By Theodore Shoebat
Catalonia just elected a racist president, named Quim Torra, an ultra-nationalist who called people who speak Spanish in Catalonia, “vipers and hyenas” and “beasts in human form”. As we read in one report from the Guardian:
Quim Torra has been sworn in as the 131st president of Catalonia amid growing pressure over the “xenophobic” and anti-Spanish tone of his past writings and comments.
Torra, a hardline Catalan nationalist handpicked by the region’s deposed president, Carles Puigdemont, was elected by 66 votes to 65 on Monday and assumed office at a low-key ceremony in Barcelona on Thursday.
“I promise to loyally fulfil the duties of the post of regional president being faithful to the will of the Catalan people represented by the Catalan parliament,” he said, using the same formula as Puigdemont and avoiding mention of obeying the Spanish constitution. Central government representatives did not attend the ceremony.
Since his appointment the 55-year-old lawyer and editor has been dogged by accusations that he is Puigdemont’s puppet and that his long history of anti-Spanish comments makes him unfit to lead a government.
“It is a sick phobia,” he wrote. “There is something Freudian in these beasts, a rough patch in their DNA.”
In a string of tweets written the same year, Torra suggested that “Spaniards know only how to plunder”, claimed that Catalonia had been under Spanish occupation since 1714 and said Spaniards had long since removed the word “shame” from the dictionary. He later apologised “if anyone was offended by the tweets”.
He has also been ridiculed for saying that Catalonia was suffering “a humanitarian crisis”.
Politicians including Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, and Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the opposition Socialist party, have criticised the “xenophobic nature” of his past pronouncements.
Notice the racism, the fixation on DNA — its all a sign of something very sinister: eugenics is rising, and its all tied with the surge of nationalism. Nationalism in Catalonia has been going on for quite some time, and it appears that it is escalating into something dangerous. Lets look at some of the history and see how it connects to today political situation.
In 1979, Joan Hortala, the president of the Barcelona Stock Exchange, became a member of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya or the Republican Left of Catalonia, a far left separatist political party. The Republican Left of Catalonia was founded in 1931 as a Catalonian separatist party and was led by Lluís Companys, a seditious radical responsible for the death of thousands of Catholic civilians, pro-Spanish soldiers and Catholic priests during the Spanish Civil War.
Lluis Companys
Companys even had 90 members of his party executed. Under the anti-Catholic reign of terror of Companys, 4 bishops, 1,536 priests (30% of the Catalan clergy) and thousands of lay people were exterminated merely because they were Catholic.
One story is the martyrdom of Jaime Hilario, a deaf boy who worked as a gardener in a monastery in Cambrils. He was arrested in 1936 and put under trial by “the People’s Court”. During the trial, the prosecutor told Jaime, “you learned Latin and you taught Latin.”
“ I have never taught Latin” replied Jamie.
“But you studied it!”
“In my first youth I did some humanities studies at the Seu.”
It was then declared: “That’s it! Why do we need more explanations? Have not you heard his statement? … He studied Latin, and that’s enough!”
Jamie’s last words were: “To die for Christ, my young friends, is to live”. He was shot five times by the firing squad commander.
Jaime Hilario, martyr of Catalonian separatism
The martyrdoms of the Catholic clergy were far greater once one considers all of the massacres done, not just in Catalonia, but in the whole of Spain. According to Julio de la Cueva: “6832 members of the Catholic clergy were massacred, including 13 bishops, 4172 diocesan priests and seminarists, 2364 monks and friars and 283 nuns.” Out of these thousands of priests that were murdered in Spain, over 1,536 of those were murdered in Catalonia. This should tell us what evils these Catalonian want to do if they have full reign. We can only hope that the situation in Catalonia will be abated. With such stories of these martyrs, are we reminded of the words of St. John:
I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held (Revelation 6:9)
In the province of Lleida, forty-seven percent of all those slaughtered in the first month of this reign of terror, were members of Catholic religious orders. During the Spanish Civil War, sixty five percent of the priests in Lleida were massacred.
In the official newspaper of Companys’ party, Diari de Barcelona, it boasted the destruction of churches by the republicans:
“we believe that our scruples about the burning of churches has been exaggerated. It is worth sacrificing the small heritage that [churches] represent, because if we leave churches standing, in the long term the [religious] processions will start again.” (See Andrew Dowling, Catalonia Since the Spanish Civil War)
This is the mass murderer, Lluis Companys, that the Catalonian nationalists revere. On October 15, 2017, Carles Puigdemont laid a wreath on the grave of Companys and said:
“Companys was the victim of a very unequal combat between the democratic legitimacy and the baseness of the Franco regime … he was murdered in the name of order and established legality.”
It was this murderous political party that Joan Hortalà, today’s head of Barcelona’s Stock Exchange, was a part of. What makes this more interesting is the fact that in 1993, Joan Hortala left the Republican Left and joined the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia, the very political party that Carles Puigdemont now leads.
Carles Puigdemont lays a wreath at the grave of Lluis Companys, a mass murderer
These Catalonian nationalists want to bring about a racialist society. Joan Hortala, the current president of the Barcelona Stock Exchange, served as the general secretary for the Republican Left of Catalonia. His predecessor was Heribert Barrera, a eugenist and racist Catalonian nationalist. Barrera once said, “In America, black people have an intelligent coefficient, less than whites.”
Barrera was against immigration, even from other regions of Spain, saying: “Immigration is the main threat of Catalonia, we were able to overcome Andalusian waves, but now Catalan is in danger. I would like a Catalonia like that of the Republic: without immigrants.”
Barrera also wanted to have the mentally retarded people sterilized, saying: “the mentally weak of genetic origin should be sterilized”.
Heribert Barrera
Berrira was really a part of the identitarian movement in his hatred against immigrants and the disabled, paralleling the Counterjihad or the Alt-right. After Berrira’s death in 2011, he was praised by the far-right Catalonian nationalist, Josep Anglada, who described Berrira as “a great patriot and a great Catalan identitarian (identitario), defender of freedoms and a person who is an example to follow”. What makes this even more interesting is that Josep Anglada is praised by the Counterjihad, being even included in a documentary by the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) as a fighter against ‘the jihad.’
Why do the Catalonians want to secede? why have they become so obsessed with nationalism? At the whole of it, it is racism. Look at the writings of some of the famous Catalonian nationalists and separatists. Pompeyo Gener, who was well known in Catalonian nationalism in the first half of the 20th century, described southern Spaniards as “Semites,” inferior to the northern “Germanic” Catalonians:
“Only in the North and Northeast have we seen real elements, both in the race and the country’s organization, that may someday develop into such a culture like their original Indo-Germanic national In the Center and the South, with the exception of some individualities, we have felt that, unfortunately, there is too much of the Semitic element, and more still of the pre-Semitic or Berber with all its quantities, arrears, bad administration, wasting of time and life, chieftainship, […] One would have said that, by expelling the Moors, the Austurians and old Castilians were getting infected by the African spirit. Saracens may have lost their lands but they won influence. Thus, New Castile overcame Old Castile, and Castile was overcome by Andalusia, and Andalusia by the Gipsy element, which prevailed in all Spain”
So, the old monster, of hatred against humanity and against one’s fellow man, returns. How difficult it is to slay a monster; it never dies, no matter how many times you strike off its head, it only changes its face and preaches with a new voice.
Today we write of current monsters, but who knows what new monsters will come out from the chasm of darkness. Perhaps the evil doers we write about now are but mere precursors to faces more terrifying, to the prevailing of ideas more sinister. These men that we write of, be they prime ministers or presidents, philosophers or thinkers, perhaps they shall one day be replaced or absorbed by mobs and figures with ideas more evil than what we are seeing now.
Perhaps we shall one day look back, remembering these times, and laugh at how they were so much easier than what we will one day endure and witness. Perhaps we shall one day look back, and remember these times as the events that we ignored, but foreshadowed whatever horror we shall see, as the world enters the cascades of utter evil, as the earth is pushed into an abyss so dark the light shall be at its brightest.