Spanish Euthanasia
"Is Spanish Persecuted?" double pages the demagogically Jacobin El
Pais. Madrid centralism always has such worries about language, but
you don't have to go further back than one generation to find real
persecution, not a lie. After the defeat of his ally Hitler Franco had
no choice but to apply euthanasia to Catalan without the Gestapo or
the option of a Catalan Auschwitz the Caudillo wanted of the F=FChrer as
his price for entering the war. The man of letters Jordi Amat has
written the history of the euthanasia and the poetic fight to make
Spanish intellectuals denounce the cultural genocide. The poets
succeeded partially and partially we remain subject to daily hate the
Jews of the Spanish Empire, very much alive speaking Catalan that was
supposed to have died from Spanish euthanasia.
"Few books will be as revealing to know without masks what
contemporary Catalonia has been" writes Jordi Amat in El Periodico on
"Such an Unfortunate Country," my memoir of Josep Verges Matas,
publisher of Destino and Josep Pla. When I tell him I am commenting in
Diari de Girona his "The Voices of Dialogue. Poetry and Politics in
the Half Century" (Peninsula) the grandson of Manuel Amat, long-time
collaborator of my father, he answers: "I am so interested that you
look at the book because I did a good part of the reconstruction of
those years thanks to Destino tracing the polemics the magazine awoke
in the small world of Catalan nationalism in exile or in the
catacombs."
Poet Carles Riba writes from his external exile to internally exiled
Dionisio Ridruejo who has broken with Spanish nationalist fascism: "I
don't see our current problems and baiting of Catalan writers as
anything different from this incoherent but systematic Inquisitorial
oppression to which thinking and its expression are subject to in
Spain." The dialogue could not be more unequal, between the racist
dictatorship that bans Catalan and the poet who prints 75 copies (!)
of his fundamental "Elegies of Bierville."
Dionisio Ridruejo distances himself from Spanish euthanasia and will
go as far as translating "The Grey Diary," Pla's equally fundamental
work, because he is well aware of what Catalans represent in Spain:
"We have placed all our hopes in this capacity to adapt to the Iberian
everything European which Catalonia represents for us. What a Spaniard
wants and expects from you is that you keep being the open door, the
street that leads to freedom. The piece of Europe that Spaniards have
lies between the Ebro and the Pyrenees." Destino led Catalan freedom:
"All are more or less of a liberal origin or tendency. Pla, the most
penetrating and influential spirit in and within the Catalan spirit."
The official policy was nothing like this. Franco's brother in law,
Carthaginian Serrano Su=F1er, auscultated Barcelona where he lived: "A
morally and politically sick population given all the treatment the
illness requires." Police minister of the Spanish Gestapo, Camilo
Alonso Vega, and a regime "liberal": "In future there will be nothing
but uniformity."
Fascism wanted to make Catalonia Spanish while Ridruejo sought to make
Spain Catalan. Valencian intellectual of the people Joan Fuster said
of him. "He spoke like a Catalan nationalist would have. Or like a
Spaniard who thinks with his head rather than with his feet as usually
happens." Both Spanish ideologies, the despotic and the European,
failed and we are where we were with Catalans hated as always by
Spanish nationalists. Jordi Amat laments disenchanted: "The basic
question, after the transition to democracy and the establishment of
the State of the Autonomies is once again today the vertebration of
Spain." The question which Madrid asks every day because Spanish
euthanasia is very much alive.
Josep C. Verg=E9s
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