Palantir Technologies is, let's say, a technology company with an ideology (other technology companies also have an ideology, but they hide it more). Ultraconservative, naturally. Palantir is dedicated to the analysis of massive data, or big data. It provides services to governments and also to large companies such as Airbus, Panasonic, Merck, and others. It is valued at 380 billion dollars, was founded in 2004, and its name refers to the magic stones that appear in the novel The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien (which you can read in Catalan, by the way, in the excellent translation by Francesc Parcerisas). Its two most visible leaders are Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, two singular gentlemen. Thiel, a German citizen naturalized American who was also a co-founder of PayPal, is an ultracapitalist shark, specializing in venture capital funds. His theory is that democracy is incompatible with freedom; if not with economic freedom. Thiel is a money supremacist above all other values.Alex Karp, for his part, comes from the humanities: he is the son of a progressive Californian family, studied philosophy in Germany, and was a disciple of Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher defender of democracy. He is fascinated by literature and adores The Lord of the Rings: despite these characteristics, or precisely because of them, Thiel saw in Karp (they had met, when young, at Stanford University) someone who understood Palantir's idea better than anyone, and that is why he pushed him to become the company's CEO. Palantir's idea: to dominate the world through the data generated on the internet (about 400 million terabytes a day) and artificial intelligence. Karp explains it in a book he published last year, The Technological Republic, which is considered the company's manifesto. Karp says that the era of atomic deterrence is ending and a new era is emerging, that of deterrence based on artificial intelligence. Karp considers this deterrence essential to protect Western values (he no longer speaks of democracy, but of a "lifestyle" that must be safeguarded). Palantir is dedicated to this.Karp does not hide, rather the opposite, his company's close collaboration with the governments of the USA and Israel. Palantir's programs are behind operations such as the detention of Maduro or the start of the ongoing war in Iran and the Middle East. He does not believe it is Palantir's place to define the limits of the use of its programs. He leaves that to the clients: the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, or even the American ICE. Palantir also works with other governments such as those of Canada, France, Germany, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia. Or Spain, which in 2023 awarded it a contract from the Ministry of Defense for 16.5 million euros, with the task of implementing military intelligence software named Gotham. Yes, it is the name of the city where Batman lived. Yes, the future is in the hands of highly dysfunctional people.

The president of the Canary Islands government, Fernando Clavijo, of Coalición Canaria, complains that the Minister of Health, Mónica García, has "ridiculed" him and "taken him to the meme" for his theory about swimming rats that could escape from the ship MV Hondius and spread throughout the Canary Islands, biting the suffering citizens at will, an idea he maintained in a screenshot taken from an AI. Perhaps Clavijo doesn't realize it, but he himself has made a fool of himself and offered himself as the protagonist of memes, by providing the synopsis of a B-movie to an extremely delicate health operation with a strong international impact. Clavijo's laughable —but not funny— overacting could not prevent Pedro Sánchez from once again receiving applause from the international community: the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen; the UN's António Guterres, and also the President of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom, have praised the management of the situation by the Spanish executive. The national spokesperson for Vox, José Antonio Fúster, commented: “How scary, when the WHO praises you, it must be a bad thing.” Because, as we know, the WHO is one of the favorite targets of the lies and conspiracy theories of the global far-right. Perhaps for all these reasons, Clavijo has announced the possibility of taking the Spanish government to court for its handling of the hantavirus (in fact, the arrival of the ship has already been the subject of judicial rulings: on Friday, the National Court rejected an urgent request to halt the disembarkation, and the next day, the Court of First Instance of Madrid confirmed the imposition of a quarantine on the cruise passengers). When the fear mechanism fails them (the theory of the invasion of amphibious rats, however much fun it may have generated, was nothing more than an attempt to sow fear among the population), they always have the option of taking matters, whatever they may be, to court. They don't always win (often they do), but at least they have managed to bog down the discussion.Experts at spreading falsehoods and judicializing, the ultra entity Abogados Cristianos has raised a outcry because they want to prevent Pope Leo XIV, during his visit to Barcelona in a month, from visiting the Lluís Companys stadium because, they allege, under Companys' mandate "more than eight thousand people were murdered". They refer to the persecutions of religious by the FAI during the Civil War, but they omit precisely this: that there was a Civil War caused by a military and fascist uprising, which had the support of the Church. They propose that, instead of the Lluís Companys stadium, the pontiff go to the Valley of the Fallen, as they still call it. It seems that under Franco's mandate no one died, starting with the 33,833 people (12,000 of whom were unidentified) that the dictator had buried in his tomb in Cuelgamuros: the largest mass grave in a fascist Spain to which some want to return at all costs.

In the case of the two Mossos agents infiltrated in a teachers' assembly, speaking of a greater evil is not a play on words with Trapero's rank, but an objective description of a serious abuse of power committed by the institutions. In a democracy, it is a greater evil for the police, and therefore the government, to act against the right to free assembly: quite the contrary, what the police and the government should do regarding freedom of assembly is to guarantee it. Not to monitor it. Only the meetings of criminals should be monitored and prosecuted, and we do not see police infiltrating the meetings of certain politicians with speculators and directors of vulture funds, for example. On the other hand, there is another democratic requirement that must be demanded of rulers, and that is that public education should not be questioned. Teachers are not and can never be the enemy of rulers, and if they become so, or are seen as such, then the fault lies with the rulers, never with the teachers. The work of teachers and professors is one of the cornerstones of any democratic society, and the teaching collective should be very specially listened to in their demands, respected in their decisions, and remunerated for the decisive work they carry out. Public education cannot be a space of conflict and insecurity, and even less so a space infiltrated by plainclothes police. Neither in teachers' assemblies nor, of course, in classrooms.The lesser evil is what the parties supporting the Government, and also, from the opposition, Junts, seem to have chosen. ERC, Comuns, and CUP agree on demanding the dismissal or resignation of the aforementioned Trapero, and they do not go beyond requests for responsibility (they could do so, because the scandal is, let's repeat, serious). Junts does request that councilors Paneque and Parlón fall, but these are routine requests, which they do not expect to be heeded. The Government, on the other hand, has closed ranks around Trapero and thinks, at first, of getting out of this difficult situation without anyone from the organization falling. Illa is a politician of the old school with an axiom: heads are not cut off except when there is no other remedy. From this perspective, the risk that the situation will fester is less compared to the danger of the Government showing hesitation or weakness. Therefore, once again, the choice is for an evil that is considered lesser (it remains to be seen if it is: putrefaction generates infections).In the limbo of evils, in the middle but no less toxic zone, there is the ultra-conspiratorial swarm, which these days has had more than enough material to fill the networks with all sorts of delusions, threats, and hallucinated prophecies: hantavirus, the murder of a woman (an immigrant, by the way) in Esplugues and, now, the scandal of teacher assemblies infiltrated by police. If these people come to power, even with a small part of their arsenal of lies and alternative realities, it is possible that the upheavals they preach will become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The title phrase is said by one of the passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius, the one with the hantavirus, in a video that has become, precisely, one of the most viewed stories on social media this week. The passenger's name is Jake Rosmarin and he makes a call to whoever sees his video not to be forgotten. He cries as he says it, and you can see he is afraid, an objective and justified fear because he is on a ship where three people have already died. But then there is another fear that also makes him cry: that of not being able to count on the support or empathy of others, of us who are watching his video. Of becoming, as he says, a story, which in social media language is a video or an image that circulates for an ephemeral time and then simply disappears.Jake Rosmarin expresses this fear from the other side of the black mirror of the screen. He too is a social media user, like everyone else, and he too has surely seen videos similar to the one he recorded himself: people who were suffering, who found themselves in terrible, desperate situations. Surely Jake Rosmarin had looked at these videos with indifference or with a brief shiver (of compassion, of rage, of disgust: this already depends on the specific emotion that each video seeks to excite), and then had not thought about it anymore. It is, by no means, any reproach to Jake Rosmarin: it is how more or less all of us behave as users, or as consumers, of social media. What Jake Rosmarin, passenger of the hantavirus cruise, asks of us is that we do not do this to him and his unfortunate companions. That we do not pause briefly at their tears and then move on to another video, who knows, of celebrities on a red carpet, or of funny animals, or of in-laws formulating conspiracy theories.Jake Rosmarin's plea surely comes late. For a long time now we have been accustomed to contemplating people subjected to extreme pain on the screens of our mobile phones. For a long time now we have become accustomed to seeing people cry while we dine in front of the television: victims of bombings, immigrants shot down in boats, elderly women evicted by vulture funds, bodies abused or raped or blown up. Sensationalism, banality, the algorithm, and the desire to make easy money (in short, what we call technocapitlism) come together to help us become spectators — more passive, more abulic than ever — of the misfortune of others. People who suffer like flies trapped inside a glass, which is the screen.The horror is to go from being the spectator to being the fly. Jake Rosmarin rebels, with good reason, against this horror, but his tears will predictably have the same trajectory as those of so many, so many people who appear crying every day on our screens. We will be moved, of course, if in a while a film, or a series, is released narrating the ordeal of the hantavirus cruise, with the corresponding tagline: “Based on true events.”

That the Popular Party has a patrimonial conception of justice (of institutions in general, but of justice in particular: let's remember Ignacio Cosidó in his stage as a senator, boasting that the party controlled —it's just an example— the second chamber of the Supreme Court “through the back door”) is a well-known fact. This week, however, the PP has taken, in its capacity as a popular accuser, a step on this hitherto unprecedented path: dictating what the prison sentence should be for an accused person in an ongoing trial. And accusing the Prosecutor's Office of being “subject to the government” when it refuses to comply with its dictate.This is what happened with the businessman (we accept businessman as a euphemism) Victor de Aldama. The PP made it known to the public that it considers the appropriate sentence for this character to be five years in prison, a sentence that would precisely allow him to avoid entering a penitentiary institution by resorting to a couple of technicalities (technicalities, and pardon the joke). The Prosecutor's Office immediately replied no, that it requests seven years, as it had already established in its brief. The PP's response, in the words of Feijóo himself, is that the Prosecutor's Office has thus dashed the right of any person who collaborates with justice to obtain penal benefits in exchange for this collaboration.The “collaboration” of this Aldama with justice has so far consisted of appearing before judges and operating a fan for seven hours that spread lies, fabrications, half-truths, and some true facts, all mixed in any way, with a whiff of a biased and prefabricated narrative that is astonishing, and verbalized with an unacceptable and barroom language. That Feijóo (and not someone of lower rank within the party) comes out in his defense means that Aldama is a VIP, a piece considered key within the strategy that the PP has designed to harass and bring down the hated Pedro Sánchez, and with him his government. Aldama, let's remember, is an accused person in an ongoing trial: that a political party goes to the extreme of indicating what sentence can be imposed on him is a serious attempt to interfere with justice.We must assume that it does not come from here: in the case for which Aldama is accused, the former minister and former organization secretary of the PSOE, José Luis Ábalos, faces a request for 24 years in prison for crimes very similar to those committed by Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner, who not only did not go to prison but also caused the dismissal of the State Prosecutor General Álvaro García Ortiz and received compensation of ten thousand euros for damages to his honor. The conclusions are self-evident, and the socialists have no right to complain much, because the practice of judicial dirty warfare dates back a long way and the PSOE did very little to prevent it.Be that as it may, for a party to dare to say what sentences should be handed down in a judicial process that is still open, even as a popular accuser, is more than worrying. If this is a party that claims to be fit to govern (and it is), the ways of its future government can only be authoritarian.

On the 9th, the last stage of the Correllengua Agermanat will take place in Brussels, a mobilization that has managed to unite the Catalan Countries, from end to end, in a popular race that is actually a declaration of collective esteem for the Catalan language. The Flame of Language has been passed on, from relay to relay, from hand to hand, through towns, cities, and islands, symbolically drawing a cultural and civic community that recognizes itself by the Catalan language. Everywhere (in Catalonia, in the Valencian Country, in the Balearic Islands, in L'Alguer), participation has been massive and has made the Correllengua Agermanat an act of self-affirmation with a truly massive mobilization capacity. And with a tone —as in Estellés's verse— festive, joyful, and combative, the result of the organization's excellent work, which has also taken up the baton from the history of the different Correllenguas, first celebrated in Mallorca in 1993.Just last Sunday, the Flame arrived in Palma, and the citizens' reception was once again enthusiastic and massive, as it was during the Yes to Language two years ago. The songs of the group Música Nostra (with the singing of La Balanguera as the closing act) and the speeches of the organizers —far from routine, certainly powerful— set the tone for a great civic affirmation of a feeling, but above all of a right: the inalienable right to live fully in one's own language and, therefore, to be the country we are and not another. The Palma event was so successful that the next day the spokesperson for Marga Prohens' party, Sebastià Sagreras, came out to congratulate the organizers of the Correllengua Agermanat and try to put a good face on it. Naturally, the Popular Party (which governs in the Balearic Islands not with the support, but on the orders of Vox) had turned a deaf ear to the call precisely until the moment of seeing (once again) thousands of people clamoring in the street for the language. The linguistic policy of the PP-Vox government in the Balearic Islands consists of suppressing or marginalizing Catalan from public life (in healthcare, in administrations, in education), although at the same time they try to perform a balancing act by avoiding what they call “linguistic confrontation”.Whatever the rulers do, the Correllengua Agermanat leaves a decisive message: there is a living, awake, and organized citizenry and civil society, with a large base of young people who are both children of deeply rooted families and recent immigrants, willing to defend Catalan and Catalan culture as a way of living and being in the world, and who will not allow it to be taken away from them. This realization should not lead to any triumphalism (the very existence of governments with Vox in the Catalan Countries makes the magnitude of the problem quite clear), but above all it nullifies the catastrophic discourses and hate speeches that want to present Catalan as a semi-dead language due to immigration. Enough whining and finger-pointing, and much more Flame.

After verbally attacking the ERC deputy Najat Driouech, the also deputy Albert Tarradas, from Vox, backtracked and stammered a confused apology “if my statement may have offended”, while saying some idiocy about humor (fascists, when they threaten, often say they were joking, so they don't have to face the consequences). The hate speech of this Tarradas against a Muslim deputy caused consternation, with reason, and led many to exclaim that such an event had no precedent in the Parliament of Catalonia. In this, they are mistaken: there are precedents, and the most recent ones are found in the trajectory and the political legacy, never sufficiently lamented, of Ciutadans. The aggressive, frontal, defiant style of characters like Arrimadas or Carrizosa, always based on lies or misrepresentations, leading the premises of the discourse to aberrant conclusions, were forms of hate speech, then against Catalan independentism and the left. Ciutadans built a large landing strip for the far-right, on which Vox and Alianza Catalana have comfortably landed with their racist and xenophobic rhetoric, and with their phobia against progressivism —which they call woke—. Now they are not only in the Parliament of Catalonia, but their prospects (especially regarding AC) are to increase their presence significantly.In the Balearic Islands, it is not just any deputy, but the president of the Parliament, Gabriel Le Senne, who also chairs the island delegation of Vox, who is awaiting trial for hate crime for having torn up a photograph of Aurora Picornell and the Roges del Molinar, murdered by fascism on the night of the Epiphany in 1937. But the judicial case against Le Senne —curiously— is not progressing, and it will soon be two years since the events without him having to assume any political consequences either. The reason is the support that the government of the Popular Party, presided over by Marga Prohens, has given him and continues to give him. I mention this as an example of a fact that is quite visible: despite the multitude of voices lamenting that the PP has “let itself be dragged along” or conditioned by Vox, as if it had undergone a dramatic shift in its trajectory, the reality is that the PP's support for Vox wherever they have agreements is total. Not only that: the, let's say, relapses of the PP into supremacist, xenophobic, confrontational, civil war-mongering, and demagogic discourses and attitudes are also no novelty, but rather a well-marked constant in the party's history.All this leads to this dark moment when hate speech is aired with an arrogance that endangers any idea of social cohesion. It does not help at all when the left also falls into populisms of the worst kind, such as Rufián's finger-pointing gesture in Congress against the deputies of Junts. Wanting to fight —out of strategy or pure arrogance— against the far-right with the weapons of the far-right is not a form of audacity, but a direct path to brutalization and failure.

This past weekend I rewatched Gran Torino, one of the best films directed by Clint Eastwood (and that's saying a lot, considering he's one of the best directors of the last fifty years of Hollywood). It coincided with the publication of the YouGov poll for this newspaper, with the data that 66% of Catalans, an undeniable majority, are in favor of restricting immigrants' access to the country. This same majority is, at the same time, in favor of guaranteeing equal rights among all residents. However, 30% declare themselves in favor of applying the national priority defended by Vox and Aliança Catalana (and which the Popular Party has adopted). Released in 2008, Eastwood's film already speaks openly about immigration, and it's a hymn to the diversity and social cohesion of a country (the USA, but it could be Catalonia, it could be the Catalan Countries) historically formed by immigrants. However, being a hymn doesn't mean it's accommodating or well-intentioned: it shows how Black people have prejudices against Asians, Asians against Whites, Italians against Chinese, Chinese against Hispanics, Poles against the Irish. White supremacism over everyone else is portrayed, as well as the resentment and xenophobia that minorities profess towards Whites, etc. There is violence, weapons (we are in the USA), linguistic, cultural, and religious conflicts, and tattered American flags on the porches of rundown houses in degraded neighborhoods. But Eastwood clearly takes a stand for people's capacity to welcome and coexist. It's a capacity based on tolerance, empathy, and intelligence, qualities that define us as human beings before patriots.

Beyond petty politics and party strategies (in Junts they must be very sure of where they are going, voting what they vote), any debate about housing should start from this principle: people's right to decent housing is superior and must prevail over other rights, such as private property and its monetary exploitation. We can make it even broader: as a general principle, where individual rights collide with the common good, it is the individual right that must recede. Never the common good or society's interest. In a housing emergency, an individual —be it an individual, a real estate company, or an investment fund— does not have the "right" to speculate on rental and sale prices of homes. In a climate crisis, no one has the "right" to destroy the environment in the name of economic productivity, nor to question scientific evidence without valid arguments. In an epidemic, or pandemic, no one has the "right" not to get vaccinated, unless they assume that their decision endangers the health and lives of those around them (and they are indifferent to it). These are just a few examples.Some will call the previous paragraph communist, but it is not: it is simple social democracy and the welfare state, as we understood them not so long ago. The principle is simple: for societies to advance, they must do so collectively. If only a few benefit and many are harmed, there is no progress: there is regression. Illiberal, or turbo-capitalist, discourses are not an evolution of classical liberalism, but its degradation. The market, by itself, does not put everyone in their place, especially when the market is doped, inflated, and falsified in favor of very specific and describable interests. The retraction of democracy reveals another project, a new order conceived and commanded by global oligarchs with local servants in each country, imposing on rulers and populations a kind of natural selection based on money. This is nothing new in human history, but if for some decades we have prided ourselves on the West being the most advanced zone on the planet, it was precisely because we had worked in the opposite direction to all this.Trying to anchor this ideology in the figure of the good Catalan (or the good Mallorcan) who has worked his whole life like a beast and now has the right to do whatever he wants with the houses and apartments he has inherited from his grandparents, or that he has bought by speculating, is, to say the least, an indecent falsehood. Catalonia, precisely, has been a pioneer for having been a country built on the firm idea (and this one, indeed, liberal) of wealth distribution and collective improvement. In Mallorca, this idea has never existed, and that is why it is drowning in mass tourism with no alternatives in sight (and selling the grandparents' houses and apartments to the highest bidder, which curiously are vulture funds). The right to decent housing, let's repeat it, must prevail over the right to property.

Donald Trump's enormous, and sadly proven, destructive capacity does not deprive him of an undeniable comic flair. It works, however, in reverse: when Trump thinks he's funny, he's not funny at all, because all his supposed humor is based on denigrating people or institutions that generally cannot defend themselves, and also on that deceptive resource of the coarsest people which consists of wanting to be politically incorrect (according to them, “you can’t say anything anymore”, but, on the other hand, we hear and read them every single day). Instead, when he doesn't try to be funny, his own grotesque nature makes Trump capable of making us laugh.This is what happened again during the White House Correspondents' Dinner and the attempted attack that the current president of the USA supposedly suffered again, events that, instead of the gravity of a drama, had the ingredients of a comic opera. Journalist Antonia Hitchens, from the New Yorker, for example, tells it with the relaxed tone of someone who has witnessed a farce and not a moment of grave crisis for democratic institutions. The same correspondents' dinner, in fact, is a custom that, over the years, has acquired a certain ceremonial air, but which above all is based on good humor: it is precisely for this reason that Trump had avoided it until now, because his spoiled child attitude cannot tolerate jokes or criticism. He can insult, threaten, or ridicule, but if someone upsets him or makes fun of him, his reaction is to get angry and make a scene. This is what happened the day after the incident, when journalist Norah O'Donnell, from CBS, read Trump a fragment of the manifesto that the supposed terrorist, a certain Cole Thomas Allen, had made public before attempting to shoot him and in which he accused the Republican leader of being a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor. Trump's reaction was to explode in anger at the journalist and insult her gravely in front of the same camera (when, until that moment, he had been playing the part of the understanding, and even compassionate, leader who, when attacked, worries about people's well-being). The effect, in this case, was one of unintentional comedy, in the style of Airplane!.However, whether true or part of a setup to try to boost Trump's very low popularity, the shooter's words were very presumably true: Trump has already been convicted of diverting campaign funds to pay for the sexual services of a pornographic actress, and the indications that he may be a rapist and pedophile are numerous and consistent. Almost all analyses of Trump's role in conflicts such as Gaza, Venezuela, or Iran include the current US president's need to distract public opinion from the scandals that weigh on him, starting with the Epstein case. As for the accusation of treason, there is no need to doubt it: he is merely a parasite of the homeland, like so many others who boast of patriotism. In the USA and everywhere else.

In the end, Jordi Pujol's citation before the National High Court has been a kind of black whim (a capricho by Goya, who already denounced the abuses of power of the Spain of his time) by the court presided over by magistrate José Ricardo de Prada, who has not bothered to hide much his complacency in making the former Catalan president go through this grotesque episode. “The court does not want to fall into ageism,” he let slip, in an evident tone of mockery. In Madrid they have corroborated what had already been determined in Barcelona: that Pujol was not in physical or psychological condition to appear before a court. “Personal contact was essential,” insisted judge De Prada, light years away from acknowledging that he and the court had committed what in legal language is known as a monumental fuck-up. The most elementary common sense warned that the maneuver, besides being ugly, had no sense or content, beyond a gratuitous exhibition of power in greater abundance by ultranationalist Spain. But the most elementary common sense is something that cannot and should not be asked of the Spanish judiciary's leadership, because they are exempt from it.The episode recalls several things about justice in Spain. One, that slow justice is not justice and that when it takes ten, twelve, or fourteen years to judge things, it can happen, for example, that one of the accused (against whom, on the other hand, nothing has been proven) is already dead or in very poor health, as in this case. On the other hand, for the protagonists of the Kitchen case, which is being tried in the same National Court, the delay has been good for them to fuel the attacks of feigned amnesia with which they appear to testify. The mention of Kitchen leads us to the following questions: the different yardsticks of Spanish justice are also political. And this explains why De Prada and his court have fun mocking Pujol, while in the Kitchen courtroom, Judge Teresa Palacios takes care of interrupting or discrediting questions that might inconvenience Rajoy, De Cospedal, or Sáez de Santamaría, who not only do not receive any kind of vexatious treatment but arrive and leave with their heads held high. Placing justice at the service or against one political interest or another is one of the worst forms of perversion of the rule of law.This episode has also been a reminder that what we call the Catalonia-Spain conflict is the result of the sum of two weaknesses: that of Spain, which has never managed to complete, not even with the Civil War, its Jacobin and homogenizing national project (one state, one nation, one flag, one king, one language), and the weakness of Catalonia, which not only has not managed to get out of this national project of Spain, but also, to a large extent, does not want to get out of it. Spanish nationalism is boastful; Catalanism is victimist; both are resentful and rancorous. Nothing ever advances, or advances very little. Jordi Pujol is a complete personification of all this.

Mariano Rajoy has always managed to get extraordinary performance out of his public persona. Some time ago, he managed to create, even among his detractors, a kind image, for many even endearing, of a absent-minded man, a little slow, with somewhat bizarre but funny remarks, more interested in football than in politics (sadly, both in Spain and Catalonia, football works as a perfect social whitewash for any scoundrel), old-fashioned, fundamentally a good fellow.All of this, needless to say, is false. It is a facade, half-casual and half-studied, which, as we said, has given him very good results. Rajoy always maintains a clearly visible distance between what happens around him and his person, as if things never concerned him, as if there were no causal relationship between the positions he has held in the Popular Party and in the government of Spain and the crimes that were committed within the party or within the executives he presided over. It doesn't matter if it's the Kitchen plot, the patriotic police, the police charges of October 1st, or any other scandal. He wasn't there, he didn't know anything about it, he was alien to it, his ignorance was absolute. Rajoy also possesses a notable cold-bloodedness, which allows him to lie before a court and remain impassive. Even more so if the president of the court helps him, as Magistrate Teresa Palacios did last Thursday during the declarations of Rajoy and Cospedal at the National High Court, precisely for the Kitchen case.Rajoy, however, is like bad actors, who eventually get tired of playing the same role and then overact. On this occasion, he even denied knowing the aliases by which he was known within the criminal circles organized within the leadership of his party: he claimed to be unaware of the nicknames of el Asturiano, el Barbas, etc. "My name is Mariano Rajoy, as everyone knows." Another of Rajoy's favorite recursos are obvious statements and tautologies, with which he often manages to provoke the audience's smile and facilitate jokes from monologists and impersonators.The reality is that Rajoy's time as president was one of the darkest in Spanish democracy, and that's saying something. These are years of blatant patrimonialization of institutions, of denial of any dialogue with the opposition, of impulse to the ultra ideology that has finally become hegemonic within the Spanish right (now we exclaim, but Rajoy already had ministers who sang "El novio de la muerte" at the processions of Holy Week in Malaga), of constant belligerence against any form of diversity (especially against linguistic diversity, especially against Catalan) and, of course, of organized and institutionalized corruption at all levels of public administration. Perhaps it would be necessary that the next times Rajoy sits before a court it is not to mock justice and citizens again, and to leave as happy as ever.

The Calvià town hall, Mallorca, is once again celebrating this year (it did last year too) a festival called Saint George, which is essentially Sant Jordi but aimed exclusively at tourists and British residents, who are very numerous in this beautiful corner of the Serra de Tramuntana. The town hall, governed by the PP with the support of Vox, considers (these are verbatim words from their website, translated from Spanish) that it is their responsibility to “highlight the significant British presence in the municipality, and foster coexistence through culture, music, and shared leisure”. To this end, and in the coastal town of Palmanova, “this festive day will take place, including an extensive program of activities for all ages in a family and multicultural environment”. The aforementioned activities “highlight the English identity and the vitality of this group with a significant presence in the municipality”. The rulers of Calvià have discovered multiculturalism of whites with whites, which would be tourist multiculturalism. This beautiful celebration will not take place on Sant Jordi's Day, but this coming Sunday, April 26th, to encourage people to go for a peaceful walk with their children. If the British are in the mood, perhaps they can greet them and take a photo. The “cultural activities” include tribute concerts to The Beatles and Freddie Mercury, face painting workshops, an “artisanal” market, and “themed” parades about the legend —here the translation is impossible— of Saint George and the dragon. The Saint George of Calvià, it hardly needs to be said, dispenses with any reference to Sant Jordi and to the culture and language of Calvià, Mallorca, and the Balearic Islands, which are Catalan language and culture. It is part of a political vision that considers the island a Spanish enclave, and if convenient also British, and which at the same time does not neglect to work on the tourist projection of the municipality (the only and true obsession of elites with a pathological relationship with easy money) under the sign of de-seasonality, a concept that once progressivism advocated thinking it was about better distributing tourism and its impact throughout the year, but which has ended up meaning massification and collapse for as many months as possible. For a long time, Calvià has had far-right municipal governments that also have to face, every year, a dilemma: Jaume I and his troops landed in Mallorca on September 10, 1229 in Santa Ponça, precisely within the term of Calvià, and they find it a problem to celebrate the anniversary because then they have to balance to hide that those Christians who killed Moors (good) were Catalans (very bad).The day before Saint George, on Saturday the 25th, the Book Day will be celebrated in Calvià, with stalls selling this product. Perhaps writer Mendoza will have time to stop by, as he will find in Calvià a celebration alternative to Sant Jordi very similar to the one he demanded a few days ago.

Saint George is also the festival of diversity (and that is why it is called Saint George, and not Book Day or anything else). This means that it is also a festival for books that perhaps are not seen everywhere during the –fierce, let’s not fool ourselves– promotional campaign prior to the Big Day. That they are seen less does not mean they are less good: on the contrary, there are more excellent books that do not become known to what we call the general public, than those that do succeed. Diversity, precisely, occurs within the part of the forest that we do not perceive at first glance. “Oh, if only I had married the lighthouse keeper!” is a phrase that Joan Pons Bover, author of the novel Com voleu, germans, que canti (which takes its title from a verse of a traditional Ibizan song, popularized by the great Uc) heard his mother say on many occasions. The woman was referring to a lover she had, with a profession as literary from the outset as that of a lighthouse keeper in the lighthouse of La Mola in Formentera. Based on this true family anecdote, Joan Pons Bover creates a double narrative in the present, with a brother and sister sharing their old age in a nursing home, and in the past, when he focuses on the youth of these two characters. Published by the Illa Edicions label, Com voleu, germans, que canti is a defense of the value of memory and an exploration of affections as the foundations of people’s identity, as well as an immersion into the recent history, from the War to the present day, of the Balearic and Pityusic Islands, islands that have never been calm and have instead been quite brutal. Pons Bover had already published two very good novels (Un incendi al paradís, in 2016, and Tàni i els vius, in 2019). Crafted with the consciousness and demand of the best craftsmanship, Com voleu, germans, que canti is the best of the three and incorporates well-learned lessons from Antoni Vidal Ferrando (teacher, friend, and neighbor of the literarily prodigious town of Santanyí, where Blai Bonet, Bernat Vidal i Tomàs, and Antònia Vicens also hail from).Primero fueron las estrellas is the first novel by the young Joan Moragues Roca, and it functions as a backbone that links the sleepless story (of love?) between a nurse and a terminally ill patient with the case of the scientist who discovered the applications of mustard gas without being fully aware of its war potential. These main stories accommodate other small and large stories, loose ends or plot points, ideas, and flashes of brilliance, which could have risked dispersion but which take shape and meaning in the reader’s eyes, who is happy to finally read something truly different, thanks, among other things, to a lyrical style that fully embraces confidence in the Catalan language. Published by Angle and winner of the Premi Ciutat de Palma Llorenç Villalonga (an award that Joan Pons Bover also won with Tània i els vius), Primero fueron las estrellas is the debut of an author who can literally do whatever he wants in the future, and then we will be proud to have followed him from the first book.

Aware of his parliamentary weakness, Pedro Sánchez and the PSOE have decided to make an all-or-nothing bet to turn the Spanish president into a progressive benchmark, both internally and internationally. For now, it's working for them, also in the State: fewer and fewer people doubt that he can complete the legislature, and the shells with which the PP thought to break his waterline (starting with the alleged judicial scandals relating to his wife, his brother, and even his late father-in-law) have rather remained wet gunpowder.Within the failed ammunition, there are also reproaches against the new regularization of immigrants, which has come into effect with the last-minute incorporation, by the Spanish government, of the criminal record certificate requirement. Requesting a criminal record certificate from people who in many cases will find it difficult to obtain it (because in their countries of origin, often impoverished and damaged by war, corruption and/or poverty, they will not be issued it) is equivalent to short-circuiting the regularization process with an administrative hurdle that, for many, may be insurmountable. This should have forced a review of the opposition's arguments against this measure, but it has not been the case: the right-wing, extreme and not-so-extreme, have once again spun the rosary of immigration as a source of crime and recidivism. Feijóo, even, resorted to the old fallacy of immigrant rapists.In our homeland, in the Catalan Countries, the reaction of again presenting immigration as a tool for Hispanization and the substitution or elimination of Catalan (or Mallorcan, or Valencian) identity, in addition to a solid imbecility, is an expression of weakness that clearly goes against the ability of Catalanism and separatism to gain supporters among newcomers. You are an immigrant arriving in the country, or who is born and grows up there, and within the political landscape you see some who accuse you of being a colon sent by someone with the purpose of liquidating the country, language, and culture: you already know who you will never want to go anywhere with.While this was happening, the Spanish president undertook a Chinese tour in which he met directly with Xi Jinping, and on his return he landed in Barcelona to host an international progressive summit (or an anti-Trump summit, as it has also been called) which obviously goes against Catalan independence and at the same time further strengthens Sánchez's role as a left-wing benchmark. It remains to be seen what content all this has (content means consequences in the form of policies) and if it has any electoral effect (traditionally, the impact of the international agenda on election results is low), but what cannot be said of Sánchez is that he is standing idly by. On the other hand, mans plegades is an expression that can be used to describe political options based on catastrophism, resentment, and discontent. For whatever reason, those who present themselves as losers do not usually generate enthusiasm.

For Sant Jordi, you can also buy history books. In fact, it is advisable to do so: to buy and read good history books, now that revisionisms, denials, and pseudo-historians are once again occupying platforms and spaces in the media, in addition to flooding social networks. History is one of the most decisive areas of knowledge in the construction of societies and civilizations: without knowing where we come from, we cannot know where we are or who we are, and we are more exposed to lying, self-serving, and – these indeed – indoctrination narratives, which some are interested in spreading to seize control of power.Two excellent books have recently arrived in bookstores to understand what Francoism and Nazism were, and to comprehend the danger posed by the rise of new fascisms and far-right movements. These are the volume El franquisme, by Josep Fontana, published by Eumo, and the essay Els irresponsables, by Johann Chapoutot, published by Angle with translation by Andreu Gomila.Edited by the historian —and Fontana's disciple— Jaume Claret, El franquisme brings together conferences and other texts by one of the most outstanding Catalan historians of the second half of the 20th century, and one of those who analyzed the Francoist regime most penetratingly and incisively, as was Josep Fontana. Reading this book, which combines rigor with the good writing that was its hallmark, disproves and invalidates the relativistic, nostalgic, and amiable views of the forty years of dictatorship that are disseminated by parties like Vox or even the PP, and by their intellectual and media circles. Fontana precisely describes several fundamental aspects of the regime, from the creation and aggrandizement of the figure of the Caudillo to the ideas that Francoism applied in economics, through the involvement of the Spanish Church in the regime's governance, otherwise known as national-catholicism. An agile, yet in-depth, look at black Spain, and, of course, furiously anti-Catalan, which the current nationalist right wants to return to power. A Spain that, contrary to what is often made to believe, is not at all distant in time.The irresponsibles have an explanatory subtitle (Who brought Hitler to power?). Its author, Johann Chapoutot, Professor of Contemporary History at the Sorbonne University, explains how Hitler's rise to power through elections was not a matter of chance, but the result of a series of powers (economic, business, financial, media) who were convinced that a government of the national socialist party would be useful to their interests. These prominent figures of German society were also sure that they would easily control an individual like Hitler and prevent him from losing control and committing excesses. We already know how it all ended, and the parallels with all those who seek to whitewash and normalize Trumps, Netanyahus, Mileis, or Melonis with the argument that they have been voted for are so clear that they do not need to be emphasized.

Beyond the very short-term vision that usually dominates political parties and this Wednesday's discussion in Parliament (surprise: the one who got more wet, or who spread more butter, was Orriols), the Ripoll episode, in which the municipal budgets presented by a fascist and racist party like Alianza Catalana were approved with the votes of two PSC councilors, points to the questions of a not-so-distant future. Questions like these: What policy will Catalan parties follow regarding AC, the day after the next municipal elections? Will they make a deal with it? Will they not make a deal but "consent" to receive its "external" support to invest mayors and government teams? And a little later, to approve budgets? Or will they follow (as should undoubtedly be done with fascist and/or far-right formations) a cordon sanitaire policy? The two socialist councilors have been dismissed for having contravened their party's position on this matter, and that is correct (if we're asking for things, this same speed would be appreciated, in all parties, in other internal matters, such as those affecting corruption or sexual harassment). But the reasonable doubt persists: in the next municipal elections, scheduled for 2027, all surveys and polls predict an exponential increase in votes and representation for AC, in line with the rise experienced by far-right and racist formations throughout the West (it is true that the first signs of a certain deflation are beginning to be perceived, such as Orbán's defeat in Hungary, Donald Trump's low popularity in the US, the small but significant changes of course by the opportunistic Meloni in Italy, but of course all this, as of today, means nothing concrete: talking about trend changes is premature and illusory).

Pope Leo XIV is a continuator of the doctrinal line of his predecessor, Francis, but from the very beginning he has sought to differentiate himself by his methods: where Bergoglio was vehement, talkative, and a bit torrential, Prevost has strived to emphasize, in his first year of pontificate, a calm, discreet, and relatively understated way of doing things, seeking to moderate his presence and public expressions.That is why it has caught everyone's attention that the Pope has decided to openly respond to the provocations and impertinences of Donald Trump. The orange pachyderm, who presides over the USA with a guilty verdict in the Stormy Daniels case, and from the very alleged condition of having been a prominent member of Epstein's pedophilia network and now also a war criminal, did not like it that the Pope of Rome reminded him that “God is not on the side of those who drop bombs” on the civilian population. He responded with a couple of insults and a meme in which he himself, Trump, appeared characterized as a kind of stuffed and grotesque Jesus Christ, who acted as if he were about to heal a dying person. The White House had to withdraw the image in the face of protests from Christian associations, but Trump reaffirmed himself in statements in which he maintained that he can indeed heal the sick. Leo XIV, for his part, also reaffirmed himself in his role: he recalled that he would continue to speak out against wars and said, textually: “I am not afraid of the Trump administration.” That a pope finds himself in the situation of declaring that he is not afraid of the president of the country that boasts of representing democratic values is just one of the paradoxes of the days we live in.European citizens (the so-called despised Europe, often by itself, which, however, we need like the bread we eat), educated and/or convinced of the idea of the secularity of states, had perhaps forgotten that religions continue to be important engines of power throughout the world. The episode of the clash between a character like Trump and a pope like Leo XIV reminds us, once again paradoxically: Trump, president-elect, behaves like a parasite of the rule of law, while a figure like the Pope of Rome, of absolutist and theocratic tradition, is the one who defends this rule of law, along with human rights and civil liberties. Meanwhile, a good part of the major wars underway in the world (such as the genocide in Gaza, or the war in Iran) have religious pretexts or backgrounds. And many of the new authoritarian or neo-fascist leaders, starting with Trump himself, proclaim themselves inspired by God or sent by divine providence. Leo XIV (of whom Trump celebrated the fact that he was American, to then add that he had been elected thanks to him) seems to have well understood that —like everything contained in the scriptures— the mandate to always forgive and turn the other cheek should not be taken literally.

Populism, as we know, is a quagmire, and for that very reason those who play in it often slip. That's what happened to Gabriel Rufián at his rally in Barcelona with Irene Montero and Xavier Domènech when he stated that he prefers “to fill TikToks than libraries”, with the argument that his son “mirrors TikTok”. Measuring public policies based on what relatives do puts us close to Rajoy and his denier cousin.In any case, Rufián's statement (which he must consider valid, as he has neither apologized nor qualified it, despite the understandable discomfort it has caused) is a mess for several reasons. The first is that it poses a false dilemma between public libraries and social networks, a choice that is not presented to anyone from the outset. On the other hand, it is true that many politicians tend to want to burden libraries, or public schools, with responsibilities they should not bear (in Palma, to mention a case right now, PP and Vox want to inspect libraries to see if they find “too many books in Catalan”).Public libraries offer a fundamental service for any society that wants to be advanced and offer equal opportunities to citizens, especially to the children of families who most certainly do not have (because they cannot) books or other means of access to culture and knowledge. They are also excellent spaces for socialization, not virtual, but in person. Their audience is usually local, but not precisely a minority, as demonstrated by the very high numbers of users and loans. Catalonia is a country with a magnificent library network and, therefore, Rufián should know all this. He should also know that what a progressive politician (any politician, but one more so than any other, and without excuse) should do is defend the public library. Not to belittle it because it does not have the audience figures of a social network with an algorithm designed to create addictive behaviors among its users.Perhaps the greatest paradox is that public libraries are one of the most important tools a society has in the fight against fascism, which is what Rufián says he cares about. Public libraries are essential for building critical thinking and more cultured societies, and more cultured means better informed: on the other hand, what is promoted from TikTok and other large social networks is precisely disinformation, or information poisoning. Rufián, I have said it before, is right when he warns that Spanish politics (and this directly affects Catalan politics) is once again clearly confrontational. But it is not clear that the way to stop the anti-democratic front is to play within its field, with its rules and its tools. More libraries, better funded and equipped, and greater recognition and prestige for the people who work there would surely help us more than a thousand viral videos of people challenging each other to idiotic stunts.

Until the 26th of this month, you have time to go to the Heartbreak Hotel theatre, in the heart of Sants, to see Return to Haifa, the magnificent adaptation of the story of the same name by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, which Àlex Rigola has adapted and directed, with a cast of four actors and actresses who offer literally impressive performances: Chantal Aimée, Jordi Figueras, Ariadna Gil and Carles Roig. Return to Haifa, the original story, is a testimonial novel that recounts the reunion of a mother and father with their son twenty years after they had to abandon him, when he was just a baby, due to the Nakba, that is, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their country, leaving behind all their belongings and also, often, their loved ones. This happened in 1948, just as the State of Israel was founded. The protagonist couple returns there twenty years later (Kanafani wrote the story in 1969; you can read it in Catalan in the translation by Anna Gil Bardají, published by Club Editor) to find their city again, their streets, their home, apparently as they left them, but now in the hands of the occupiers. And to meet their son. The break, the wound, is impossible to repair or heal.Return to Haifa, the play, brings all this to the stage with undeniable austerity and authority. As soon as the spectator enters the small room of the Heartbreak Hotel, they are greeted by Rigola and the four performers, and the director briefly presents the performance: he calls it theatre of urgency, conceived to provide an artistic response to one of the great political and human crises of our time: the genocide of Gaza perpetrated by the government and army of Israel in the face of the passivity, or acquiescence, or complicity, of the international community. It is literary theatre, text-based theatre: the actors and actresses serve the text scrupulously, while dramatizing it with a depth free of any affectation, at the antipodes of any temptation towards emphasis. To say that the result is breathtaking at several moments is accurate. The length of the play is just under an hour, but it reaches far and deep.The infamy of Gaza, of the West Bank, continues its course while the wars in Iran, in Lebanon, in a Middle East set ablaze by Netanyahu and Trump, two war criminals who have led the planet into a black hole full of destruction and corpses, partly for their own profit, partly for the profit of the elites who support them, partly for the delirium of the exercise of absolute and unpunished power, also continue. A little further on is Putin in Ukraine and, below, bleeding as always, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo. Faced with all this, closing oneself in one afternoon to see Return to Haifa in a theater like the Heartbreak, where everything is in close-up and where the actors cannot and do not want to hide (but neither can the spectators), may seem like a simply symbolic response. But it is not so: it is an active response, it means affirming ourselves in humanity and civilization in the face of atrocity and barbarism. And it is excellent theater, among the best that can be seen now.