Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • Spanish Smokescreens

    The Catalan independence movement may seem like a throwback to a bygone age of nationalism. But the disproportionate reaction of Spain’s central government to the referendum in October has served, perversely, to make the break-up of the country more likely. Along with wider curbs on freedom of expression, the repression orchestrated by a ruling Partido Popular (PP) mired in corruption scandals, is an unsettling reminder of Franco’s long dictatorship (1939–75).  Disturbingly, mainstream media and the judiciary are failing to check these trends.

    E.M. Forster once remarked that if a choice came between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. Anyone who formulates such an opposition may be said to have no country if by that we mean: a sense of belonging to a broad set of principles identified with the state.

    Thus, most Americans, notwithstanding their differences, submit to ideals of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ expressed in the US constitution, which includes restraints on the excesses of presidential power. The appeal of belonging to a country declines when its government, even acting lawfully, becomes an immoral instrument of power.

    George Orwell might have lost some friends if they had known he had provided a list of writers with Communist sympathies to MI5 in 1949. But he did so for the sake of friends he saw as countrymen, at a time when Stalin was in power in the Soviet Union.

    Such dilemmas are rarely in black and white, or represent good versus evil. Even under the Nazis there were presumably, among others, nurses tending to the sick who played no role in the machinery of death and destruction. Under late capitalism states bear less responsibility than transnational corporations for destructive technologies, ecocide and grotesque inequality. State power and that of supranational institutions needs to be bolstered, but underpinned by transparency, representative democracy and accountability.

    With large corporations exerting unaccountable influence, states, such as the Spanish, controlling public discourse and harbouring a compliant judiciary, may be tyrannical institutions.

    The current impasse in Spain appears to be an old-fashioned conflict over national identity. Any nation, as far as most historians are concerned, is an imagined construct. ‘Imagined’, as Benedict Anderson put it, because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion’. Nations loom out of an ‘immemorial’ past, generally based on dominant vernacular languages. A number emerged ascendant in Modern Europe from a stew of idiolects that co-existed in transnational empires, before the homogenising effect of Guttenberg’s printing press.

    Image: Hector Castells

    But language is not the only source of identity. An English speaker living in Wales may feel either Welsh, British or Muslim depending on the occasion. The particular identity selected to represent oneself shifts according to moods and settings, and can be stoked by demagoguery.

    After observing the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 Michael Ignatieff wrote: ‘Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalist hatred only when the surviving communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.’ Today, we find Yugo-nostalgia among many Croats, Slovenes and Serbs who lament the dissolution of their historic friendship. “Nationalist hatred” is also the product of manipulation in Spain today, and appears to provide a smokescreen for corruption within the ruling Partido Popular (PP).

    Once upon a time I knew Barcelona reasonably well, having rented an apartment there for a summer with friends after finishing university in 1998. In the days before euro-inflation the price of living was jaw-droppingly cheap, especially when it came to purchasing food in the colourful markets off Las Ramblas. Catalan was spoken widely, but we heard little talk of an independent state. Nonetheless, I was surprised by an assertion from one adult child of immigrants from another part of Spain that she was often made to feel a second class citizen.

    Growing up in Ireland, I was accustomed to daily news bulletins reporting sectarian murders. This honed an awareness for potential divisiveness around identity. I have watched, therefore, with concern the increasing stridency of Catalan nationalism. The last time I visited Barcelona, two years ago, the streets were festooned with flags hanging from windows, amid rumours of intimidation of those who did not wish to participate. I could not help wondering whether separatism was a product of the region’s relative wealth compared to the rest of Spain: the region accounts for approximately sixteen percent of the Spanish population, but twenty-five percent of all Spanish exports. These pressures have increased in the wake of Spain’s economic crisis, culminating in Eurozone finance ministers agreeing to lend the country up to €100 billion to shore up its banks.

    Image: Hector Castells

    However, the jackbooted response of the Guardia Civil to the Catalan referendum in October, which left hundreds injured, has imperiled an often tempestuous relationship between Catalans and Castilians. The kingdoms of Aragon (essentially historic Catalonia) and Castile formed a political union in 1469 in the wake of the marriage of their respective monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Catalan has remained the lingua franca in the former Aragonese territory until the present day, although large scale migration there from other parts of Spain, and elsewhere, diluted this; just over half of its population appears to feel Spanish, based on the 2017 election results.

    In the wake of the Nationalist victory of Generalissimo Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which Barcelona played a prominent role on the Republican side, thousands were imprisoned and the Catalan identity was systematically undermined. During that long dictatorship (1939-1975) schools were banned from teaching the Catalan language and sources of Catalan identity whitewashed. With the introduction of democracy in 1975 a modus vivendi developed between Madrid and Barcelona – the Basque country became the nationalist flash point – until diminution in regional sovereignty in 2010 allied with the Economic Crisis gave rise to the current strife.

    Iberian Peninsula 1400

    Since the violent scenes in October many Spaniards have pointed to the illegality of the referendum to justify the conduct of the Guardia Civil, which makes neither moral nor legal sense. Editorials in the apparently liberal El Pais often refer to the Catalan leadership as ‘Golpistas’. The word ‘golpe de estado’ is the equivalent of coup d’etat or putsch, and implies that Catalan separatists have been using violent means to bring about independence, thereby justifying the thuggish scenes.

    El Pais’ Managing Editor, David Alandete, remains obdurately unapologetic, likening Catalan separatists to Far Right extremists: ‘This is the exact same situation as The New York Times under Trump, the UK press under Brexit, German press under Alternative for Deutschland’. Like most established print media around the world, El Pais has experienced significant financial troubles in recent times. John Carlin, a sacked former columnist has argued that the parent company Prisa reflects the wishes of Madrid’s political class.

    Catalans might justifiably wonder whether their national friendship with Castile can withstand the failure of mainstream media and television to hold its government to account, and provide a reasonable witness to the events. To compare Catalan separatists to Alternative fur Deutschland is a gross distortion.

    How has this all came to pass? We are living in a European Union which guarantees free movement of labour and capital, and Spain has been a democracy for over forty years. There are certainly heirs of Franco who want to impose linguistic and religious homogeneity on the rest of the country. Individuals with connections to the lay Catholic organisation Opus Dei exert what many consider an unhealthy influence over the Spanish cabinet, but the PP holds power without a majority in the Cortes.

    We appear to be witnessing a sophisticated distortion of reality, where crucial components of the media have been co-opted into serving the interests of a governing elite now mired in economic scandals. This is not to say that the Spanish media is a monolith: reports continue to emanate from sources including El Pais furnishing evidence of government impropriety. But when it comes to reporting on the burning issue of Catalonia keen observers claim that balance has been lost.

    One disturbing hypothesis is that polarisation is actually Spanish government policy, permitting a slide towards centralised, autocratic rule. As A. Reynolds put it in his recent article for Cassandra Voices: ‘Spain remains to a large extent a liberal democracy, but there’s an unsettling authoritarian trend, which is being orchestrated by its main conservative party.’

    Oppression of Catalan separatism is part of a wider draconian policy, extinguishing civil liberties, aimed at perceived enemies of the people. This month the Spanish Supreme Court upheld a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence against rapper Valtonyc, for lyrics deemed offensive to the monarchy and supportive of terrorism. The court’s contention that the lyrics of the Mallorcan native represented an incitement to terrorism are implausible, especially considering he refers to the Basque separatists ETA, who have been in permanent ceasefire since 2011. The wholly disproportionate sentence – the same week a man was sentenced to two years for paedophilia in Palma – simply draws attention to his songs, one of which has had almost a million hits on YouTube in the wake of this latest miscarriage of justice.

    Enrique López, one of the judges in the 2014 High Court case, offered the following rational for his decision: salvar la democracia de sus enemigos, aunque sea sobre la base de redefinirla como disciplinada o autoritaria: ‘to save democracy from its enemies, it may be necessary to redefine it as disciplined or authoritarian’. He was referring to the German concept of Streitbare Demokratie, ‘well fortified’, or ‘battlesome democracy’, used to justify extreme measures against extremists who wish to dismantle democratic institutions. To compare Catalan nationalism to Neo-Nazisism is another perverse distortion, legitimating the most appalling excesses. If Lopez’s approach was accepted through history, the world would still be made up of empires.

    Ironically López himself was forced to resign from the bench in 2014 after being found driving with blood alcohol levels six times above the legal limit. He is aligned with the PP, and now laments that separatists parties cannot be banned.

    The playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by nationalist militia in 1936. By then he had written his eerily-familiar ‘Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard‘ (1928) which begins:

    The horses are black.
    The horseshoes are black.
    Stains of ink and wax
    shine on their capes.
    They have leaden skulls
    so they do not cry.
    With souls of leather
    they ride down the road.
    Hunchbacked and nocturnal
    wherever they move, they command
    silences of dark rubber
    and fears of fine sand.
    They pass, if they wish to pass,
    and hidden in their heads
    is a vague astronomy
    of indefinite pistols.
    …
    (translated by A.S. Klyne)

    No doubt these words of Lorca still offend certain Spanish sensibilities, and could conceivably land a poet in jail if he wrote them today.

    Furthermore, an exhibition called ‘Political prisoners in Spain’ has recently been shut down by the authorities in Madrid, while a book about cocaine smuggling in Galicia which mentions a PP mayor originally convicted for involvement, but absolved on appeal, has been banned.

    As with Valtonyc’s case, keeping these subjects from public attention does not appear to have been the primary purpose of the censorship. We live in the age of the Internet. The BBC exhibited the photos to the world and the book was soon selling ten copies a minute on Amazon. It seems to be part of a wider policy of drawing battle lines between patriots and traitors, which takes the sting out of ongoing prosecutions imperiling the PP elite.

    Financial irregularities also feature in the affairs of politicians from the PDeCAT, the centre-right party of the Catalan bourgeois, and historical ally of the PP, who are late converts to the independence cause. But the number of PP politicians that have been investigated for corruption in recent times is staggering. This includes a scandal involving a large number of high level PP politicians in Valencia in 2016.

    Notably, in this region, neighbouring Catalonia, Valencian, a dialect of Catalan, is widely spoken. The kingdom of Valencia was historically within the realm of Aragon. Although Valencians have always been wary of the big brother in Barcelona, a discredited PP could leave room for the ‘contagion’ of Catalan separatism to spread. The distraction of a confrontation with Barcelona takes the heat off corrupt officials.

    It is also instructive that the Valencia branch of the Popular Party (PP), under the leadership of one-time premier Francisco Camps, played a determining role in ensuring Mariano Rajoy’s survival at the helm of the national party in 2008, when he lost a general election for a second time to the Socialist Party. Ever since, Rajoy has offered stout defence to a supporter who was at the helm of a region that became a byword for corruption.

    Corruption is far from being restricted to the provinces. The Madrid branch of the PP was raided in connection with the Púnica ring, also in 2016, which is alleged to have unlawfully awarded as much as €250 million in public contracts to beneficiaries in return for bribes. The origin of the Operation Púnica investigation was the discovery of Swiss bank accounts held by, among others Francisco Granados, once the right-hand man to Esperanza Aguirre the former President of the Madrid region. It is telling that Swiss banking authorities, rather than an internal investigation, reported: ‘aggravated money-laundering operations’. This compelled an investigation leading to a trial in 2017 involving 37 suspects.

    Franscisco Correa, a businessman at the heart of the scandal allegedly liked to be known as ‘Don Vito’, after the character played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, making his protestation that he did not realise he was committing any crimes ring rather hollow.

    The confrontation between Barcelona and Madrid has been brewing for some time in a football-obsessed country. Rather than acting as a lightening rod to diffuse tensions, the morbo rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC fuels hatred. The success of Barcelona  infuriates Madridistas, and vice versa, explaining the outlandish sums both sides began to spend on players, even as the Economic Crisis was in full swing.

    It also might explain why the former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola, a supporter of Catalan separatism, has been harassed by the Spanish authority. His private jet was boarded by police, apparently in search of exiled former Catalan leader Carles Puidgemont. Also, a car in which Guardiola’s ten-year-old daughter was travelling was stopped and searched by Police.

    Sides are being chosen. The apparently centrist Ciudadanos which claims to disavow nationalism is increasingly eager to assert its ‘Spanish’ credentials. The leader of that party Albert Rivera was recently photographed with a Spanish flag wristband, which was hardly an unintentional gesture. He has also expressed the uncompromising view that ‘putschists can never be part of any negotiation‘, sticking to the falsehood that separatists are violent insurrectionists. The Spanish Socialist Party have been similarly spineless, supporting the ban on the recent exhibition on political prisoners.

    Image: Hector Castells

    Spain is still coping with the legacy of the Economic Crisis, and the introduction of the euro which substantially drove up the price of living. Youth unemployment now stands at levels close to 50%, and entrenched poverty co-exists with fabulous wealth. Populist nationalism, on both sides, distracts attention from day to day concerns, cloaking the real inequities and corruption at work. But the authoritarian sentiments expressed by politicians and judges associated with the PP are especially worrying. The idea they are defending democracy represents an Orwellian inversion.

    Fellow Europeans must pay greater attention to the erosion of civil liberties and the Rule of Law in Spain, perhaps registering their disapproval by avoiding travelling and doing business with Spanish regions that support the PP. Pressure can be brought to bear on home governments to isolate the Spanish government in Europe, until negotiations begin and liberation of political prisoners occurs. Perhaps the territorial integrity of Spain can still be saved: national break-ups are rarely achieved without significant bloodshed, and often regretted afterwards. After all, as Samuel Johnson noted: ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’.

    Frank Armstrong is the Content Editor of Cassandra Voices. You can find an archive of his published work here.

    Feature Image: Hector Castells

  • My Social Media Shame

    I went in my first chatroom when I was 12. My name was ‘Phoebe’ – she was my favourite friend – and every day after school I rushed to the computer to chat to the other liars in the chatroom who were probably aged 38. It was like stepping into Narnia. One evening I dialled up the Internet, let off some steam (or trolled people) and left the chatroom. I set up a new identity – possibly ‘Rachel’ –  and told everyone that I had terrible news. Phoebe had jumped out the window.

    It was fun when the sympathies came in, with people so shocked and sorry for the loss of my friend (myself). Rachel left the chatroom, and we never returned, me or myselves. The chatroom was, like Narcos episodes or Easter eggs, too much of a good thing. My life since then has been one chatroom disappearance after another, though the chatrooms have the more benign shape of ‘social media’ and the disappearances are not so dramatic, just the absences you don’t notice when the algorithm wipes people out.

    I never cared for networking sites, and Bebo and MySpace seemed to be just culchie hang-outs. Then one day people started using this Orwellian surveillance technique called Facebook. Now, I thought Facebook was the laughing stock of everyone. The Irish, enemies of narcissism, seemed to particularly hate it. Imagine having an online diary all about yourself, putting pictures of yourself online for all the world to see. Imagine being seen to think thoughts about yourself. People jeered, with the glazed look of the captive just before they enter the cult. In around Summer 2007, my friend Francis told me that within twelve months, everyone we knew would have a Facebook page. He eyed me. Everyone. Everyone except me, I promised.

    Then you move abroad and Facebook sounds like a good way of keeping in touch with old friends. Also I had the selfie application on my Apple Mac that took gorgeous pictures of the beholder (myself). So I handed Facebook all my personal details and took some gorgeous pictures of me and my flatmate in our new London pad, and posted the hell out of them one restless night. Friend requests came pumping in – it was viral, a friend disease, a cholera outbreak of camaraderie and everyone I’d ever met was stricken. I sat in bed enthralled by kite surfing conventions and weddings in Capri, envy infiltrating my shivering soul so quietly I didn’t even know it was there.

    The next night my flatmate knocked on my door.

    ‘You put pictures of us online in our pajamas.’

    It was all about learning, but it was all still very compelling, and I kept stalking people, kept infecting new friends. The picture slideshows were like a beautiful sedative. Evenings, mornings, were thrown away gazing at edited lives and it really didn’t matter. Facebook had rooted out an obsessive strain in my character and I wanted to click and click until I could be absorbed into the screen, indistinct from the digitised friends whose own friends’ lives I was preying on, and then I would just fall asleep. The friends which, by the way, were incongruously arranged. What was Bianca from Spain doing with those idiots from primary school, and my mum’s friend and that new girl at work who seems nice but boring. The whole thing was a fiasco.

    I stayed on Facebook about three weeks before trying to disappear. (‘Are you sure?’ They asked when I begged them to unchain me. What makes you so sure? What is your real reason for wanting to leave us? Would you like us to keep your personal information? It doesn’t matter, we’re going to keep your personal information anyway, and have it ready for the moment you come crawling back to us.’) The exit was labyrinthine, I recall, and even after I’d got away one of their men was crouched there waiting to intercept me.

    Many humorous articles were written at the time, parodying Facebook and taking issue with what these Californian kids were asking us to do with our ‘friends’. The ‘poke’ was a great source of naughty excitement. Privacy was a real talking point. Anonymity was much pondered as a modern belief system. Trolling, bullying and abuse were not okay. And over the years, Facebook listened to its critics, had some glossy AGMs, cleaned up its act, and created a more softly controlled ‘tool-kit’ for its ‘community’. Even when it recently got caught publishing fake news written by Russian teenagers, Facebook was terribly remorseful. Top nerd Mark Zuckerberg has been compared to Lennie, the giant in Of Mice and Men, for his helplessness in the face of his own power. Doesn’t he hate himself? I don’t know. I am way above Facebook now (aside from borrowing my mum’s password if I need to prey on someone). I went on Twitter.

    In an old diary, on ‘June 11th, or 12th, or 13th, probably 13th’, there is written in an angered hand: ‘Miseries, miseries. Today I entered Twitter, or it entered me, penetrating my thoughts and [illegible] and perceptions and thrusting onto me all the familiar friends and famous people I could ever hope to meet in Lillies [Bordello]. Oh the grimness. Most of the evening spent uploading a thumbnail image – what kind of [illegible] crackpot keeps thumbnail images of themselves on computers. Kafkaesque. Like introducing yourself at a dinner party you know you will never get out the door of.’

    That was 2012, when there were still names for people who used Twitter, like ‘Twitterati’. Now Twitterati are just people. All of us. There is no special tribe. My first season on Twitter wasn’t a success. I didn’t know how to tweet, or even what a tweet was. Then one day, early in my unprolific and ongoing career in journalism, I wrote an article that struck a goldmine. It must have been about beautiful women or something. Everybody retweeted the hell out of it that fine, salubrious day. I watched my numbers build. Watched that tweet balloon. I was getting fans, influencers on my side. Like the gambler, flush from her first winning horse, I bet higher – wrote more daring tweets, with opinions. And nobody retweeted those. I disappeared, let my Twitter profile die of natural causes and returned to friendlessness.

    My late and unlamented LinkedIn presence must have emerged around then, too. I’d been having requests from all my mates – Vincent Browne, David McWilliams, Rosanna Davison, everyone really – to connect with me on LinkedIn. (It took time before I realized that the LinkedIn nerds and losers had a kind of hari-kari click, whereby with one slip of the hand you’d asked everyone you’d ever written an email, including that guy from the hostel in Buenos Aires, to be your peer in business.) So I thought I should make the career move. I spent an afternoon setting up a LinkedIn profile, publishing my work CV, which would surely be fascinating reading for people, and, thus whored to the Western elite, waited for something to happen. I wasn’t head-hunted instantly. The odd message came in, from an old real-life friend, who laughed with me about meeting like this. I never once used LinkedIn. I tried to disappear from it, tried hard to remember old passwords that would let me disappear forever, but LinkedIn is still loafing around the unwanted ‘Social’ section of my Gmail account, sending daily spams, together with its creepy sister Pinterest. Apparently I’m still ‘on’ LinkedIn. I haven’t used it in six years. Bit of a long-shot, eh, LinkedIn losers? Though it regularly tells me that so and so has been admiring my profile and I do get a little bit excited.

    Around 2013 I went back on Twitter for a second shot, keen to make it now. The years I spent in shared office spaces, where there were signs in the bathrooms asking office mates to kindly not steal toilet paper, I remember without fondness. Each morning, I would get a coffee and a double chocolate chip muffin and sit at my lair with a bleary kind of ambition. I was going to have a great day. I knew people who forced themselves to write 2000 words before they could open their Twitter machines, but not me, I was way above Twitter. I would go directly, nonchalantly, on Twitter, first thing in the morning, just to show how little it meant to me.

    And so I scrolled through the Neoliberally sorted parcels of news. And scrolled, and clicked, and engorged myself with other people’s success, until envy’s poison seeped into my veins again. I felt awed, embittered, and then, something I couldn’t put a finger on, something uncomfortable. Something that made me want to throw a few hardbacks out the window, or worse. Anger. I felt a great, blood-letting anger. And by the time the double chocolate chip muffin and the coffee had worn off and my little Twitter profile was still little, I felt as good as dead.

    Depression usually enters a person through an unconventional route. Not directly through consciousness, more through the back of the heart, and in around the stomach, through the legs, gently paralyzing them. I watched an old friend become ultra-famous on Twitter, and I think in real life – there’s no difference now. I conversed with him publicly on Twitter thinking – I’m not doing this for show, not to gain followers, not me. I watched as media storms blew up, over terrorist attacks or sexism or people captured and tortured by terrorist groups themselves formed by Twitter and Facebook; threw in some hashtags and lent support to causes that made me look pretty good, as a bonus. I watched as my ultra-famous friend wiped out thousands of followers one night. Just deleted us. Apparently it’s something you do when you get ‘there’, so that more people are following you than you are them, and I was lost in his genocide.

    It came to me one day. The backslapping lie of the whole thing. People only say nice things about other people with their names in the tweet, in order to get a mega retweet out of it and an orgiastic public massage. (@famousfriend. I can’t thank @famousjournalist enough for her amazing article about me in which I talk about @influentialfamousfriend. I love you all so much. #mybook. Blah.) It looks nice to be nice. Who doesn’t like niceness, when there are all those terrible trolls to contend with! And it also wins you retweets, when the person retweets the nice thing said about them. Niceness makes you a really big deal. So I said nice things about other people with their names linked into the tweet, in order to get a mega retweet out of it and an orgiastic public massage.

    How then do you even write an incredibly successful tweet? This was the next great challenge of my career. There were just 140 characters to hang your reputation on, those days. I’m sure they teach that at journalism college now but I had to learn it alone.

    When there was an article to plug, a ware to sell, that was easy. You just sent the link out to do your dirty work. But when I just wanted to tweet about something on an ordinary day – when I just wanted to be a natural, loveable wit. That could take hours. No matter how ingenious the idea, how hysterically funny the sentiment, how neat the observation, how succinct my little aphorism really sounded, it always ran over those 140 characters into the dead zone of untweetable words. (‘Your Tweet is too long. You have to be smarter,’ Twitter told me once. I think they’ve changed that auto setting – like Facebook, they’ve grown up, become nice young men.) Sometimes, seeing my tweet sit there unliked, or seeing one or two charity likes under it, I simply had to delete the wretched thing –  had to proverbially ball up the opus that hadn’t gone beyond the first draft. There were all too many of those. The ignominy of my tweets! My career was not blossoming, my articles not grandly shared – and by the way, every year I got hit by the mother and father of a tax bill. Journalism, on Twitter, was a stupid existence.

    I quit the Twitter machine in December 2016. That’s when I went heavy on WhatsApp.

    WhatsApp led me back to something like the good old days in the chatrooms. It was just hanging out, with your closest friends instead of bots and strangers. And, you could post cute pictures for free. You could barrage close friends with cute pictures. Nobody would not find these pictures cute. Nobody would desert their friends. (‘X left’ in small font was your shame to live with if you tried.) You could keep in touch with your friends abroad, for free. You could make a plan for a night out together, and then change the plan, for a night out that never happened, then comment convivially on the night that never happened, then set up another group for a night that will never happen, as the group ‘Nite on the Tiles!’ sinks lower and lower into the graveyard of groups – down with ‘Table Quiz Larks’ and ‘Summer Swims’ and ‘Trip to Tayto Park?’

    I liked WhatsApp. Liked how the popularity contest wasn’t numerically driven, how we were all equals. Liked the dopamine punch-up when you threw something really successful, and nobody didn’t comment. Liked the crying-laughing emoji, the dancing girl emoji, pressing my finger on the crying-laughing emoji so you got a whole paragraph of them, just to show how heartbreakingly LOL all this was. I liked to see that such and such was ‘typing’ – I was glued to that. With one friend, we were both ‘typing’ so much, so cleverly, I felt sure our dialogues would be optioned for a major motion picture. I loved to share pictures. Any pictures, of any of the fabulous things I was doing in this efflorescence of my digital life – Campari cocktails at home, the beaches of Santorini, my little newborn’s first bath. WhatsApp was so safe. There were protocols, but of course. Some memes were not acceptable in the wider WhatsApp community, and silence was the loudest comment of all. But WhatsApp was a wonderful place to spend the evenings. I had events to look forward to: birthdays of people I didn’t like; Christmas parties planned years in advance; expensive lunches. I felt what I had been missing all that time on Twitter. I felt massaged. WhatsApp brought me and my friends so much closer together.

    And every waking minute was dedicated to catching up with the latest hilarious chat. There was a feel of unreality to the ever warm, congratulatory tones of WhatsApp. There were no trolls here, just the opposite of trolls – friends. Who, despite all the groups that kept multiplying, I didn’t actually ever see. I wanted something real. I wanted at least a good trolling. It was sitting by the fire one night with my family, shooting off sneaky WhatsApp replies between Snakes and Ladders moves, that I saw how antisocial social media is. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, barbaric dating sites – they’re all free but we’re prisoners. Like the fawns of Narnia, they gave us the sweets, then had us frozen in pretendy-world.

    One day on the bus I was about to catch up with the latest hilarious WhatsApp chat but instead I pressed delete on the WhatsApp icon. Now everyone is gone.

    I still check my emails 248 times a day, so that’s social. And the Internet keeps my pancake brain nice and flat, so I want for nothing in terms of intellectual decline and death. As for personal validation, I can always be Peeping Tom via my mum’s Facebook password. So when this article goes out, it better be liked.

    Maggie Armstrong is the fiction editor of Cassandra Voices. Her short story ‘My Space‘ appeared in the last edition. 

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Enemies of the People

    At the height of the Vietnam War, torching U.S. flags at anti-war demonstrations became something of a burning issue for many patriotically-minded Americans. Most states brought in laws criminalising such actions, but the US Supreme Court twice struck these down, holding that desecrating the star-spangled banner is protected by the First Amendment, which regulates freedom of expression.

    In a society as divided as the United States of the late 1960s and early 1970s, flag-burning was a provocation seized on by self-proclaimed patriots to clamp down on ‘Un-American’ activities. Today in Spain, a similar scenario is being played out, but people offending Spain’s sacred cows are not afforded protections equivalent to those under the First Amendment.

    Spain is not currently involved in a foreign war, but is instead embroiled in an existential conflict with itself. One of the most unpleasant aspects of this is a deluge of draconian sentences being handed down, mostly to young people for ‘offending the symbols of Spain’.

    There is no large far-right or anti-immigrant movement in Spain. The animus of Spanish ‘patriotism’ has not, as one might expect, been directed against North African Muslims, or even sub-Saharan Africans, who make up a substantial minority of the population. Instead, the enemy lies within, namely Catalan and Basque nationalists, as well as those on the Spanish left perceived as sympathetic to separatism.

    The prime example of this was the long-running mass hysteria generated by Basque terrorist organisation ETA. Yet since the turn of the century, ETA has killed just a quarter of the number of the victims of Islamist terrorism in Spain. But Islamists have not aroused anything like the level of frenzied antipathy, as they are not perceived as threatening Spain’s national integrity, whereas an independent Basque state would see Spain ‘dismembered’.

    During the Basque conflict the Parot Doctrine – named after ETA member Henri Parot who first to feel the brunt of it – was introduced in a 2006 decision by the Spanish Supreme Court. It proved controversial and ultimately unlawful. To the chagrin of Spanish conservatives, the European Court of Human Rights declared the approach invalid in 2013 for retrospectively adding years to sentences.

    About a decade ago, Basque nationalists, both constitutional and violent, began to calm down. ETA declared a definitive end to its campaign in 2011. Enter Catalan nationalism. Losing Catalonia would be far more catastrophic for Spain as it has three times the population of the Basque provinces and is responsible for almost a fifth of the country’s GDP. It would also be, in the view of many Spaniards, an indescribable blow to the country’s pride and self-esteem.

    To counteract these challenges, the central government in Madrid of the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), has chosen stick rather than carrot. A harsh sentencing regime has become the norm for acts of politically motivated vandalism, with prison terms of more than ten years handed down for offences such as setting fire to public buses, ATMs or wheelie bins – violence against property in which no one was injured.

    Such measures could previously have been construed as a proportionate response to a genuine threat posed by terrorism. But in recent times, perpetrators of seemingly innocuous crimes – in some cases hardly crimes at all – have begun to feel the full force of these laws.

    Listed are a sample of the numerous cases that have made headlines in Spain, and which raise serious doubts over Freedom of Speech in Spain. Some appear almost comical, albeit distasteful, and in only one case was anyone actually physically hurt.

    • – Five feminists sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for interrupting a Catholic mass in Palma with chants in favour of abortion.
    •  Josep Miquel Arenas, a greengrocer’s assistant from Sa Pobla in Mallorca, sentenced to three-and-a-half years for releasing a rap song, which ‘calumnies and slanders the crown, glorifies terrorism and humiliates its victims’. Among the lyrics were gems such as ‘the Bourbon king and his whims; I don’t know if he was hunting elephants or whoring’; and ‘fucking police, fucking monarchy, let’s see if ETA places a bomb and it explodes’. Hardly Byron or Shelley but worthy of a jail sentence? A decision of the Spanish Supreme Court is imminent as to whether he serves the time.
    • Cassandra Vera, a student teacher from Valencia, given a suspended sentenced of one year’s imprisonment for tweets containing jokes about Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. Blanco was heir apparent to Generalissimo Franco who was dictator of Spain until 1975. Blanco’s assassination by ETA in 1973 is widely reckoned to have removed the biggest obstacle to a democratic transition after the dictator’s death.
    Generalissimo Franco with heir apparent Blanco.

    There also ongoing cases in which no sentences have been handed down, and where the state brings indeterminate charges, recalling the shadowy manipulation of the judicial process in Kafka’s novel The Trial. Perhaps the most notorious, concerns Catalan separatist leaders accused of misappropriation of public funds, sedition and violent rebellion. The latter charge is highly contentious as the only violence throughout the Catalan Referendum Crisis was perpetrated by Spanish police, especially the Guardia Civil. Incredibly, state prosecutors are arguing that the ‘violent language’ of separatists should be equated with actual violence. The charge of violent rebellion carries a sentence of up to 30 years.

    One has to question the extent to which fair trials are possible in circumstances where a sitting cabinet minister makes statements such as: ‘the jail to which [deposed Catalan president] Puigdemont will be sent has all the mod-cons that most people, not just prisoners, would desire’; and where a government spokesman says: ‘they’ll probably end up in jail’.

    Exiled Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont.

    Even these prosecutions pale in insignificance compared to the plight of nine youths from Altsasu, a town of fewer than 7,500 inhabitants in a Basque nationalist heartland. In October 2016, they became embroiled in a bar fight. The two men they tussled with were off-duty police officers. The state prosecution alleges the youths were aware of this, and the court deemed it was an intentional assault against police officers. All nine were arrested and transferred to Madrid, three have been under arrest since, without bail conditions being set.

    The eight now face sentences ranging from 12 to 62 years on a variety of terrorism-related charges. It is instructive to note the draconian penalties faced by just one, Oihan Arnanz: eight years for terroristic public disorder; two years for attacking agents of authority; eight years for non-terrorist lesions; and twelve-and-a-half years for making terroristic threats. In contrast, Rafa Mora, a reality TV star was involved in another barroom fracas that same year with off-duty police officers, and fined €300.

    The list of injustices grows daily: Oleguer Presas, a former professional footballer with Barcelona and Ajax, and outspoken Catalan separatist, is about to go on trial for a bar fight with police 14 years ago.

    There is also the case of Jordi Pelfort a 48-year-old barber from a town near Barcelona who has been charged with incitement to hatred and threatening to kill the leader of the virulently anti-Catalan nationalist Ciudadanos (Citizens) party. He posted on Facebook that Albert Rivera, the party’s leader, ‘deserves to be shot in the head’.

    The Facebook comment of Jordi Pelfort which led to criminal charges.

    Wishing someone to be shot is very different to actually threatening to do so, yet that is what he has been charged with. It is indicative of an alarming trend towards highly disproportionate sentencing against those who ‘offend the symbols of Spain’

    In fairness, recently a court handed down a suspended sentence of fifteen months against a Catalan man for making threats against Puigdemont on Facebook. But the overwhelming majority of prosecutions have been brought against those expressing views unfavourable to Spain, and its sacred cows. 

    Sadly, Spanish civil society beyond the Left and the nationalist parties is hardly questioning this disturbing spiral. Faced with an existential crisis, the dominant approach has been to circle the wagons and deny ‘the enemies of Spain’ ammunition by questioning the Rule of Law or the Separation of Powers. Spain remains to a large extent a liberal democracy, but there’s an unsettling authoritarian trend, which is being orchestrated by its main conservative party. Moreover, the European Union has failed to censure this approach, unlike its condemnation of similar repressive measures in Poland and Hungary.

  • UK Unwritten Constitution brews Brexit Confusion

    It is necessary for him who lays and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
    Niccolo Machiavelli

    In the summer of 2007 I agreed to teach a law course to visiting American students in Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), Oxford. Preparing this, for the first time I seriously engaged with the rather paradoxical notion of an ‘unwritten’ UK constitution. I argue now that this leads to a destructive uncertainty in the wake of the Brexit Referendum.

    Oxford University is composed of thirty-eight colleges of various distinctions and reputations. Founded in 1878 as the first women’s college, LMH’s central redbrick quadrangle is an inspired recreation of French Renaissance architecture. The dreamy grounds adjoining stretch to the River Cherwell, Weeping Willows conjuring a pre-Raphaelite impression of forlorn Victorian damsels.

    The grounds of Lady Margaret Hall.

    Now accepting both genders, illustrious alumni include Benazir Bhutto, Nigella Lawson and, more incongruously, Michael Gove, the current Secretary of State for Environment, and Brexiteer-in-chief. More commendably he was also the political assassin of Boris Johnson. His dismissal of expertise during the Referendum debate infuriated staunchly-Remain Oxford, and ran contrary to his alma mater’s motto ‘Souvent me Souviens’, ‘I remember often’.

    The UK legal system resembles our own, save in one crucial respect. Apart from during a brief period between 1653-57, after the English Civil War (when Oxford was a temporary Royal capital) neither England, nor the United Kingdom from 1707, has been governed under a written constitution.

    The political philosopher James Tully describes a constitution as: ‘the cluster of “supreme” or “essential” principles, rules and procedures to which other laws, institutions and governing authorities within the association are subject.’

    The absence of such an outline clearly setting out these “supreme” and “essential” principles accounts for many of the difficulties of the UK government arising from the victory of the ‘No’ side in last year’s referendum. No fixed domestic constitutional provision guides how the UK’s executive should proceed in the wake of a referendum vote. Indeed, the first such poll only took place in 1972, when a landslide vote approved UK accession to the European Community. The constitutional implications of a referendum remain unclear.

    This has put Her Majesty’s government in a state of persistent confusion. The bee in her bonnet is that decisions are vulnerable to legal challenge. It took a High Court decision last November to compel Theresa May to secure parliament’s approval to activate Article 50. In that instance the Lord Chief Justice said: ‘the most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that parliament is sovereign’.

    Parliamentary sovereignty for the moment, however, co-exists with the supremacy of European law. Moreover, eminent jurists such as Lord Bingham have also argued that the UK is also subject to a Rule of Law beyond any decision of the majority in the House of Commons, which uses a first-past-the-post electoral system that effectively excludes minority views, rubber-stamped by the House of Lords.

    Furthermore, residual powers of the monarchy reveal archaisms at the heart of the ‘unwritten’ constitution. This includes the idea of Conventions, which do not have the character of ‘hard’ law. One such is that of a reigning monarch calling on the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons to form a government. Conventions are, however, a slippery constitutional instrument, and the system relies on the sanity and decency of the monarch, who is above the law.

    In a speech on November 13th last year Brexit Secretary David Davis sought to provide bring more clarity to the issue. He said MPs in the Commons, and peers in the House of Lords, would be given an opportunity to approve any agreement with the EU, but would have no say in the case of no deal, or power to compel the government to reopen talks.

    Parliamentary sovereignty is thus seemingly upheld, though legislators are given no discretion or meaningful oversight. This division of powers between the branches of government – the executive exercising its prerogative to negotiate a treaty with foreign states before it is placed before the legislature which brings it into law – may be consistent with other political systems. But the point is that in the UK this has to be specified.

    Moreover, the constitutional status of the Good Friday Agreement is unclear; as discussions around a ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ border unfold it is worth bearing in mind that this the agreement operates as a simple act of parliament under UK law, which could be repealed by a majority, as opposed to a more durable constitutional provision in Ireland.

    An amateur sporting organisation would hardly tolerate its managing agreement and fundamental members’ entitlements to float in such fashion, and it is surely inappropriate for a modern democracy. Ancient sources such as Magna Carta are cited as formative on the UK Constitution, but without a definitive text any principles are nebulous, and ephemeral.

    There are of course advantages to constitutional flexibility, as Tom Paine’s wrote: ‘The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of tyrannies.’ Thus, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution ossifies the demand of a frontier society for unrestricted access to firearms. But at least the US Constitution to some degree restrains presidential excesses. And Paine also declared: ‘government without a constitution is a power without right.’

    The Irish constitution also bears anachronisms, but provides a stable managing agreement that is the hallmark of most modern democracies. The roles of the three branches of government, judiciary, executive and legislature are defined, even if, like in the UK, the absence of a clear distinction between the executive and legislature places more power than is desirable in the hands of the Taoiseach. Bunreacht na hEireann is also far simpler to amend than the US Constitution.

    The Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Crotty confirmed that any additions to European treaties should be placed before the Irish people in a referendum, rather than requiring a simple majority in Dail Eireann. This has brought considerable discomfort to the executive, especially the two referenda required to pass the Nice and Lisbon Treaties.

    But the sovereignty of the people is upheld by requiring a majority of voters to approve any constitutional realignment through a referendum. This also involves a majority in Dail voting to place any such choice before the people. Importantly, these mechanisms are all laid out clearly in the Irish Constitution.

    No such incremental approach was adopted by the UK – or most other European countries for that matter. Instead, David Cameron asked the bald question: ‘take it or leave it’. In its wake unprecedented instability reigns in a country that takes pride in its venerable institutions.

    Central to the perpetuation of this legal disorder has been the University of Oxford, which counts all post-war prime ministers among its graduates, apart from Winston Churchill, Jim Callaghan, John Major (none of whom attended university), and Scottish Gordon Brown.

    A dominant consensus has been that the ruling class knows best, delaying and stifling constitutional reforms. To justify this, conservatives point to centuries of stable government. But this has had much to do with geographic insularity, and often ruthless suppression of internal dissent.

    The Brexit crisis reveals a wider malaise – of a society in conflict with itself after a great empire has receded – now unsure of what it represents and nostalgic for a departed greatness. This awakens the need for a modern UK constitution to regulate the branches of government and enshrine fundamental rights after this inexorable Brexit. Inevitably, this will provide scope for expertise.

    Frank Armstrong is content editor of Cassandra Voices and lives in Dublin, www.frankarmstrong.ie.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

  • Compassion for Trump

    We are a little more than a year into the Trump Administration, and the US President shows no sign of slowing down. His behavior – erratic to some, predicable to others – and character (vanity fueled by obsession with, well, what is he not obsessed with?) have propelled a global audience into a compulsive cycle of: ‘He said what?’; followed by either withering criticism, or loud guffaws. And guess what. Trump wouldn’t have it any other way.

    If you love him, great, be happy for him and grateful he became President. But try to avoid insulting immigrants, harassing women, or bragging about the size of your guns, car, private golf club, or male member, you know, all the things you laugh about when Trump says them, but would never say yourself, right? But what if you don’t like the President, or his policies? What then?

    Compassion is the answer. Seriously. Show compassion towards Donald Trump. Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, consider how you have reacted to him over the past year. Have those responses made you any healthier or happier, or helped you sleep at night? Have you instead grown more bitter and angry? Donald Trump isn’t going to change, but your reactivity towards him can. And by altering this you will make the world a better place.

    Let’s conduct a thought experiment for a moment (one grounded in centuries of Yoga and modern cognitive science). At first Trump was a mild annoyance as a Presidential candidate. Then he won the election and became your nightmare. Now you spend at least 30 minutes a day complaining about his policies, and hating his tweets. You’ll do this again and again, and again, for the next 3 years: complaint followed by hate, followed by hate and more complaint. A habit will form, without you even being aware of it.

    After 3 years you may get your wish if Donald Trump is defeated and is no longer President. Then you will celebrate like never before. That will last exactly a week, after which you feel an emptiness. The complaining starts again, the hating is back. Only this time it is directed against your mayor, or your Congressional representative, or your mailman. And it feels wonderful. You haven’t noticed that the habit has become an obsession, not with Donald Trump but with anger. Now you are addicted. Without putting too fine point on it, you have become similar to the man you so loath.

    Don’t believe me? Can’t happen to you right? Just look at the number of Republicans who have decided against running in the next electoral cycle, just two years after the man they complained about and hated, Barack Obama, has been defeated and left office. You’d think they would be ecstatic! Republicans got what they wanted: ‘Ding dong! The witch is dead’. But the reason many of them have given for not seeking re-election is some form of excuse from: ‘Washington is broken’/’we cant get anything done’/’I don’t like my job’.

    What about people that voted for Donald Trump, are they happy? You wouldn’t know it, since all the world’s problems can no longer be laid at Obama’s door (although many do still blame him). The fault now now lies with Fake Media, and government regulations, even though the Republicans are now running it. This could be exactly the mindset you’ll have after three years have passed. You’ll look for something else to complain about, and hate. Unfortunately, anger and hatred are fast acting drugs that give you a brief feeling of elation, but corrupt the spirit and lead to emptiness in the long term.

    So what to do? Try compassion. Trump is a man filled with self-doubt, who uses vanity and anger to cover his insecurities, over and over again. Instead of falling into that trap yourself, recognize Trump and those like him as people deserving of compassion rather than hate. Why? Because the only person who can change Trump is Trump. By hating him we fuel his vanity and anger. By feeling compassion we give him a chance to change. More importantly, we become better people instead of angrier ones, who are more compassionate and less frustrated. And since the world is composed of billions of us, not just the US President, the more compassionate we become as a group, the better the world we live in becomes, despite the Donald Trumps.

    This answer is gleaned from one of the oldest treatises on spirituality: the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali.  Compiled about 2000 years ago, it offers a glimpse at how to maintain a healthy mindset, and simultaneously change the world around you.

    1.33 In relationships, the mind becomes purified by cultivating feelings of friendliness towards those who are happy, compassion for those who are suffering, goodwill towards those who are virtuous, and indifference or neutrality towards those we perceive as wicked or evil.

    Act on it – just for a day even – and observe how you feel when next you go to sleep. We already know what the alternative is.

    Here is the other half of the equation, if you happen to love Trump. Not a problem right? Wrong. You probably still hate Obama and Big Government, and now you are bound as Trump supporter to hate the media, universal health care, minorities and anyone else who doesn’t agree with Donald Trump.

    Sure, every once in a while, like Trump, you look back and feel a little pride at having beaten Hilary, but basically you have seen how complaining and hating can raise someone to the Oval Office, and you think that might work for you too. It won’t. Need proof? Do you actually feel better now that Obama is no longer in office? If so, why are you still complaining? Maybe you are just as addicted to it too. So what to do?

    See 1.33 above. You get to feel goodwill towards Trump and indifference to all others. You can try and feel friendliness to Trump, but honestly, does he seem like a happy guy? Anger and hate might win you the Presidency, but it won’t make you happy. In the end, love or hate him, you can only make choices about your own mindset, and what your reactions to Trump will lead to.

    One only needs to look back on the life and Presidency of Richard Nixon for an example of someone who became the world’s most powerful person, and yet felt completely alone with his regret, his anger, and his complaints. And how do we feel about him now? Love him or hate him, it’s hard not to feel compassion, even pity, for the embittered man he became. My point is, you will come to compassion when you are done hating anyway. Why not start today instead of waiting 30 years?

    Chris Parkison is a recovering lawyer and full time yoga and pilates Instructor.  He lives in Washington DC.

    Featured Image by Daniele idini.