Under the title "Catalan, in danger? Catalan, into action!", ElNacional.cat brought together four outstanding speakers on Thursday at the Palau Robert in Barcelona - Jordi Cuixart, president of Òmnium Cultural; Iolanda Batallé, former director of the Institut Ramon Llull; Arnau Rius, creator of the Canal Malaia digital channel; and Blanca Pujals, publisher of Viena Edicions - to reflect on the barriers that the Spanish state is constantly erecting to suffocate the Catalan language, seeking to reduce it to a language with virtually no social use, and and on what kind of actions should be the priority to escape from its current cul de sac. In short, the need to overcome the current pessimism, to be more demanding with rulers and political parties, to become activated as a civil society and gain attraction among young people. On the eve of the major demonstration planned this Saturday in Barcelona in defence of Catalan language immersion and against the court ruling imposing 25% of teaching hours in Spanish, the debate was useful in generating a very Catalan mixture of self-criticism and hope, on the basis that language has won many battles throughout history and most of them when the situation seemed impossible.
Fully in command in his role as president of Òmnium Cultural, together with the social activism leadership that has been clear ever since he entered prison and even more so after his forthright attitude before the Supreme Court, Cuixart did not disappoint. He spoke directly, without crossing barriers he didn't want to, but his convincing response to the often lukewarm attitude of parties and politicians on the subject of language is beginning to mark the current agenda. There is no other way to understand this paragraph about the Spanish audiovisual law: "Catalan politicians, get to work. If there is no regime of penalties, it is useless. If there is no quota set down, it's worth nothing. I'm sorry. All the rest, declarations of good intentions. Òmnium will always support everything that is constructive, and obtaining money, getting more resources is always positive, but the 6%, which more than good would be excellent, is nothing without a regime of penalties and a guaranteed quota. If 6% of every 100 audiovisual productions had to be produced in Catalonia and in Catalan this would be an injection of hundreds of millions of euros into the Catalan audiovisual sector."
Or "wanting to make a state, we have forgotten the nation," a single phrase that conveys the essence of what has not been done well, a few words that speak volumes. The sense of the need for a reactivation in defence of Catalan was expressed among the speakers, with different expressions but ideas that were quite similar. It will not be an easy battle due to the magnitude of the opponents and a whole state mobilized to take advantage of the opportunity it has to push Catalan into a corner. But the demonstration on Saturday morning, which will end at the Arc de Triomf, must put an end to a strategy that has seen Catalan losing ground as a language of social relationships and underused in school life.
Somescola, the platform that brings together dozens of organizations from the educational sphere - a fact that gives its call a marked unitary character across the school system - organized a similar rally in 2018 in defence of the Catalan school system that causes such great annoyance in Madrid because it is a model of success and a formula that helps social cohesion, one of the great goals of Catalanism throughout its history. Putting an end to the raison d'être of Catalanism, that of "Catalonia, a single people", is the permanent dream of Spanish nationalism in its idea of unifying the state through a single language, a single culture, in short, a single identity. There is no Spanish project embodied by the successive presidents of the government that does not end up offering the same idea as that expressed by a clumsy Adolfo Suárez, who, in 1976, when asked by the magazine Paris Match about a high school diploma in Catalan, replied: "First find me teachers who can teach nuclear chemistry in Catalan. Let's be serious". Forty-five years later we are more or less at this point. They haven’t evolved much.