October 1st, 2017, the citizens of the would-be nation state of Catalonia took to their local polling stations to make their voices heard on the question of independence from Spain. Days prior, news had arrived of National Police being mobilized from outside of the state to suppress the referendum - which the federal court deemed unconstitutional. The national media made a vain attempt at framing the voting citizenry as violent rebels when the police brutally attacked them - men, women. Young, old. The question on even the minds of mainstream media such as Canada's CBC is: why? In the age of cameraphones, 5G, and social networks, why was Spain so stupid as to hand the Catalans even more reasons to separate and ammunition with which to do so? Was this just a continuation of Spain's brutal treatment of this distinct peoples over the centuries or is there a deeper agenda at play here?
The Context
From history class, to the news media, to the History Channel, we're taught about events as isolated blips in time, and if any causal link is offered it is usually just one over-simplified explanation. Each event and causal link is, as the old adage goes, "written by the victors." We should remember when looking at this event we are already looking at history and that it is being written in real-time, unlike events of the past which have been pieced together in retrospect. Today, history is still being written by the victors - the current victors. In this context, the European Union and it's supporters in media and academia.
Many people don't realise this, but the giant countries that make up Europe are actually many tiny countries that have been conquered, absorbed by, or have entered a union of a larger country. Almost all of these places have distinct cultures and histories, and some of them even have distinct languages - one of those is Catalonia.
Last year a similar referendum was held in Scotland, the sizeable Gaelic country in the North of Britain. A push had been building for years to separate from the United Kingdom and go it alone, which is completely within Scotland's rights. The referendum failed to return a "Yes" vote by a considerable margin. The attitude of the Scottish establishment and many of it's citizens turned on a dime when, later that year, the United Kingdom as a whole successfully voted "Yes" by slim margin to withdraw from the European Union. The establishment had the Scottish people terrified of the prospect of being separated from the megastate, triggering a call for yet another referendum so they could then independently join the EU. This fact comes into play later.
With the success of "Brexit" in the UK, the proverbial cat was out of the bag and many more countries in the megastate began to agitate and prepare for their own withdrawal referendums. This spells doom for the EU as, they may stand a chance of surviving without the UK, but not if another country like France or Italy follows suit. Another country with strong Anti-EU sentiment on the rise is Spain. It's clear that the EU project is terminal and that it's only a matter of time before it perishes unless some ingenious strategy is employed - probably through cloak and dagger means.
I propose this new strategy of preserving the European Union experiment is to stoke the embers of the various independence movements throughout Europe to segment the countries that would otherwise leave, creating an untenable situation for these smaller states, and forcing them economically and geo-politically to individually rejoin the union. Just like Scotland is (irrationally) afraid of being alone, so is Catalonia. The Spanish people, on the whole, are anti-EU, while their Catalan counterparts are pro-EU. The Spanish state, however, is also pro-EU. Those in the establishment itself are true believers of the great project of dissolving the nations of the continent to build the megastate, and so have no actual loyalty to Spain as a sovereign entity. The courts - which the establishment only controls indirectly - and the Constitution - which the establishment cannot change on a whim - makes Catalan independence a legal impossibility. Something else had to be done to accelerate the inevitability.
Everyone with reasonable intelligence eventually comes to realise that the disagreeable behaviour of others is best ignored if it doesn't actually do one any harm as confrontation usually makes the other more determined in their actions. This was everyone's reaction to the police brutality inflicted on the Catalans - why didn't they just allow the referendum to go ahead, ignore the results, and arrest a few politicians for sedition? It shouldn't be such a stretch to suggest they wanted to make the separatist movement look noble and supply them with free world-wide advertising. Now the whole world is looking, as well as the EU itself, and we will naturally pressure Spain to drop the charges of sedition against the Catalan police chief, policemen, and firefighters for defending their citizens. The EU via Spain has checkmated us into pressuring for Catalan independence and, thus, further entrenchment of their tyrannical megastate.
