Black and white, once again

For the fourth consecutive year, the grandchildren of Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera have organized an Autumn Event, and this year’s they have dedicated to the enduring relevance of their grandfather’s example: a Christian supporter of independence who did not fit into the Catalonia that persecuted religion during the Civil War and who ended up criminally executed by Franco's Spain in 1938. A politician who, despite his efforts to negotiate everything with his opponents except his ideals, ended up succumbing to the black-and-white nature of an era in which some reproached him for being a Christian and others for supporting Catalonia, the Republic, and democracy.

Today we live in a black-and-white atmosphere, where it seems there is no place outside the factions. It is a dangerous game because it forecasts future and new exclusions. Next week we will enter the electoral campaign for the Spanish elections, and part of the anxiety of these days is the conviction that a PP-Vox government will arrive with a spirit of revenge and that, from the executive branch, it will be even easier for them to activate the connections with the judiciary and the deep state with which political opponents have been persecuted.

It may be a revenge accompanied by an attempt to refound Spain where, to use a symbol, there is no longer any room for Catalan-to-Spanish translation headsets in the Congress of Deputies. On the left, the alternative is a desperate contract of adhesion, born of necessity and not of conviction, and one that, when it is time to fulfill the acquired commitments, turns a blind eye and lets the clock run because anti-Catalanism is a constitutive fact of Spanish politics regardless of who governs, and it predates the pro-independence surge by a long time. The process will only be an excuse to carry out the usual purge. We run the risk of a new black-and-white, reminiscent of ninety years ago, when there was still no color.