Laurence Dollimore
DOZENS of towns and cities in Catalan refused to celebrate or even recognise Spain’s national holiday yesterday.
Some 40 municipalities across the region ignored court orders to close for the day to mark Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the Americas in 1492.
Many Catalans associate the holiday with the millions of indigenous Americans who died as a result of the explorer’s discovery and the Franco regime that brutally repressed the region.
Deputy mayor of Badalona Josep Tellez said ‘there’s nothing to celebrate’ as he tore up a judge’s decree in front of city hall.
Xavier Garcia Albiol, regional president of the Popular Party, criticized municipalities’ ‘brazen and disobedient attitude’.
He said: “There should be some sort of reaction from the justice because if not we’re going to end up turning this country into a jungle.”
Left-wing lawmakers proposed taking down a statue of Columbus in Barcelona and banning the holiday last month.
They said: “The celebration of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to America represents the intolerable act of the glorification of colonialism and imperialism.”
This backward PP Francoist lout thinks Catalans who want competent, democratic, just government show a “brazen and disobedient attitude” for refusing to celebrate Isabel’s thieving regime? That ignoring Columbus day will “end up turning this country into a jungle”?
What have we mow? An affluent, democratic paradise?
This fact reveals the inculture of my compatriots including not only the separatists, indeed.
We are not celebrating the Spain day, some hundred millions people of many countries are celebrating the Hispanity day, the day of the Hispanic culture.
This celebration is more old than Franco. The first celebration was in 1913 and Franco ruled since the 1939 and only in Spain, and its not about celebrating conquer of subjugation. Is about cultural links.
Those separatists, are so isolated of the reality (really they are mad) that they are not aware that Catalonia is part of this cultural links. And that the colonization of the New World and the life of the Spanish Empire is an important part of the history of Catalonia, that in their fanatism they try to erase, but it actually they are erasing the identity of Catalonia for to fit in the procrustean country which is in armony with their demential dreams.
Worse, due to the inculture that it shows , is the attitude of those politics not separatist that think that they are celebrating the day of Spain. Forty millions of inhabitants in process of declive demographic and cultural day , compared with four hundred millions in full demographic and cultural expansion.
Strange that this article should restate what I wrote on the Columbus day article which was not put up – double standards, now will this post go the same way.
Anselmo – you are a card. The cultural links would’nt exist if the conquistadores had stayed at home, instead of destroying what were in so many ways totally superior civilisations to that of the Catholic savages.
It is your opinion- that I think is wrong. But is a fact that those cultural links exists.
The expansión of Western societies through the world have been an historic phenomenon, that is absurd evaluate acording with ethical . It is an outcome of spiritual and material factors, that acording Oswald Spengler started with the Vikings.
The extension of your reasoning leads to the assertion that would better that our ancestors prehominids never had gone down of the trees.
Apologies to the O/P I see that my post on Columbus day was there after all.