Today, dear readers, we will review the figure of the syllogism, proposed by Aristotle. Let's take as an example the statement by the no less well-known M. Rajoy, which acts as the major premise when he writes that the French team is playing in the World Cup without French players. If having players of immigrant origin or diverse ethnicities means that a team is not made up of citizens of that country, and (minor premise) the Spanish team has players of immigrant origin, such as Lamine Yamal or Nico Williams, the conclusion can only be that Spain is also playing in the World Cup without Spaniards.
Note that the conclusion is correctly derived from the premises, but it is false in reality because the major premise contains a fallacy, which is that a person's Frenchness is not achieved based on a certain skin color, religion, or family origin. And we would not want to think that M. Rajoy believes that the young Barcelona player from Rocafonda or the younger of the Williams brothers from Athletic Club are less Spanish than Rodri from Madrid. Or perhaps he does think so deep down and it just slipped out.
And what do we think? Do we address a kid like Lamine Yamal in Spanish? Do we exclude him from a job or from being able to rent an apartment because he has Arab names and surnames? If we were to ask young French people who are children of immigrants (just as if we were to ask young Catalans) if they feel treated like white French or white Catalans, they would surely remind us that there are still categories. Let this train of thought from M. Rajoy serve to understand and normalize new Catalan identities, resolved some decades ago by Jordi Pujol.
It goes without saying that in republican France, Rajoy's statement has been met with indignation. The country of Descartes is more about intuition and deduction than syllogism.
