"I know I am old, but my ideas are young. If you don't make your brain work you become stupid"
Neus Català, 2012
The fact that thousands of young people—because it was, fundamentally, young people, more so than parents—protested on Thursday at the Fossar de les Moreres against racism in any of its forms is, if nothing else, good news. That they did so, specifically, against the closest xenophobic formula, that is to say, against Aliança Catalana, is much more relevant. In these troubled times, when it is so easy to see the eye of the hurricane ten thousand kilometers away and not want to see it nearby, right at home or knocking on the door. In any case, yes, there were thousands of young people, and some of the most active and supportive in the country, answering the call of the pro-independence left and with the support of the Tenants' Union (Sindicat de Llogateres), Top Manta, the Educational Assembly of Catalonia, the OJS, or the Enough Complicity with Israel coalition. Paradoxically, they are the only ones arrested this Diada. It must be remembered that they were protesting against 400 people who were gathered there under an institutional protection that was shameful, through an unusual deployment of various operational areas of the Mossos d'Esquadra and alongside some remnants of the most violent faction of the Boixos Nois. Insufferable paradoxes. In the middle, photojournalist Jordi Borràs, attacked by both. Because it happens that those 400 people, compared to the 8,000 who were protesting so justly against their presence, crudely represent the Catalan niche that euphorically congratulates itself on the victory of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, celebrates the genocide in Gaza with open arms, and miserably stirs up a humiliating ethnic-racial segregation. The Mossos, paradoxically, looked outward, but the German police have long been looking inward and classifying the AfD as a real threat of far-right extremism.Less paradoxical, more paroxysmal are some events I experienced during the afternoon of the Diada. Simultaneously, while the neo-Nazi group Núcleo Nacional was gathering at Plaça Verdaguer –poor Mossèn Cinto– under a drastic encirclement by the Mossos and with 1,500 anti-fascists protesting nearby, a small block of Aliança Catalana tried to march in the middle of the pro-independence demonstration almost as if nothing were happening –amidst growing reproaches and constant rejections, final police encirclement included, when the majority understands and understands very well everything that is at stake. Because what one must never do –in the light of the darkness of history– is to normalize racism, walk by its side, or give it space. The organizers have some responsibility, despite the prior warnings and alerts, just as we all do. I say this feeling both angry and disillusioned, worried and committed, scared and hopeful, as a cry or a plea or as an enough. Discreet or loud, the form is all the same to me, but the ethical, political, and cultural foundation is clear, explicit, and simple for future gatherings: no form of racism should be invited, allowed, whitewashed, or tolerated in a democratic, unitary demonstration. Do sanitary cordons work? They work, of course they do. Basically, if they are implemented. Let them manifest their racist hatred wherever they can, but let them not contaminate or parasitize a mobilization that demands a country for everyone by insulting diversity, cowardly criminalizing newcomers, and fueling the dirty and brutal reality that is all racism, when those responsible for the structural problems the country suffers sit in other seats of power and never arrive in boats adrift. I say this while returning home, pondering at every step and remembering an old anti-racist slogan from the nineties, when Lucrècia Pérez was murdered in 1992: don't mess with my friend, we used to say back then. And today it is of a literal militant anti-racism: don't mess for even a second –today, now, here– with my neighbors; don't bother the Senegalese family that lives on my same landing, door to door, anymore; nor the beloved Colombian neighbor from the fifth floor, who are already an inseparable part of my community, landscape, and country. The shoes of others, Casaldàliga would say, are mine. Paradoxically, polysemically, we are here because they are here —and vice versa.
But by the time another June comes—and everything points to the fact that next summer we will already be under the dire ranks of the disastrous PP-Vox binomial and under some change of slope on the Catalan municipal map—it will be necessary to assume that perhaps the locations change, but the maps are not altered, nor is the route modified, nor does the long-distance race stop. Everyone lives their own particular and collective Diada —from the Carmel paying homage to Salvador Allende, passing through Ferran street at first light to demand justice for Gustau Muñoz, to every reunion on the street of a country that self-convenes to keep walking—, but we have all lived the ninth consecutive one with exiles still —from President Puigdemont to ministers Puig and Comín—. Now it seems that "eppur se muove" at the Supreme Court, after a decade of repressive cruelty between sadistic and obsessive, and while estelades and singers remind us that we continue and will continue to be. I do not know if the times are changing or if they turned upside down a long time ago. I do know, as Josep Termes would say, that we continue to be a miracle and that, in this country, the norm of resistance has always been self-organization. To solve every challenge, every difficulty, every headache. Now that we are returning from the street, let us not be tempted to stay at home. The most stupid defeat is non-appearance and it would be out of withdrawal.While returning from the demonstration, I remembered that the other day, on a radio talk show, regarding the 25th anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Hamas attacks of October 7th, someone asked eurocentrically why we were focusing so much on the response given and not on the events that triggered them. I would swear the answer falls on its own just as bombs fall: because Bush's factual response was to raze an entire country that had nothing to do with the Al-Qaeda attacks and because Netanyahu's response has been to perpetrate a genocide that still persists. So it will be better to focus on the responses, which is always where either the possible exits or the probable dooms are brewed. And to focus on the response that we are, when the dilemma is already as global as it is Catalan: either a millimeter-by-millimeter and step-by-step democratic reconstruction of everything we are losing or an ultra-uncontrolled demolition of what remains. The snake circling the egg, when the snake's egg is already nesting in too many places. And for that reason, luckily, seeing thousands of disobedient young people with such anti-fascist clarity continues to be more than good news. So thank you, youth. A thousand thanks.
