Between the Crusades and the Civil War

As Pedro Calderón de la Barca said, “What is life? A frenzy What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction".

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
29 January 2024 Monday 10:15
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Between the Crusades and the Civil War

As Pedro Calderón de la Barca said, “What is life? A frenzy What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction". You only have to read most of the press in Madrid or listen every morning, Jordi Basté aside, to the radio editorials of Jiménez Losantos, Alsina or Herrera, to see to what extent we are in another of those times in which the right does not comes to power and its media environment wants us to believe that this is the end of the world.

But it is this media environment that sets the agenda for PP and Vox. Not the other way around. And, at the same time, all of this conditions a PSOE which is either already fine with this, or does not know how to detach itself from it. This climate also affects a text of the Amnesty law which, as it reaches Congress today, without substantive amendments, makes it difficult to vote for independence. Despite the clamor or precisely because of this clamor and for what he is looking for.

Because this tension on the right, more than a civil war, in the line described by the film Brexit: The uncivil war, promotes an uncivil confrontation. And in the face of this, all caution is little, when there are those who almost call for crusades against the infidels, here reds and separatists.

And while this media fiction maintains its political expression in a declarative frenzy and mobilizes a part of Spanish public opinion that moves from the shadows projected on the wall, in Catalonia the classics are also revisited.

No minimally exciting project on the horizon, guided by anyone, starting with the Government. Only frenzy in the attack on the neighbor. And a widespread feeling, also in a media here much more besieged by political power than the other way around, that we may have to spend a millennium flogging ourselves for the theoretical shadows or fictions that would have been projected during the process

But, in general, the Government and Parliament, dumb. Although perhaps this will end now that we are entering an (official) election year and now that President Aragonès has decided to have his own Óscar Puente by granting the rank of almost councilor to Sergi Sabrià. For the record, I don't see it as a mistake (on the contrary), nor the position of deputy councilor for him, nor the promotion (verbal, because de facto it already was) of Laura Vilagrà to vice president. Not only can a president perfectly make these kinds of appointments, but others in his place have done it before, to grease the machinery and to prepare his troops.

But it would not have been too much if Sabrià, aside from softening the opposition, had also used his first interview in office to attack, for example, those who from Madrid have hurled filth without mercy against the even greater Mossos, Josep Lluís Trapero. Recent revelations in the press would have justified it. And this, perhaps, would have helped to outline the fiction that here we have a Government that governs and that knows who is in front of it. But that, too, might have been asking too much. Don't mind me. Because, as Calderón said in his legendary verse, "los sueños, sueños son" .