I've been making this point for some time: one day, someone will put together a book from the reports of the Supreme Court prosecutor's office and the resolutions, interlocutories, court orders, sentences and assorted writings of some judges who have written texts related to the Catalan independence process, whether they are from Barcelona, the National Audience or the Supreme Court itself, and it will form part of a new genre of literary fiction. I don't know how it will end up being classified it or if it will be a brand new category, since the possibilities are endless: suspense, mystery, horror, adventure, science fiction, comedy, fantasy... This it how it seems after the literary text presented by prosecutor Fidel Cadena, in which he sets out the arguments of the 12 prosecutors who overturned the three colleague that aligned themselves with the reporting prosecutor Álvaro Redondo, the latter group being opposed to investigating Catalan president Carles Puigdemont for terrorism in the well-known Democratic Tsunami court case.
Cadena's report or narrative, which would undoubtedly be accepted as a novel by the executives of Editorial Planeta and not only because of their ideological proximity to it, attempts to be so realistic that it is not so strange that it ends up convincing his colleagues. However, it has a problem that is not small: nothing happened the way that Cadena explains it. He takes the facts, puts them in a cocktail shaker, and subtly distills the conclusion he wants to reach. We already saw it in the Supreme Court trial of the independence process leaders, but some people, who with hindsight seem quite naive, might have thought that it was all a result of the tension of the moment, when any exaggeration was even welcomed by that Spain that chorused A por ellos - "Go get 'em". Cadena is not the only one, he is still there and the sociological right does not seem willing to let anything that happened in those years disappear from the politics of the present.
But there is one detail of the report created by these prosecutors that particularly struck me. Cadena, after explaining why, in his view, the actions and movements of president Carles Puigdemont in the investigative summary of Democratic Tsunami fit perfectly with a crime of terrorism, he points out: "This plurality of evidence proves functional mastery of the action [referring to what happened at Barcelona airport], absolute leadership, intellectual authorship and assumption of the reins of typical [criminal] action". And he concludes that Puigdemont could have paralyzed the development of the crimes allegedly committed, according to the prosecutor, "by withdrawing his charismatic support from Tsunami". Behold, the new concept that comes to join so many others that the judiciary has forged in relation to the independence process: charismatic support.
Charisma, something that is inherent to any kind of political and professional leadership, is now included in a new type of crime
Crikey! So "charismatic support", charisma and its use, something that is inherent to any kind of political and professional leadership, is now included in a new type of crime. And the question must be this: how is charismatic support measured and who deserves the classification, so far manifestly positive, of having charisma? I don't know. I wonder, for example: a tweet by radio presenter Jordi Basté about Democratic Tsunami on those dates and, we assume, favourable to the movement, would that make him a suspected criminal? Because it is clear that Basté had charisma, since he was the audience leader during those years. Or the ERC president Oriol Junqueras, or the president of Barça, or the president of the Association of Doctors, or that of Lawyers, or Pep Guardiola?
Phew! Here, indeed, a new method has been opened up in which the number of people who could give their charismatic support to something could be, I won't say infinite, but certainly in the dozens or hundreds. To be decided by the taste of the consumer. I mean, by judge Manuel Garcia-Castellón or the Supreme Court. It really ends up being an unwinnable battle. One can prepare one's self for almost anything. But tilting at windmills is an impossible mission.