the "Catalan" problem

Today's entry's in my "English" so that everybody cannot understand something and this way be justified in doing what they were going to do anyway: say and think freely about what I'm saying here, without taking into consideration a single word of what I actually say.

I want to publicly denounce in this blog that it is absolutely false that Spanish speakers are discriminated in Catalonia. This is one of the most absurd and interested lies I've heard in my entire life. It is not only false, but probably the mirror image of the truth. This applies not only to the times of Franco's 40 year fascist regime, where you could go to prison for speaking Catalan in public, but also today, in the so-called Spanish democracy where Catalan is losing speakers year after year, because of the pressure of one of the most powerful languages on Earth (the third or fourth in number of speakers, depending on the sources). In Catalonia, today, there are thousands (probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions) of people who, despite having lived there for years, or even decades, have never used (or will never ever use) spoken Catalan even once in their lifetimes. The number of monolingual speakers of Catalan, in contrast, is either zero or close to zero. The Spanish-speaking monolinguals can bear a perfectly normal life: they can have all their rights respected, except perhaps the "right" of having their kids schooled only in Spanish (in public schools). The other group (if existent) lacks however many fundamental rights: Catalan monolinguals don't have access to the justice in their own language, they cannot make a claim to the police in their own language, they cannot address the government in their own language... Now, the Spanish monolinguals keep insisting on that their language is discriminated in Catalonia. They pretend to be treated as second-class citizens, and then their message is relentlessly publicized by the vast majority of the Spanish-speaking media in both Catalonia (80% of the total media, including public and private TVs, radio stations, newspapers, etc.) and Spain. This leads to a so deep misconception of reality that the victims end up seen as the hunters, and the real hunters seen as the poor victims of the fascist oppression of the weakest, who, furthermore, are claimed to manipulate history, and lobotomize people so that they fall in blind obedience to the Catalan evil regime. That is to say, the exact opposite of the truth is perceived as the real state of facts. A perfect Orwellian exercise.

As a Catalan, I have to frequently confront disdain and sarcasms whenever I meet non-Catalan Spaniards. I have to accept those people's opinions on who I am (what they say I am), what I am (an ungrateful and boring perennial complainer, to use the expression of the famous Mexican semanticist VAZQUEZ-ROJAS 2008), or who I should be (a Spanish citizen and speaker really grateful about it). In addition, and for the same price, I have to accept their condescend, or worse, their lecturing me in the name of rationality, about how I should behave so that they can accept me. According to that highest form of rationality, since (i) languages are valid to the extent that they are useful to communicate with the maximum number of people, (ii) given that my universe, believe it or not, shrinks to Spain, and the common language in Spain is Spanish, and (iii) given that in addition this language has hundreds of millions of speakers, it then logically follows that I have the moral obligation of (and the right of pronouncing thanks about) knowing Spanish, along with the freedom of restricting Catalan to the private sphere until it completely disappears. Needless to say, if any of these opinionators I sometimes encounter went to live in Catalonia, s/he should not be required to learn Catalan, because Spanish is the common language to the whole country. And so on and so forth, almost every single time... You tell me how difficult is to understand with a very slight effort that this is really tiring for most Catalans and doesn't make us happy to be living with these people who hate who we are, our language, and our society.

If the problem is that languages should be a tool of communication between humans, I don't see why we should maintain Spanish or for that matter more than one language on Earth. Maybe we should all speak Chinese, or English, and forget about the rest. No, they say. Indeed, we have to consider real politics, and here some other languages deserve credit as useful tools of communication. The criterion for membership to this select club is essentially quantitative: i.e. number of speakers. Spanish of course holds a pretty old membership card in this club of connoisseurs. Now, the question is: why does Spanish (like French, English, Chinese, etc) have a so important number of speakers? Because it is a better tool of communication? Because it is easier to learn? Because it is a more logical or older language? Nope. Because it is the language of a country which, like France, England or China, historically conquered lands by means of war, enslaved the people who had lived there for centuries, made them forget about who they were before the conquerors arrived, and made them adopt the new language, the new religion, the new lifestyle. ("And you call me a terrorist, while you look down your guns..."). In virtue of this political rationality, it follows that Spanish deserves more credit than, say, Catalan or Nahuatl, and therefore I should simply shut up my Catalan mouth and be rational. Maybe, but I WON'T.

Once I heard a debate broadcast in a Spanish private TV station, in relation to what they usually call the Catalan problem (clearly evidencing whose problem really is). Someone was building a fine metaphor: if you have a company where all the partners except one agree in the business line, the majority has every right to require of the problematic member either a change in behavior or her resignation. Well, I can't agree more. It is as simple as divorce: unhappy marriages divorce, unhappy communities should also be able to set parts and each live the life that fits it best. I seem to be unable to see in what this is less rational than the rationality they throw upon me every single fucking week.