Dirty hands

It´s weird. All this damned nationalistic stuff, I mean… All those fools seeking to replace the old liberal nation-state´s legitimacy by some outlandish identity in the name of only God knows what sacred anointed community.

A massive demonstration took place some days ago in Barcelona. People marched down the streets claiming for the respect of their double identity as Spaniards and Catalans. Also against the hatred instigated by the nationalistic authorities of the region shamelessly and relentlessly trying to strip away the Spanish side of his or her soul from everyone that falls within their reach. It´s not the only region in Spain where nationalists gloat over these sadistic exclusion practices free riding the guilty neglect of a central government in Madrid, traditionally reluctant to enforce law in certain areas of its territory and carelessly prone to entrust the task of preserving its legitimacy to unreliable and powerful nationalistic autonomous governments. As a result and ever since Spain became a democracy the nationalistic ideology has encroached upon almost every aspect of the lives that people live in certain Spanish regions, not to speak of the helping hand that the Basque nationalistic terrorism has played in this process as a whole.

It has always- and still does- puzzled me, for instance, why the hell is it that in those autonomous regions where bilingualism is legally sanctioned by the Spanish State, road signs tend to exclude Spanish and are increasingly written in just one language, precisely that which the nationalistic ideology makes use of in order to strengthen the control over a portion of the territory for which it claims exclusive ownership and, ultimately, monolingualism.

The people that marched in Barcelona shook gleefully Catalan and Spanish flags. Under the shelter of the old liberal Spanish nation-State people showed themselves willing to live out undisturbed and peacefully their double identity. As the rally concluded, one speaker visibly worn out for having had to put up with the nationalistic nonsense for too long, cried out in rage from the platform in which he was speaking the following catalan words “racisme identitari”, “Identity-based racism”. The accusation that he made against the Catalan nationalistic authorities resounded all the more powerful in my ears as he had expressed it in Catalan. I got the impression that his statement,besides an accusation , was also a decent and long-repressed attempt to free an innocent from the grasp of somebody else´s dirty hands.