https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/20/what-is-happening-in-catalonia-and-spain/. . .
Most of the international press has reported on the police riots, but they did not explain the political context that has led to the current situation. Two visions of Spain have always existed. One sees Spain as a uninational state, centered in the capital of the Spanish Kingdom, Madrid. This vision denies the existence of other nations in Spain. It is based on the Borbonic Monarchy and is the vision of the Monarchic State, including the armed forces and the Catholic Church; it is the conservative version of Spain.
Another vision of Spain, however, is plurinational, which recognizes other nations in Spain, including Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. Each one of these nations has its own language, culture, and history, and all of them prefer a republic rather than a monarchy as a form of state. It has always been the left republican vision of Spain. It had its full expression during the Second Spanish Republic, from 1931 to 1939, known for its famous reforms that included land reform, stronger unions, the establishment of the public school system, women’s suffrage, divorce, abortion, and many other highly popular reforms.
The institutions whose interests were negatively affected by these reforms—the large land owners, the bankers, and the church, among others—stimulated a military coup led by General Francisco Franco, whose troops (helped by Nazi German and Italian Fascist troops) needed three years to defeat the Second Republic. Initially they thought the coup would take just three months, but it took much longer than expected because of the enormous resistance offered by the popular classes (whose republican government only received assistance from the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent from Mexico). The so-called Non-Intervention Treaty (signed by most Western democracies and also by Hitler and Mussolini) was not respected by the Fascist states of Germany and Italy, and they continued to arm the Spanish Army. The victory of the Fascist forces led to the triumph of Franco’s regime, one of the cruelest dictatorships established in Western Europe. According to Professor Edward Malekafis, an expert on European Fascism at Columbia University in New York, for every political assassination of Mussolini’s Fascist regime, Franco completed 10,000. This Fascist state brutally repressed Catalonia, forbidding the Catalan language and culture. The dictatorship became the extreme expression of the uninational view of Spain. Before dying, Franco appointed Juan Carlos I as king (the grandson to the former king of Spain, Alfonso XIII).. . .
I wondered what went on here...again, the rich stopping the rich of plurality and diversity. Of attaining anything in life which threatens the wealthy. Do I have that right?
