

Now it is Brussels' turn |
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English | |
per Víctor Alexandre | |
diumenge, 10 setembre 2006 | |
[Speech the day before the National Day of Catalonia 2006 at Fossar de les Moreres, a place dedicated to those who died defending the rights and constitutions of Catalonia in the siege of Barcelona in 1714.]![]() But today I do not want to talk about the external enemies but about the enemy that we Catalans have inside us. It is the most dangerous enemy because it cannot be seen and, even if we saw it, we would be unable to recognise it, because it has our own face. This enemy has a name: deception. A deception which we, sometimes in an unaware way, spread all over as the idea according to which we will never achieve anything because “Spain and France will never want to…”, because “Spain and France will never admit…”, because “Spain and France will never let us…”. We have to remove this negativity from our brains for several reasons. I will mention three of them. First: because giving up before the end of the match is a sign of infantilism, low self esteem and distrust toward our own possibilities. This does not mean that infantilism is bad, infantilism is not bad in a child, but it is unhealthy and pathetic if it is the image of a people which boasts about having three thousand years of history. Second: because the more we insist on the impossibility of national independence the more the false certainty of this impotence grows inside us. Independence is not a prize that an omnipotent father has to give us for good behaviour, independence is a right that every human being exercises when he or she reaches adulthood or that every national group exercises when it gains consciousness that equality between peoples is not possible without the respect for their singularity. And third: because the energy that we spend with victimism or justifying ourselves moves us further and further away from maturity. And the maturity of a people is shown by the rejection of this people to subordinate the will of its Parliament to the one of another Parliament. Without any doubt, we have recently been victims of a historic fraud, a fraud called Statute, which will soon be judged by history, but we should not get discouraged. We should not do it because there is nothing in this world which is intrinsically good or bad. And not only because the nature does not make moral judgement or because the rain is never welcome by everybody, but because many acts that we consider negative end up being fairly positive. It is evident that, in order for it to happen, it is necessary to know how to positivate adversity. And the positive part of the Statute is that Spain is definitely naked. In fact, no matter what they say, there is no new Statute, because a Statute which does not recognise the Catalan nation, which does not end with the fiscal plundering, which does not consider the economic agreement, which does not admit the management of our ports and airports, which does not force to label in Catalan all the products manufactured or distributed in Catalonia and which denies the right to hold referendums, to have national teams and to exercise democratically the right of self-determination is a Statute in favour of the Spanish interests and, therefore, a Statute against the interests of Catalonia. Do not we realise that the fact that Catalonia is ruled by a Statute is a contradiction? Do not we realise that “nation” and “Stature” are contradictory terms? Adult nations do not have Statute, they have Constitution. And where is the Catalan Constitution? Where is the document which guarantees its legal status? Where is document which makes it equal in rights and duties to the other sovereign nations of the world? We do not have it, because the attempt of our neighbours to turn southern Catalans into Spanish and northern Catalans into French has not changed along the time. In every political cycle, different governments are born and die, in Spain and in France, some of them are right-wing ones, and some other call themselves left-wing governments, but all of them, absolutely all of them, have a common aim: the disappearance of the Catalan people as a differentiated national identity. ![]() ![]() France and Spain are at the end of their imperial history. It does not matter that they do not realise it, or that they do not want to, the fact is that their vital cycle is ending, and with its end, another cycle will be born, which will be the antithesis of this one, because it will be defined by the decrease of imperial States and the increase of the little peoples. And do not doubt that the Catalan Countries will have their place among these peoples. Berria , 9/15/2006 (Basque) Nabarralde , 9/15/2006 (Spanish) Racó Català , 9/19/2006 (Catalan) Eurotribune.net , 9/26/2006 (Catalan, English, Spanish, French) |
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