When Will We See Tanks in Barcelona?

2012-10-30 · first published in Socialist Project · 201 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to socialistproject.ca”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at Socialist Project: read it in full. The full piece runs to about 1,143 words against the 201 that survive here.

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Esther Vivas (via Socialist Project )

“Independent Catalonia? Over my dead body and those of many other soldiers.” It was with these words that on August 31, retired infantry lieutenant-colonel Francisco Alaman Castro referred to the possibility of an independent Catalonia. And he added: “We will not make it easy. Although the lion seems to be sleeping, they have no interest in provoking it too much, because it has already given enough proof of its ferocity over the centuries. These plebs are not up to much, if we know how to confront them.”

In the current verbiage that some politicians have adopted, these statements are not the only ones that we might call “undemocratic,” “putschist” and “anti-system.” After the demonstration on September 11, [1] the UPyD spokesperson [2] , Rosa Díez, called on the government to suspend the autonomy of Catalonia if the region used money from central government aid “to finance its secession.” Not to be outdone, the MEP (representing the Popular Party, in power in Madrid) and vice-president of the European Parliament, Alejo Vidal Quadras, requested that a brigadier-general, preferably from the Civil Guard, take charge of the “Mossos de Esquadra” [3] to curb the independence process.