Not many days ago, a woman posted a very dejected image on social media of one of the many parks Manacor has available for the enjoyment of its citizens. She lamented that, due to the water shortage, the City Council, or whatever entity was responsible, had stopped watering the lawn that gave so much life to an outdoor space so frequented by families with their children, or by owners with their dogs. At that point, one of those furious commentators blurted out: "They've had to stop watering because the Moroccans go to the free fountains to get water and get it stuck." Not a word about the swimming pools, the golf courses, or the hotels.
This is just one example of the hundreds of comments of this style that focus all the world's ills on people belonging to a certain group.
ranchers, either trollsBut there's no need to use strange words or euphemisms: it's hate. Perhaps we can abstract ourselves or distance ourselves from the algorithm controlled by the American far right (see Wikipedia entries for "Steve Bannon" and "Elon Musk"), from the fake profiles, from the bins, and from all this virtual feces that has us abducted, but hate is already transversal. Today, anyone who doesn't link immigration and crime is a do-gooder. Now, in the 21st century, anyone who isn't angry about children playing soccer in the street is a do-gooder. Here, anyone who doesn't see that all the social services assistance from the city councils is for newcomers is a do-gooder. In Mallorca, anyone who doesn't believe that those who have come from outside have done so to take our jobs is a do-gooder. Today, anyone who doesn't say, like Donald Trump, "locals first," is a do-gooder. As if being good were bad. As if anyone who wants to be good had to apologize for trying to be so. I don't know if I'm making myself clear.
Today, we find such curious hobbies as migrant hunting, rage against the poor, or humiliating those who have already fallen on their knees. And those who practice them shouldn't apologize, because it's well-regarded. Young people are pondering populist virtual anti-system revolutions without realizing that they're actually stopping themselves. Today, we tend to be mean, liars, and manipulators. The advent of "malismo" (note that it doesn't have an entry in Termcat. "Bonismo" is there) brings us dangerously close to the fascist movements that ended in the 1930s.
These are the arguments we mentioned above, the arguments of the Spanish far right, against which it's very good to take a stand from any ideological spectrum of Catalan identity here and there. They are also, however, of Silvia Orriols, the forceful mayor of Ripoll who, with her viperous and incorruptible tongue, has become the implacable scourge of difference and Islam and the steamroller of confidantism...
Orriols is a stone-cold racist who is in danger of destroying all official Catalanism for the plunder she applies to the miseries of a system that doesn't know how to get out of the dead end it has gotten itself into.
On the one hand, her appearance represents the confirmation of the solvency of the Catalan differential trait, which thus self-centeredly embraces all tendencies of the ideological spectrum, from the extreme right to the extreme left. We could say that we Catalans, after all, are like the rest of the world, which once again looks into the cesspool of fascism, of the dehumanization of difference and of exclusion. But it also represents a perhaps irreversible evil for the democratic Catalanism we knew at the end of the Franco regime and well into the 21st century. We abhorred Matteo Salvini's populist and neo-fascist Italian Lega Nord... but now we have the same rhetoric within our own country, and if we reject it, we are bondholders. In fact, it is the mayor of Ripoll who sets the path for the other parties. She is the one who has won the narrative. And it is the others who dance to her tune and allow themselves to be seduced by the siren song of the votes she is now collecting by the shovelful.
Although the dominance of contemporary Catalanism has almost always been right-wing, Father Pujol, from his position as a victim of Franco's regime, a compassionate Christian Democrat, and a skilled Europeanizer, turned Convergència i Unió into the straw man of Catalanism, a platform under which a will for self-centeredness flourished, regardless of any ideological strings and, also, whatever their origins. The symbolic culmination of all this, and who knows if also the end, was the fraternal embrace between Artur Mas and David Fernández on that distant November 9th.
What was the original secret of all that? We laughed at the time... The inclusive formula: 'Catalan is anyone who lives and works in Catalonia.' The slogan: 'There are 6 million of us.' No one is superfluous in building a new and free country. On the contrary: all hands are needed. And it is in this solidarity and cooperative fraternity, far from Spain and far from fascism, that the country's greatness must be found.
