Can anyone (preferably from the region) share some link to a good serious source for a foreigner to understand the modern thing with this Catalonia thing? (preferably without the history bullshit because... people never make decision based on history that's just pretext).
Because every article about it I've clicked ended up as an example of horrible quality journalism! Either 0% facts, or too un-opinionated to be of any use, or the other extreme with the "it's the Russians behind it" wackos.
Like... why tf would people want to "break" a country that works so well, such as Spain?! Yeah, some regions are poorer and other are richer and also pay some of the bills of the poorer ones, but that's how a country works.
The only thing being that not only businesses disrespect our culture, but the government and current main party do it too. And have been doing for some time.
They are descendants (sometimes literally) from the ones directing the dictatorship that ruled Spain until 40 years ago.
And they act like they had the same kind of power.
People that disrespect Catalonia, I can count them with the fingers in my hand. Catalonia is one of the most productive regions in Spain, and also the one with the greater deeds.
Big businesses are mostly in Barcelona and Madrid, and more in Barcelona. Tourist from inside the country visit Catalonia as much as other regions.
Catalonia is not hated, but politicians and independentists are making us hate it.
Looking at it from the outside it does seem to be some contempt towards Catalan people, like referring to them as polacos (Polish, I guess because the speak “weird”). It also feels like when Catalan governments have tried to discuss the model of autonomy/government and the relationship between central government and autonomous governance and there’s an almost childish reaction from the central government.
> They pay a lot dividends to other provinces that are now broke because they sold ownership of their resources to third parties.
This is not exactly true. Quebec doesn’t pay anything to other provinces, in fact it is the biggest recipient of Equalization Payments, by a huge margin.
Catalonians don't have a very different culture. They're as dumb illogical in their demands, football-loving, perfid nationalistic as any other Spaniard. The current situation is the best proof of it.
Do you have a source for the dividends thing? I've always seen/heard that Quebec takes an insane amount of Provincial Equalization funds - like almost 10x more or something like that.
> other provinces disrespect their culture and right to be different
Hmm... that's a pretty backwards thinking. Insisting on "the right to be different" is kind of what's disrespectful to the other cultures!
So it's same shit again. I'd never thought we'd miss the good ol' "global village" thing, and "English for all", and "one European government" movements. That sounded horrible but was actually working well for average people that wanted a homogeneous culture that allowed the right and possibility to easily move freely from one country/place to another instead of having to "grow roots" like a fking tree.
There's a whole bunch o people and businesses that want a more homogeneous worldwide culture and the whole freedoms and possibility for a more nomadic lifestyle that this allows. And of companies that can easily expand across borders instead of always having to hire useless locals to "oil the gears" of cross-cultural integration or whatever...
How right to move implies homogeneous culture? These are completely different things. If you can move form Spain to Poland without being detained on the border, that does not imply Spain and Poland now has to have the same culture.
> There's a whole bunch o people and businesses that want a more homogeneous worldwide culture
I'm sure some do. It's very convenient to not have to learn languages, customs, cultures, etc. but just fly whereever you want and not have to work even a bit on trying to learn how the local people live. It is not happening though, people are not going to throw their cultures away just because some travellers are too lazy to learn something they don't yet know.
...I know it sounded like a "pro faceless international corporations" rant, but in most less developed countries aggresive globalization helps the young lower/middle-class working individuals most, who, believe it or not, actually want to "get the f out" of their mostly toxic cultures that is only stiffling innovation and keeping people in poverty.
The whole "union in diversity" and "reviving local culture" movement only helps countries and regions that are rich in relation to others to stay rich in relation to others. Hopefully in Europe the whole war incited movement of people around helped with some shaking and mixing and setting the middle east on fire a lil' bit to move people in and out enough to "wash the culture from them" helped both sides (because some will return to their countries, and with a more "westernalized" mentality).
It's kind of sad to see regions of countries like Spain that pull in the "retrograde" direction when we finally had a breath of fresh air, violent as it was... bigger countries, with less cultural identity, offer more freedom to the individuals simply because they free them from the oppression of local cultures and a true-EU sounded like a move in the right direction. That's what people never get: in a small country, a local tyrant can really tyranize the s out of you (think NK), while in an empire-ish bureaucracy you can be free as hell, especially if you're not the kind of person that "fits in" or "embraces the culture" (take countries like China where you can have an utterly tyranical government, but regions with lots of local identity and lots of freedom like Shenzen). When something is too big to control without bankrupting it, like an oversized country, or an overgrown "international faceless corporation", you get tons of freedom (as an individual) as a byproduct... and it's the best kind of freedom because it's also free (like in... "you don't pay for it" :P).
> who, believe it or not, actually want to "get the f out"
It would be more noble to try and fix the culture, instead, since if all people that don't like backwards culture get the f out, by definition the ones who left are those that like backwards culture, thus ensuring it stays backwards forever. But I understand that people have right to take care of themselves first and don't owe anybody heroic effort on fixing a broken culture. Sometimes getting out it the best you can do.
Still, that does not mean somebody needs to change their culture so it would be comfortable for somebody else to move around.
> bigger countries
What's good in that, except more expensive and out of touch bureaucracy? Everything nice you can do in big country - like unifying standards, removing customs borders, etc. - you can also do as an agreement between small countries. But if (or, rather, when) bigger government wants to do something stupid - it would be nice for the stupidity to be contained. It is a basic evolutionary principle - monocultures are extremely fragile and one big mistake or one big adversarial change can kill the whole culture. Union of many diverse cultures is much more robust to both mistakes (culture that made a mistake goes down, and the rest take up the space) and change (again, cultures that can adapt poorly to a particular change, wither and get replaced by ones that can adapt well, but at least they not die out as a whole).
> in a small country, a local tyrant can really tyranize the s out of you
And in a big country, a global tyrant can really tyranize the s out of you, 100 million other people and 50 countries around you. See USSR.
> while in an empire-ish bureaucracy you can be free as hell
You obviously never lived in a tyrannical empire. I did (even though I had the luck of it being on its last leg by then). Not recommended at all.
> you get tons of freedom (as an individual) as a byproduct
No, you don't. Of course, in USSR in the 80s one was relatively more free than in NK, but it's just a peculiarity of specific time - in late 30s in USSR it was probably much worse than in NK now.
No, links, just someone from Spain that wants to give a somewhat "objective" opinion.
Catalonia has always had problems with the rest of Spain because of politicians.
Around the 17th century (don't quote me on this, I'm not good at history), the Castillians had been oppressed in terms of taxes, because they had started a revolution the king and lost. As Spain was suffering an economical crisis (how strange), they decided to collect the same taxes from Aragon as they had been from Castilla, and also to recruit 5000 soldiers (peasants) to fight in France. Catalonia, which was under Aragon's crown government, decided to secede and form a republic. They tried to ally with France, but what happened was that instead of fighting in France, Spanish and French fought in Catalonia. It ended up with France retiring from Spain but with some Catalan territories under their belt. After that, the kings mantained the tax benefits in Catalonia, because they didn't want another war. It is important to remakr that the kings were Austrian in this period of time.
Time after that, when Charles II, king of Spain in 1700 and with severe mental and physical problems, was about to die without descendants, he chose his grandnephew, Philip of Anjou as succesor.
Philip was French, and the Austrians didn't want a French king (Austria had been part of the Spanish empire). So they proposed a candidate, Leopold I's son, Charles. No one wanted to accept the other candidate, and even the people were divided, leading to a war known as the succession war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Spanish_Succession
Philip, who had the Castillians support, won the war, and Aragon, which supported the Archduke Charles, lost its regional code of laws that every region (because Spain was composed of crowns and such) had.
Jumping into this days, Catalan politicians have been using this last part (being oppressed without their jurisdiction) as an excuse to ask for benefits. The problem is, no party has said no to them, and they have always gotten more. Recently they tried another time, and they got denied (when Artur Mas was the president in the Generalitat), that is why they started again with the independence threats. As they didn't get what they wanted, they forced it and it has shifted into a big snowball, too large to be stop already.
(Also, Catalonia had proclaimed independence before, but it got quickly shut down, and the president was taken to jail and after that executed, but bear in mind that this was while Franco was in the government. This is something they are using now to accuse the Spanish government of opression and other things.)
Sorry if there are typos, I'm writing this from a phone.
Agreed. Deliberately ignoring history is deliberately ignoring all sorts of vital context behind all sorts of factors and variables and decisions. History is also necessary to extrapolate trends and predict future effects.
As the saying goes: "those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it; those who do know history are condemned to watch everyone else repeat it".
I don't have a disregard for history in general. Like, there's lots to learn from the world wars and the whole communism story...
But Europe's "local" medievally rooted history is always either useless or utterly malignant and has only been used to turn against each other people that could otherwise live in peace and prosperity, sometimes with violent consequences. Even the concept of "nations" is utter bulshit and should be erased from people's mental vocabulary imho. You just have groups of people with regional ties (because assets like land property rights can't unfortunately be easily transferred like you can with Bitcons ...yet :P) and economic interests and real cultural identities (that never, ever map in a useful way to "nations" or "provinces"... if they do map to anything it's at the bigger scales with race and religion, or at smaller scales with sub-culture groups, gender identities and these kinds of sutff).
The whole modern version of "understanding history" is a freakin cancer that can only bring confusion and false understanding.
The issue of the Catalans is quite complex and I don't think that anybody will be able to make a short summary in a forum comment. The Wikipedia entry about Catalan Independence contains a lot of information but I would say that does not explain all the reasons:
My take: Catalans are a National Minority in Spain. Catalonia has its own government, culture, language and, quite important, different political culture. Just to give you an idea, the party of Rajoy (Spanish president) that wins with majority in Spain election after election, got only 8% of the votes in the Catalan Parliament.
After the death of the Fascist Dictator General Franco, many catalans thought that Catalonia would be able to thrive as a Nation inside of Spain. This general opinion lasted for many years but, since 10 years ago, the attacks of the Government of Spain against the autonomy of Catalonia have made many people change their minds and realize that that the only way Catalonia will survive is by getting its own State.
> why tf would people want to "break" a country that works so well
Spain does not work so well. It has a massive unemployment and some of the lowest salaries in Europe. The economy is f* up and the Spanish government just spent all the money that was supposed to be used to pay our public pensions once we retire.
Also, the most important thing for me, is that most of the politicians in the Spanish main political party (PP) have direct links with the Fascist Dictatorship. Could you imagine a minister in Germany was the son of a Nazi official? Well, this is quite common in Spain.
Catalonian leaders are indeed approaching a dead end, and they do while a steamroller is coming from the other side, and this is the judiciary system. Right now most of the politicians are deep in red ink, in borrowed time.
They have asked multiple times to dialogue with Spain and negotiate a satisfactory outcome for all. But the steamroller doesn't stop. And who is on the driving seat of the judiary system/steamroller? Yes, the PP, the spanish nationalists, who have appointed the judiciary and are ready to bend it to their interest. Spain has one of the least independent judiciary systems in Europe.
And catalan politicians are in a dead end, because while there may be a majority for independence, nobody else is going to defend the legitimacy of a declaration of independence, and the more they resist, the more the steamroller accelerates and the darker the street.
What I see as the likely outcome is that catalan leaders will be jailed and only after PP loses majority/power, which is very likely in the next cycle, the catalan politicians will be pardoned.
Stop lying. The only thing that Puigdemont wanted to negotiate about was how to approach the independence. He takes it for granted, the goverment has nothing to do.
25 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 70.0 ms ] threadBecause every article about it I've clicked ended up as an example of horrible quality journalism! Either 0% facts, or too un-opinionated to be of any use, or the other extreme with the "it's the Russians behind it" wackos.
Like... why tf would people want to "break" a country that works so well, such as Spain?! Yeah, some regions are poorer and other are richer and also pay some of the bills of the poorer ones, but that's how a country works.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
Maybe their numbers just reflect people without a job.
- Quebec has a different official language (same with Calalonia)
- People from Quebec have a very different culture, which is more socialist.
- They constantly have businesses disrespecting their culture for sake of cost cutting.
- Their heritage is different. They don't care about the commonwealth, etc.
- They can survive on their own. They invested hard in environmentally friendly power sources and keeping ownership over their own resources.
- Other provinces disrespect their culture and right to be different.
- They pay a lot dividends to other provinces that are now broke because they sold ownership of their resources to third parties. (Alberta, NB, etc)
Disclaimer: I'm from NB, but most of my family lives in Quebec.
The only thing being that not only businesses disrespect our culture, but the government and current main party do it too. And have been doing for some time.
They are descendants (sometimes literally) from the ones directing the dictatorship that ruled Spain until 40 years ago.
And they act like they had the same kind of power.
This is not exactly true. Quebec doesn’t pay anything to other provinces, in fact it is the biggest recipient of Equalization Payments, by a huge margin.
Hmm... that's a pretty backwards thinking. Insisting on "the right to be different" is kind of what's disrespectful to the other cultures!
So it's same shit again. I'd never thought we'd miss the good ol' "global village" thing, and "English for all", and "one European government" movements. That sounded horrible but was actually working well for average people that wanted a homogeneous culture that allowed the right and possibility to easily move freely from one country/place to another instead of having to "grow roots" like a fking tree.
There's a whole bunch o people and businesses that want a more homogeneous worldwide culture and the whole freedoms and possibility for a more nomadic lifestyle that this allows. And of companies that can easily expand across borders instead of always having to hire useless locals to "oil the gears" of cross-cultural integration or whatever...
> There's a whole bunch o people and businesses that want a more homogeneous worldwide culture
I'm sure some do. It's very convenient to not have to learn languages, customs, cultures, etc. but just fly whereever you want and not have to work even a bit on trying to learn how the local people live. It is not happening though, people are not going to throw their cultures away just because some travellers are too lazy to learn something they don't yet know.
> always having to hire useless locals
Nice one.
The whole "union in diversity" and "reviving local culture" movement only helps countries and regions that are rich in relation to others to stay rich in relation to others. Hopefully in Europe the whole war incited movement of people around helped with some shaking and mixing and setting the middle east on fire a lil' bit to move people in and out enough to "wash the culture from them" helped both sides (because some will return to their countries, and with a more "westernalized" mentality).
It's kind of sad to see regions of countries like Spain that pull in the "retrograde" direction when we finally had a breath of fresh air, violent as it was... bigger countries, with less cultural identity, offer more freedom to the individuals simply because they free them from the oppression of local cultures and a true-EU sounded like a move in the right direction. That's what people never get: in a small country, a local tyrant can really tyranize the s out of you (think NK), while in an empire-ish bureaucracy you can be free as hell, especially if you're not the kind of person that "fits in" or "embraces the culture" (take countries like China where you can have an utterly tyranical government, but regions with lots of local identity and lots of freedom like Shenzen). When something is too big to control without bankrupting it, like an oversized country, or an overgrown "international faceless corporation", you get tons of freedom (as an individual) as a byproduct... and it's the best kind of freedom because it's also free (like in... "you don't pay for it" :P).
It would be more noble to try and fix the culture, instead, since if all people that don't like backwards culture get the f out, by definition the ones who left are those that like backwards culture, thus ensuring it stays backwards forever. But I understand that people have right to take care of themselves first and don't owe anybody heroic effort on fixing a broken culture. Sometimes getting out it the best you can do.
Still, that does not mean somebody needs to change their culture so it would be comfortable for somebody else to move around.
> bigger countries
What's good in that, except more expensive and out of touch bureaucracy? Everything nice you can do in big country - like unifying standards, removing customs borders, etc. - you can also do as an agreement between small countries. But if (or, rather, when) bigger government wants to do something stupid - it would be nice for the stupidity to be contained. It is a basic evolutionary principle - monocultures are extremely fragile and one big mistake or one big adversarial change can kill the whole culture. Union of many diverse cultures is much more robust to both mistakes (culture that made a mistake goes down, and the rest take up the space) and change (again, cultures that can adapt poorly to a particular change, wither and get replaced by ones that can adapt well, but at least they not die out as a whole).
> in a small country, a local tyrant can really tyranize the s out of you
And in a big country, a global tyrant can really tyranize the s out of you, 100 million other people and 50 countries around you. See USSR.
> while in an empire-ish bureaucracy you can be free as hell
You obviously never lived in a tyrannical empire. I did (even though I had the luck of it being on its last leg by then). Not recommended at all.
> you get tons of freedom (as an individual) as a byproduct
No, you don't. Of course, in USSR in the 80s one was relatively more free than in NK, but it's just a peculiarity of specific time - in late 30s in USSR it was probably much worse than in NK now.
(Also, Catalonia had proclaimed independence before, but it got quickly shut down, and the president was taken to jail and after that executed, but bear in mind that this was while Franco was in the government. This is something they are using now to accuse the Spanish government of opression and other things.)
Sorry if there are typos, I'm writing this from a phone.
If you seriously believe this, then I don't think you have much of a chance of understanding much of anything
As the saying goes: "those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it; those who do know history are condemned to watch everyone else repeat it".
But Europe's "local" medievally rooted history is always either useless or utterly malignant and has only been used to turn against each other people that could otherwise live in peace and prosperity, sometimes with violent consequences. Even the concept of "nations" is utter bulshit and should be erased from people's mental vocabulary imho. You just have groups of people with regional ties (because assets like land property rights can't unfortunately be easily transferred like you can with Bitcons ...yet :P) and economic interests and real cultural identities (that never, ever map in a useful way to "nations" or "provinces"... if they do map to anything it's at the bigger scales with race and religion, or at smaller scales with sub-culture groups, gender identities and these kinds of sutff).
The whole modern version of "understanding history" is a freakin cancer that can only bring confusion and false understanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_independence
My take: Catalans are a National Minority in Spain. Catalonia has its own government, culture, language and, quite important, different political culture. Just to give you an idea, the party of Rajoy (Spanish president) that wins with majority in Spain election after election, got only 8% of the votes in the Catalan Parliament.
After the death of the Fascist Dictator General Franco, many catalans thought that Catalonia would be able to thrive as a Nation inside of Spain. This general opinion lasted for many years but, since 10 years ago, the attacks of the Government of Spain against the autonomy of Catalonia have made many people change their minds and realize that that the only way Catalonia will survive is by getting its own State.
> why tf would people want to "break" a country that works so well
Spain does not work so well. It has a massive unemployment and some of the lowest salaries in Europe. The economy is f* up and the Spanish government just spent all the money that was supposed to be used to pay our public pensions once we retire.
Also, the most important thing for me, is that most of the politicians in the Spanish main political party (PP) have direct links with the Fascist Dictatorship. Could you imagine a minister in Germany was the son of a Nazi official? Well, this is quite common in Spain.
They have asked multiple times to dialogue with Spain and negotiate a satisfactory outcome for all. But the steamroller doesn't stop. And who is on the driving seat of the judiary system/steamroller? Yes, the PP, the spanish nationalists, who have appointed the judiciary and are ready to bend it to their interest. Spain has one of the least independent judiciary systems in Europe.
And catalan politicians are in a dead end, because while there may be a majority for independence, nobody else is going to defend the legitimacy of a declaration of independence, and the more they resist, the more the steamroller accelerates and the darker the street.
What I see as the likely outcome is that catalan leaders will be jailed and only after PP loses majority/power, which is very likely in the next cycle, the catalan politicians will be pardoned.