Whichever newspaper I read, one thing I find is that there are still very few people who fully understand the nature of the conflict with Spain. Catalonia has for so many centuries been erased from history, and we Catalans have lied so much to survive that the same Baroque cape that is almost suffocating us is now throwing off our opponents.
I've already said that independence should have been achievable calmly and without setbacks and that now it will become a great slaughter. The Spanish will continue pointlessly diminishing the prestige their democracy had, and the Catalans who lived off the occupation and who have believed their own demagogy, will end up so out of context that they'll have to make a great effort to overcome the depression, when all this ends.
If Rajoy had a chance to kill the idea of the referendum, he wasted it by sending in the police. Deceived by the same small twisted group as always, who think that Catalonia is theirs and that everyone is as miserable as everyone else, he's found himself up against an unexpected resistance. The attempts to push the country to a unilateral declaration of independence or a plebiscitary election, will not turn out well after the reactions from dockworkers, farmers and academics in favour of the 1st October.
As was to be expected, the political unity which a pro-independence government would never have achieved has been achieved by the referendum. Although some smart alecks from PDeCAT (Catalan European Democratic Party), allied with Pablo Iglesias, keep working to "Spanishify" the conflict, organisation of the referendum remains in progress. On Tuesday, whilst the Civil Guard was besieging the headquarters of CUP (Popular Unity Candidacy), inside, a group of politicians of all hues were plotting to see it through, whatever the price.
With a million Catalans mobilised, when the government sets out the ballot boxes there will be no anti-riot contingent that can prevent it. If the Spanish were intelligent and knew Catalonia, they would thank us for having helped them to enter Europe and consolidate their democracy, and would accept the defeat that awaits them at the ballot boxes. As they see the country through the eyes of the liars that they themselves have bought, they've lost all perspective.
The problem the Spanish have is that they can't bomb Catalonia now, nor kill or arrest en masse. Each police officer they send, each armoured vehicle that enters Catalonia to try to avoid the referendum, not only consolidates the political nation, but returns it its historic depth. The problem is so crude and so simple that by the time the pro-union side wants to admit it, there will no longer have time to even save the furniture.
Rajoy is greatly helping to destroy the distorted image that the country had of him thanks to the funhouse mirror of propaganda. The fact that international figures as disruptive as Julian Assange and Nicholas Nahim Taleb support the referendum, is already a sign that it doesn't look too good for Spain. Even Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, which has worked so hard to prevent it, has had to report that the great newspapers of the West support self-determination for Catalonia.
The referendum is shutting out Spanish intolerance because it evidences the falseness of its pseudo-legalistic propaganda, which needs the aesthetic of a revolution and of ethnicism to appear credible. The debate produced by Brexit or the Scottish independence referendum will be a joke compared with the impact the 1st October will have. The Catalan government has already paid its civil servants without going through the Tax Office showing who is in charge in Catalonia.
Now, the Spanish will not only have to decide if they want to live in a good democracy, but also if they want to be European or want to go back to being a whale stranded upon the coast of Europe, as Edmund Burke said. If this time they want to sink into regression, they'll have to do it by themselves. We're not going to play along any more, as demonstrated by the quite eloquent fact that the port workers have left without service the police from Madrid staying on the Spanish boats.