Open Letter to Mr. David Simon

Julio Valdeón

Dear Mr. Simon,

A few days ago, we were discussing about Spain. Your Twitter feed was immediately bustling with obnoxious nostalgic Francoists. You replied to them with sanitary fierceness. Bravo. However, Spaniards should not be confused with such a bunch of imbeciles. These are, by the way, infinitely more marginal people than the millions of Americans who vote for the populism of Donald Trump, whom I assume you despise because of his extremist demagogy and his hatred for the Lib Dem system.

This —your alignment with the cause of freedom and your activism against such reactionary abstractions as selective cultural homelands— might be the reason why it hurts so much to read that “they [the supporters of self-determination referendum] seem willing to count the votes, if they can have a vote. That’s certainly a democratic premise. As opposed to, say, mobilizing the Moroccan brigades and attacking the capital with them”.

Don’t think that I don’t understand the tentation of invoking the ghost of 1936. Especially given the refusal of many good intended people to believe that Spanish democracy is equivalent to that of any European country. I guess that instead of researching and reading or finding out how Spain ranks in The Economist’s Democracy Index (it’s 16th out of 167 countries, ahead of France, Italy, Belgium and, yes, the United States), it’s way less tiring to go through life armed with the clichés about a country heir of Inquisition, hate and guns. This is the only explanation possible to why someone still holds —following nationalism’s narrative— that the Spanish Civil War was a conflict of sorts between Spain and Catalonia. Nevertheless, sometimes I feel that some folks just want us as a fascism prop, so they can serve as last-minute soldiers in the Battle of Jarama. The “Moroccan brigades” sound much more suggestive than remembering that, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit, Spain is one of the 22 “full democracies” in the world. “Full democracies” means “Countries in which not only basic political freedoms and civil liberties are respected, but which also tend to be underpinned by a political culture conducive to the flourishing of democracy. The functioning of government is satisfactory. Media are independent and diverse. There is an effective system of checks and balances. The judiciary is independent and judicial decisions are enforced. There are only limited problems in the functioning of democracies”.

You write that you do not wish to comment on “what should happen between Barcelona and Madrid”, but that sooner or later a voting will be unavoidable, though. I will not discuss the childish distinction between Barcelona vs Madrid, which are not monolithic entities. Besides, Barcelona is traditionally a refractory city to the secessionist claims, unlike rural areas and small inland towns and villages, where they are supported by majorities. That is, New York as Utah’s capital, and Utah, but not New York, insisting on leaving the USA. Incidentally, the political party that incorporated the highest number of recycled Francoist majors to Spanish democracy was CiU, the party of Jordi Pujol, the historic leader of right-wing nationalism — now that it has been found that he allegedly made his fortune by stealing, he also supports independence. The letter “U” in “CiU” stands for Unió Democràtica de Catalunya, their former partners and the most belligerent anti-abortion party that ever existed in Catalonia. CiU has morphed today into Carles Puigdemont’s PDeCAT.

You say that you are more interested in something “more universal” than our “national issues”. Good. Believe it or not, our “national issues” are related with a worldwide phenomenon. For instance, the rise of illiberal movements and the attack to the old principles of representative democracy. In the case of America, it is through Trumpism driven by authoritarianism. In the case of Spain, it is with a nationalist movement aspiring to make 50 % of Catalonian citizens —as well as the rest of Spaniards— into foreigners. There is no other reason beyond not wanting to coexist; there is no hypothetical right or liberty that any Catalan would gain in an independent country that he or she is not enjoying already as a Spanish citizen. This is all about their wish to not coexist, pure and simple —that is, xenophobia. There is no quest for self-determination in Catalonia, but a quest for self-segregation, something that could not be more undemocratic.

You see, to equate votes and democracy just like that is a textbook fallacy, a woke simplification. Not everything can be voted. If tomorrow I call for a referendum on expelling Maryland from the USA, or on a restriction of suffrage on racial grounds, or on prior restraint, every democrat should unequivocally oppose it. There is no way to decide on something that belongs to all of us other than consult with all of us. Furthermore, the Spanish Constitution is amendable, and it even allows for consulting with a part of the territory about independence, but certainly it does not allow to circumvent the legal mechanisms and/or to impose the will of just a few.

The region of Catalonia holds one of the highest GDPs in Spain. What a nice colonialism, where the colonized are wealthier than the mother country! It was a similar story in Italy, when neofascism of Bossi’s and Salvini’s Lega Nord yelled, “Rome is a thief” —a rallying cry identical to that of nationalists in Catalonia, “Spain steals us”. Every supporter of open society should be radically opposed to the creation of new frontiers, not to mention the argument of an alleged cultural unanimity which would prevent the “different” to coexist with one another. These are homelands born to the worst of German romanticism, that disposes of any egalitarian drift claiming that frontiers are needed in the name of identities. For Catalan nationalists, it’s these very identities —not the Republican pact, heir of French Revolution, neither the legacy of Atlantic revolutions nor, of course, the Marxist ideas about a community of free and equal citizens— the ones in charge of founding homelands.

And the force of numbers is not always the issue. The racist Governor of Alabama George Wallace got 96 % of the votes in the gubernatorial election, with a platform calling to disobey the Supreme Court ruling and to perpetuate segregation. Remember also Kennedy’s case. In Mississippi, when local politicians appealed to state sovereignty and the many votes from their constituency to call for disobey the court rulings, he spoke about “a government of laws and not of men”, since “no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors”. And don’t forget that one of the versions of the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, not by chance a socialist (“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”). Add to it the French Revolution’s motto, written in Marat’s tomb: “Unité, Indivisibilité de la République, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”. There is no liberty without unity, for some citizens have more rights than others. Nor is there justice, since the blackmail of leaving runs above the compliance with common rules that makes us all equal. Finally, there cannot possibly be any distribution/redistribution, by means of taxes. The rich abandon the poor and, eventually, you know, “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/ That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows…”.

It would be certainly xenophobic to say that Spaniards, as a congenitally backward people, cannot afford luxuries as the rule of law, only accessible for countries and people that are, shall we say, er, superior. This is what it seems to stem from your reasoning, when you, with the vicious frivolity inherent to “idealism tourists”, are denying to Spanish citizens the legitimacy to enforce the law to defend a hard-won democracy after many years of dictatorship.

Let me transcribe now some Pujol’s words. Regarding the Andalusian immigrants who went to work at the factories owned by the racist bourgeoises that now claim independence, the father of Catalan nationalism wrote: “The Andalusian man is not a consistent man, but an anarchic man. He is a broken man … If by force of numbers he gets to dominate without first overcoming his own perplexity, he would destroy Catalonia. And he would introduce his anarchic and extremely poor mentality —that is, his lack of mentality”. Some years later, the current President of the Generalitat (the Catalan government) Quim Torra would write that «they are here, among us. They repel any expression of Catalanness. It is a sick phobia. There is something Freudian to these beasts. Or a little bump in their DNA chain … Anything that is not Spanish and in Castilian language rebounds on them. The beasts have names and family names. Each one of us knows one of them. They live, die and reproduce themselves.”

I presume you know that 55 % of Catalans have Castilian as their mother tongue, compared to a 31.6 % who have Catalan; however, the Catalan education system has bet for monolingualism, impeding the schooling in the common language to all Catalans —Castilian, right. You surely know as well that Catalans who have Castilian as their mother tongue belong to the most disfavored groups of society. And also, that the percentual support to independence increases proportionally to annual incomes. Catalan nationalism, that has been ruling for nearly half a century, amasses all the economic and political leverages, while immigration’s sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters —the “pro-Spanish”— remain in the city suburbs and at the bottom of social scale. You wanted to talk about morality, right? Are Pujol’s and Torra’s words immoral enough to you? How about the immorality of a wealthy minority, a ruling minority, jettisoning their humbler fellow citizens?

I would like to believe that being a learned man as you are, you don’t agree with the nonsense claims that languages reinforce a world view and that it is from that language that we create units of sovereignty. I would like to think that you are familiar with the “Texas v. White” case, in 1869, when the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal state is “an indestructible union of indestructible states”. I would like to imagine that you don’t sympathize with people who, as Quim Torra does, pay tribute to Miquel and Josep Badia brothers, proto-Nazis of the thirties, torturers and murderers.

I would like to believe all of this, but sadly I’m afraid that if Spain were Baltimore, you would be way closer to work for fiction as Clay Davis’s press officer than to fight for the truth, the future and the rights of the people in the ghetto, as you did in the splendid show The Wire.

Thank you for your attention and warm regards.

(translated into English by Verónica Puertollano)