Does anyone know what happened to us? Does anyone know exactly what happened in the months before and immediately after the 1-O referendum? It's not that there's a lack of stories that describe, with little or no precision, the most obvious, most visible, most incontrovertible material facts. Nor are there any shortages of simplistic interpretations, conspiratorial approximations, and maliciously biased and self-exculpatory versions. But, of all this, what remains in our collective memory—and in our lack of memory—is a broken mirror of interpretations. A mess that has not only fragmented its memory but is also made up of pieces that don't even fit together. Reconstruction, for now, seems impossible.
This is probably the greatest victory of the State against the ambition and hope for independence that we have experienced since the failure of the 2006 reform of the Statute. Almost a dozen years that had gone down the path of a progressive convergence of wills, and now it is. It is true that, despite forming an aspirational majority, the independence movement was never accompanied by a single majority confident in victory. Popularly, there was more desire than conviction, as the polls always indicated. Not out of cowardice, but because of that old, very Catalan habit of always wanting to keep one's feet on the ground and not be accused of buffoonery. Always, more common sense than rashness. But, in any case, the horizon was shared, we gave it a name—the right to decide—and we characterized it positively: the smile, the dream... And in that progress, there were practically no cracks other than the eternal personal and partisan rivalries that, alongside the great objective, dwarfed.
But while it's true that there's little experience in achieving victories and knowing how to capitalize on them, we've now seen that we're not skilled at defeat either. That's why October 1, 2017, is both a squandered victory and a devastating defeat. Okay: independence hadn't been possible. But was this degree of subsequent fragility necessary? Because it's evidence that frustration and demobilization didn't cause the impotence displayed immediately after October 1, but rather the Cainite battles that followed. The independence movement, however, was still electorally alive and mobilized on December 21, 2017. But politically, it was already a living dead due to its docile and inexplicable acceptance of Article 155, which assumed without resistance the suspension of the government, the closure of Parliament, and a democratically illegitimate election call. To be clear: we saw people being beaten on October 1st, but we didn't see the pro-independence deputies resisting in Parliament and being handcuffed by the Civil Guard.
The violent victory of the State and the stupid self-inflicted defeat—which has ended in a humiliating return to pure and simple autonomism—are not only expressed in the fragmentation of views on what happened on October 1st, but it is the very fragmentation of interpretations that violates past experience, violates past experience. Was October 1st an epic victory? Was it the result of a Machiavellian collective self-deception? Does it have great political value upon which new attacks can be built? Is it necessary to sort October 1st into the drawer of defeats? Should we celebrate it or should we mourn it? Have we already atoned for our sins, or are there still scores to settle? Have we already given our adversaries enough satisfaction, or should we still continue to offer them for free, right under their noses, with displays of cruelty among ourselves?
From my point of view, the reconstruction of the popular unity of action to return to the struggle and resume the challenge to the State—the same unity that forced the agonizing political agreements of November 9, 2014, of the heartfelt Juntos por el Sí of 2010, which divide the independence movement. And it will depend on knowing how to rebuild a shared memory free of reproaches and settling of scores that pushes the present toward a new future. And this requires the reappearance of small, innovative, purposeful movements and initiatives, free of bitterness, that get the snowball rolling again as it did in the first half of the century. Because it is through action—reflective, of course—that we can resume that desire for Catalan identity that inexorably leads to the will for national emancipation.
Carles Porta, in the current season of CrimesHe asserts that "the truth never expires." We must trust in this. Perhaps one day we will know the whole truth, and it will be in this complete truth that the independence movement will be able to overcome the fragmented interpretations that have led it to lose confidence in itself.
