: the source of its fund­ing still re­mains a mys­tery. In­cred­i­bly, this small, eco­nom­i­cally her­metic or­gan­i­sa­tion with neo-Fas­cist links was awarded The Eu­ro­pean Cit­i­zen­ship Award by the EU at the end of 2014, for which rea­son the SCC was pub­licly con­grat­u­lated by the Span­ish pres­i­dent (who knew the SCC well, hav­ing granted its lead­er­ship a pri­vate au­di­ence in Madrid just three months after it was founded). In­deed, some say that the SCC could well be a purely bogus out­fit bankrolled and pro­moted by the Span­ish state with the aim of putting yet an­other span­ner in the works of the pro-in­de­pen­dence move­ment. But that's just a ru­mour.