We are traitors - Coherent with our betrayal, we will not sing hymns that invite blood, nor will we give support to those who freely want to immolate themselves. We just want to go out into the street in freedom to disagree, without anyone, that surrounded by hymns and flags, snatching it from us.

Mireia Esteva

When I was little, outside Spain, they made us sing the hymn every morning, in the schoolyard and before the flag hoisted. All uniformed children, trained and in line, the chin sharp. Later, in Spain, they added "Face to the sun" and at noon the rosary of the Angelus. I was almost always a public school student or a deprived private school student. Maybe that's why, despite singing hymns and repeating litanies, my mind remained in rebellion and I never learned the letters because they considered them as belonging to other people's communions.

Democracy brought us fresh air and the gift of a hymn without lyrics, nothing moved us to battle or invited us to die for our country. Our sap became the free exchange of ideas in a world under construction, open and supportive. There was an outbreak of culture and the welfare state appeared.

I thought, wrongly, that Catalonia would be the forerunner in the construction of a better world, but none of this happened. The pujolismo built from nothing a clientelar administration with a docile civil servant, to which they have access to the command in place the most outstanding flatterers. The electoral law has guaranteed the exercise of power to the most recalcitrant, corrupt and dismantling right of the welfare state. To complete the picture, Catalan nationalism tries to make a society that dangerously recalls styles of the "national movement" that for so long we suffered and thought we had left behind.

The Catalan flag fills with blood when, in the myth, Wilfredo el Piloso, mortally wounded, draws with his bleeding fingers the four red stripes on the golden canvas. The hymn "Els Segadors", sung on any occasion, promotes bellicosity by encouraging the defenders of the land to strike a good blow with the sickle. Who are we helping?

For nationalism there is a certain sacralization of the land, in a trinitarian relationship between the territory, the chosen people (which are not all who inhabit it) and the exercise of power through the state. Freedom is not of the citizen, but of the sovereign people through the power of its leaders. It looks a lot like a totalitarian mental construct. The stateless nation is impelled to achieve it and produces a tale of bad and good. The bad guys mistreat us and the good get ready to die for the country. The misfortune of our existence justifies that we have to expel the others, leaving us the same, exclusive masters of the territory. This is called becoming independent. Everything revolves around victimization, sacrifice and death.

For this reason, Catalan secessionism continuously rides between two contrasts that grip it between mutual contradictions: pacifism and violence. It is said that it is a peaceful movement (and this has been the case in the mass mobilizations), but we continually observe violent images carried out by some independence groups (harassment in the Ministry of Economy, Government Delegation and in the attempt to assault the Parliament, in the cutting of roads and more); There is talk of skipping the law in a constant dialectic of provocation, but the State is denied the ability to activate the mechanisms it has to prevent it, security forces, legal power or political decision; they look for similes that serve as a model in the construction of new states, Slovenian or not, obviating that all those who have achieved it have done so with episodes of violence, never in consolidated democracies and with loss of citizenship rights of minorities; Parliament is invited to Otegui and TV3 to Sastre, both defenders of violence for the homeland; We discussed whether the pro-independence politicians currently in jail or escaped from justice committed crimes of rebellion or sedition, according to whether or not they promoted violence (because there are reasonable doubts that this was the case); some speak of the need for the dead and others lend themselves to personal sacrifice in slow motion in the form of fasting or abstinence with media support; slogans of the type "the street will always be ours", "neither forget nor forgiveness", "Spain is Serbia", "we will be ungovernable" or calling the "battle" for December 21 by the realization of a simple Council of Ministers in Barcelona, ​​they have highly warlike components.

Pacifism is part of the express independence and without costs, while moving in the field of insult or the abstract, of the politically magical. It will be difficult that in a democratic society less oppressed than they want us to believe, the independence movement, with the support of less than half of the citizens, goes out to risk everything. Much less if any human life is at risk. However, there are reasons to doubt that the movement remains peaceful. Until now it has not been able to and we have already reached the collision with reality, at the moment of channeling the frustrations and hatred so carefully fostered. Some people lend themselves to immolate themselves, increasing the victimization of the situation. Wide is Catalonia for those who think they are masters above all reason.

The rest we have to build, without hatred or flags. Although they have wanted to distract us with wonders in the future, most citizens ask that inequalities be reduced in the present, we demand a more solidary world and we do not think that any wounded life, on either side, is worth little.

Most of us are traitors because our country is not a salvation story walking in a straight line towards the ultimate redemption. We reject the procés towards Ithaca. We are traitors and botiflers (by the way, ridiculous insult of monarchical times) we are not part of this people chosen to fulfill a mission of salvation. We are traitors because what we are is more than the definition of the people they invented for the nation. We are traitors because we do not want the historical mission of sacrificing ourselves for the new paradise. We reject the hunger strikes for the homeland and the destruction of the streets. We are traitors because we do not believe that any road is better or worse because of the number of deaths it generates, ours is more modern, it has another fit. We are traitors because we are unwilling to immolate ourselves for the sake of a Manichean vision of the world, in which the construction of the primal enemy justifies the emergence of messianic saviors. We are traitors because no country is worth it.

Coherent with our betrayal, we will not sing hymns that invite blood, nor will we give support to those who freely want to immolate themselves. We just want to go out into the street in freedom to disagree, without anyone, that surrounded by hymns and flags, snatching it from us.
  
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