Following Arran

The self-proclaimed pro-independence organization Arran posted a video on social media that has sparked controversy and mixed reactions. The video includes images of graffiti on the facade of the Ministry of Tourism, with the slogan "guilty of our misery," and the burning of photographs of the regional president and several business leaders.

Background: (1) The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemned Spain for imposing prison sentences and fines on two young men who, during an anti-monarchy demonstration in Girona in 2007, burned a photograph of the king. The criterion imposed by the court was that burning a photograph of the monarch could not be considered a crime, provided that this act was part of a political protest and did not involve violence or incitement to hatred. It considered that the action was a form of political criticism and was protected by the right to freedom of expression. It also stressed that freedom of expression includes "information and ideas that offend, shock or disturb."

(2) In July 2017, a group of young people linked to the Arran collective held a protest at Palma's Muelle Vell (Old Pier). During the protest, they displayed banners, lit flares, and threw confetti at restaurant customers to denounce overcrowding in Mallorca. The Public Prosecutor's Office requested sentences totaling up to 29 years in prison for 12 of the protesters, accusing them of public disorder. The Provincial Court of Palma acquitted all the defendants. The court considered that the protest, despite not being reported to the authorities, was within the framework of freedom of expression in a democratic society.

Tennessee Williams said, "Youth is the art of overcoming the fear of the future." There's no doubt that a critical youth drives social progress and becomes an agent of change, even more so in times of crisis.

Another element to consider: Coloring the facade of a building declared a Site of Cultural Interest (BIC) constitutes a crime against historical heritage according to the Spanish Penal Code, specifically Article 323. I don't think this is the most important issue of the protest. The government reported the incident to the National Police. However, early in the morning of the same day, the EMAYA cleaning brigade had already removed the evidence of the only possible crime. I don't know why, but it seems that it wasn't the facade (of the building) that most concerned the government, but rather the image of the Consulate General's Office.

The government described the events as a "frontal and absolutely intolerable attack on tourism." However, it was clear that the action had been directed against a government building; one didn't have to be very clever to think that the interpellation, in the first place, was aimed directly at the government itself: "Guilty of our misery" was the slogan written on the wall of the regional government. Playing dumb and saying that the protest was directed elsewhere may be clever or clever, but it's hardly convincing. It's the government's policies that are being questioned.

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued that the creation of the enemy—whether external or internal—is a political device used to delimit who belongs to the system and who is excluded. The system is the whole; in our country, the paradox would arise of assimilating the idea of "the whole" (the touristification of society) to that of an extremely partial and limited activity in relation to society as a whole. We could speak of a system shaken by technology and, scientifically, of low qualifications, manifestly dependent and with a great impact on the environment; that is, the game would consist of being inside or outside a system with little capacity for persuasion in the face of free and universal thought. In some ways, it would remind us of Schrödinger's cat, which coexists with the contaminating element that can trigger an irreversible process.

For his part, Byung-Chul Han summarizes the exclusion of the other as the expulsion of otherness in favor of the proliferation of the other. He considers it a phenomenon inherent to neoliberal society, in which the "proliferation of the same" is confused with growth. We could consider it the philosophy of massification. Translating theory into practice, we would say that the limited nature of the independence movement is exploited to reduce the "other" to the dimension of a minority subject: "a minority is not going to destroy the work of the tourism sector."

It's the fallacy of the part for the whole. Without being false, the headline could very well have been: "As a result of a controversial and irreverent recording, he demands degrowth" or "A root burns photographs of the president and business leaders to demand degrowth." Degrowth is the demand found in Arran's recording. In this case, the "other" would not be a minority group, but rather the one "demanding degrowth," a subject who has repeatedly and in many different ways expressed themselves and encompasses a significant portion of society. Then, the debate would be radically different.