Juan Carlos reconciling with the Catalans

A king who is not even wanted in his own house and who has escaped legal punishment due to criminal negligence and the statute of limitations is in no position to lecture on justice, much less to speak of betrayals. But he was king for thirty-eight and a half years (1975-2014), and his opinions carry weight.

His accusation that Pujol promotes "a Catalan culture based on the exaltation of its history" is remarkable. What exaltation is he referring to, singing?The ReapersAll nations exalt their own history. Or do you want us to talk about the feats of the conquest of America or the fact that no one was ever forced to speak Castilian?

If he kept repeating "Catalonia is much more difficult to manage than the Basque Country," he could have moderated and arbitrated (he had the constitutional power) to avoid the lamentable spectacle of the ruling against a Statute approved by referendum, the origin of the Process.

To write that "The Catalans committed a kind of coup d'état," apart from continuing theHow scary!It's a big question: what weapons did they use to stage the coup? And for him to say that Catalonia "had become a zone of intolerance where not being a radical nationalist was equivalent to being a fascist" is typical of nationalists, who never consider themselves to be nationalists. And what kind of intolerance is it, exactly, to call on everyone to vote? "If Spain is plural, Catalonia is too," he says. Exactly, that's why we've had a president born in Andalusia.

What Juan Carlos says about the Catalans, then, is no surprise coming from someone who doesn't allow Franco to be criticized in his presence. But it's useful for understanding the Bourbon, uniformist, and Castilian mentality of the Crown and how the king "who brought us democracy" thinks. And it's a good thing the book is called Reconciliation.