useless-catalanfacts:[Photo sources: El Punt Avui, Vilaweb.] 18th of December, 2021: about 35,000

useless-catalanfacts: [Photo sources: El Punt Avui, Vilaweb.] 18th of December, 2021: about 35,000 people (numbers according to the police) demonstrate in Barcelona (Catalonia’s capital city) in favour of schools in Catalonia teaching in the Catalan language.This comes after a new resolution by Spain’s Supreme Court restricts the time that Catalan schools can teach in the Catalan language (the local language) by imposing more hours in Spanish (the state’s language) instead. In this context, Spanish supremacist parties like Vox, C’s and PP, with the silent complicity of centrist parties like PSOE, have launched another massive wave of Catalanophobic propaganda and lies aiming at convincing Spanish people who don’t live in Catalonia that Catalans should be further restricted from using their language or that the use of Catalan in schools should be banned altogether, with Spanish as the only acceptable language. To do this, the far right-wing parties have lied providing zero evidences in TV, radio, social media, party speeches, etc saying that Catalan people defending their right to learn the Catalan language in the schools of Catalonia is “worse than the Ku Klux Klan” and other comparisons to ETA, the Holocaust and Apartheid (even though David Duke, ex-leader of the KKK, has explicitly given his support to Spanish supremacist organisations and the unity of Spain, and has voiced support for Catalanophobia).To Catalan people and other national minorities under Spanish rule, this whole situation is a reminder of how recent Franco’s fascist dictatorship (1939-1978) is, which banned and persecuted Catalan and all the other languages that aren’t Spanish, and how it remains alive in its political successors (reminder that Vox is openly a pro-Franco party, the founders of PP and many members of C’s also were members of the fascist youth organizations or have other direct ties to the dictatorship). According to the dictator: “We want the national unity to be absolute, with only one language, Spanish; only one personality, the Spanish one.”During the dictatorship, it was law that children had to be beaten and humiliated in school if they were heard speaking a word of Catalan, since it was mandatory to speak Spanish. Catalanophobia comes from far back, but the idea that Spanish is the superior language and that the languages of the other communities are a threat to be eradicated is still widespread. Even though often under an apparently “kinder” face saying that we must abandon our languages for our own good because only Spanish is “modern”, “universal”, “respectable”, etc., the threats of violence and violent attacks to Catalan speakers are also present, together with widespread mockery, of the language and its people (including celebrating their deaths) that contributes to Catalan speaker’s self-hate and need to switch to Spanish to be respected.In 2012, Spain’s Minister of Education José Ignacio Wert (of the PP party) said in the Spanish Congress that “our interest is to turn Catalan kids into Spanish kids” (“nuestro interés es españolizar a los niños catalanes”). Now, in 2021, with PSOE-Podemos in government, nothing changes. -- source link

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