Let them put on the burqa

Junts has been marking a tough stance against immigration for some time. They feel the breath of Aliança Catalana and Vox on their necks and believe the best strategy is to copy their discourse. I speak with the taxi driver and the doorman, the waiter and the shop assistant, and we all share the same feeling of weariness with a political class that seems to live light-years away from people's real lives. They play a game that isn't ours, even if they do it with our money and our lives. Now they're bringing up the burqa issue in Congress, knowing it's useless. Why are they doing it? Why are they throwing hours and public resources into the trash? To spread propaganda, of course, now that the one from Ripoll is chasing them. Catalan right-wing, like all Western right-wings, has completely renounced classical liberalism which spoke of good sense and order (that hypocrisy sustained on the violent exploitation of the working class) and is embracing cruelty organized and inspired by Trump. It is the perversion of stoking the hatred of the poor (even if they consider themselves middle class) against the poor who are a little poorer and already come from home with eroded humanity because they have had the whim to be born in another country. 

Orriols is eating Junts' cake and is doing so in the strongholds that the post-convergence parties considered their own, main street corners and high-ceilinged modernist buildings, renowned hotels, even in a golf course in Empordà, which must be our Mar-a-Lago. Catalan bourgeoisie approaches Ripoll perhaps because, like MAGA in the US, they believe they can manage her, that she will be easy to dominate and direct. The Aliança people talk about reindustrializing Catalonia. Long live the nineteen-tens! And the glorious past when the bosses made gold and the employees didn't see the light of day, locked up for sixteen hours in the factory. Back to Germinal and child exploitation. Because if Catalonia is to be reindustrialized, the question is: who will work? Sílvia Orriols can go around saying that immigration is nothing more than a nuisance, a threat, she can point out everything negative about it, but the truth is that the population from abroad is so necessary that if there were no "newcomers" this country would stop and cease to function. I just ate strawberries at a golden price because I wanted them from Maresme and not from Huelva, but the hands that pick strawberries are all foreign, both here and in Andalusia. The terrible perversion, the wicked cruelty, consists precisely in this: in fueling violence and hatred against those who we know are absolutely necessary. The bourgeoisie that longs for better times for exploitation, which if it could, would openly say it wants to get rid of all the rights conquered by the base of the production chain from which it extracts its wealth, benefits from having a pool of people living on the margins of society, isolated from the rest of the citizens by xenophobia and racism, by school and urban segregation. We want Catalan industry, says Orriols, but I ask again: who will work there? Those of the avocado toast and Netflix generation? Which Catalans with eight surnames will go to the Fordist assembly line?

Now they say they want to ban the burqa for security, but that they are doing it for the equality of women. What hypocrisy! We would like to believe that they care about Muslim women and girls, but experience shows us that only feminists now called "classic" have defended the rights of those born in Islamic contexts. In many town halls run by Junts, they make life impossible for immigrant women, with or without a burqa, with or without a headscarf. And from the PSOE, Bolaños says something about religious freedom. The freedom to subjugate women, as always. How boring it all is, how much I want to give them all a burqa and let them look at the world from behind the mesh, to see how they like it.