Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

So, to speak of Carles Puigdemont’s brief return to Barcelona after 7 years of exile in Belgium, they present him as someone “on the run from justice” and not as an ex-president of Catalonia, very democratically elected by the Catalans and deposed in a more than undemocratic and authoritarian manner by the Spanishist rulers in Madrid. And also, as “wanted by his country’s justice and police” for “misappropriations”, usually forgetting to say that these “misappropriations” concern the costs of organizing the referendum on Catalan self-determination in 2017, considered by Madrid’s rulers to be illegal and savagely repressed as such by their police.

But that’s not all. They also “forget” to mention that Carles Puigdemont enjoys parliamentary immunity as he is currently elected to the Catalan Parliament (Generalitat) at the head of his Junts per Catalunya party, after having been a European deputy. Above all, they “forget” to point out that Puigdemont has been granted amnesty by the current Spanish government, together with 400 Catalan ex-ministers, ex-presidents of the Generality, party leaders, MPs, academics, writers, artists, intellectuals and other leading figures. And that this amnesty was validated by the vote of the majority of the Spanish State’s parliamentarians! And finally, they “forget” to mention that the international arrest warrant issued by the Madrid judges against Puigdemont has been judged null and void, inadmissible and unacceptable by the Belgian and Swiss courts, as it blatantly contradicts international law and democratic freedoms!

In short, our beloved media and their journalists say many things to hide the essential truth. And in the case of Puigdemont and his Catalonia, this truth is called the right to self-determination, the right of peoples to self-determination, a fundamental and by no means non-existent right that has been part of international law since it was enshrined in the United Nations Charter in 1945!

Obviously, all this is nothing more than ...indecent chattering for the rulers of Madrid, who have never hesitated to label... “terrorists” and sentence to long prison terms those who peacefully assert the right of peoples to self-determination. They’ve been doing it for the last 7 years, but they’ve done far worse over the last four centuries. Moreover, they have no problem claiming to be part of this Spanishist “tradition” and regularly repeating, even from the rostrum of the Madrid Parliament, that the suppression of Catalan independence aspirations requires Barcelona to be ... bombed once every half-century!

It’s as if nothing has changed in this Spanish state, where over 1,300 streets and squares continue to bear the name of its fascist dictator Franco and his cronies. And it’s exactly this continuity in the barbarity of the Spanish state that partly explains the reason for its anti-Catalan (repressive) hysteria. After all, virtually all states have black pages in their history, but only the Spanish state is proud of them. A Spanish state whose kings, judges, bishops, generals and political parties (even the socialists of the PSOE!) continue to deny the responsibilities of their ancestors in the greatest genocide in the history of mankind, that of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and continue to claim - even before Latin American leaders! - that these ancestors merely brought...civilization to the primitives and other barbarians who populated the New World! A Spanish state that still claims and even celebrates its secular past, even though it is littered with “founding” crimes, from those committed against the Arabs of Al Andalus and the Jews expelled from Spain, to the obscurantist and infamous Inquisition and the siege of Barcelona in 1714, at the end of which King Philip V’s troops massacred its population after starving it to death. [1] Not forgetting, of course, the bloodbath in which the republican, plebeian and left-wing “other Spain” was drowned in 1936-1939, culminating in the post-Franco “transition” that saw the establishment of a democracy shaped and controlled by the old dictator who died in his bed and was buried with all honors...

This is why, in 21^st-century Spain, there are so many generals and other military men nostalgic for Franco, who are multiplying their calls for coups d’état to restore order (the one of the cemeteries), first and foremost in Catalonia. And here’s why there are so many judges, especially high-ranking ones, straight out of Goya’s drawings, handing out long prison sentences for... “terrorism” to any citizen who dares to demand his or her most basic democratic rights. And finally, here’s why all these anti-democratic, authoritarian and obscurantist demonstrations are systematically covered up by the political and religious authorities, who display a fanaticism and relentlessness reminiscent of the Inquisition!

So our media and their bosses are sadly mistaken when they hasten to sound the death knell for the Catalan independence “process” and bury - for the umpteenth time! - the popular movement fighting for self-determination in this country at the heart of Europe. This mass movement persists and remains radical and determined despite the ferocious repression and disarray caused by the infighting, betrayals and compromises of most of the so-called pro-independence parties. Moreover, the fact that the Spanish state is still using all available means to repress it, even going so far as to organize a gigantic and unprecedented police operation “on land, in the air and at sea” to arrest its ex-president Carles Puigdemont, shows how strong this Catalan independence movement remains, and how this Spanish state, bereft of arguments, has only violence as its only response.