Social Europe: A Way Forward For Catalonia

The “referendum” on Catalonia’s independence, held on October 1, did not end up well for its promoters. It had been declared illegal by the Spanish Constitutional Court, and the national government did everything in its power to prevent it from happening. In the end, around 43% of citizens entitled to vote turned out, and the vote did not meet minimal international standards as to be taken seriously by anyone.

To external observers this could seem like a clash of legitimacies between two governments, the Spanish and the Catalan, both democratically elected. Catalan nationalists dressed their demands under a supposedly perfect democratic disguise: how could any democrat refuse the will of the people expressed in a vote? Yet, in early September the regional Parliament approved by only a slim majority the referendum law that did not even comply with its own parliamentary rules and procedures. The law claims that the Catalan people have the “imprescriptible and inalienable right to self-determination”, as expressed by the United Nations. Yet, as independentistas should know very well, the right to self-determination only applies to people subject to colonial domination or foreign occupation and in undemocratic states. None of these applies to Catalonia.  [...]

Crucially, it is not true that Catalans are oppressed and cannot vote. On the contrary, over 91% of the Catalan voters approved the current Spanish Constitution in 1978, which is now so lambasted by pro-independence forces – a much higher rate than anywhere in the rest of Spain. Ever since, Catalans have been voting in free elections and expressing themselves in many ways since the restoration of democracy in 1977. They have participated massively in over 35 elections to choose their representatives at local, regional, national and European level. [...]

On the other hand, the current Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is totally unfit for embarking on negotiations. He and most of the current center-right Popular Party (PP) senior leaders are also responsible for the rise of Catalan pro-independence forces in the last decade through their centralizing tendencies and total lack of sensitivity about Catalan singularities and demands. The PP claim of unconstitutionality regarding the reformed Catalan Estatut (the Charter that sets out Catalonia’s self-government), previously approved by the national and regional parliaments and by the Catalan people, was a decisive moment in the struggle for independence. The ensuing ruling from the Constitutional Court in 2010 turned down parts of the Estatut and was considered a major blow to millions of citizens, who turned to independence as the only way to enhance self-government. Since then, the mistrust felt by a large majority of Catalan citizens and political forces towards Rajoy and his collaborators make it impossible for him to strike a compromise.

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The New Yorker: Birth of a White Supremacist

The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the over-all tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week. [...]

In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will—an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish. [...]

A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise. [...]

The idea of racial hierarchy seemed to hold enormous explanatory power. As a liberal, he had dealt with troubling facts—the achievement gap between black students and white students, say—by invoking the history of racial oppression, or by explaining why the data didn’t show what they appeared to show. As a Marxist, he had attributed unpleasant facts to capitalist exploitation; as a libertarian, he had blamed the state. But all those explanations were abstract at best, muddled at worst, and they required levels of context that were impossible to convey in a Facebook post. Now he was free to revert to a far simpler explanation: maybe white people had more wealth and power because white people were superior. After arguing himself out of every previous position, he had finally found the perfect ideology for an inveterate contrarian—one that presented such a basic affront to the underlying tenets of modern democracy that he would never run out of enemies.

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America Magazine: San Diego bishop celebrates special Mass for parents of L.G.B.T. Catholics

The U.S. bishops’ committee on marriage and family released the letter “Always Our Children” in 1997 as an attempt to encourage parents not to abandon their gay and lesbian children and to assure them of God’s love. It received mixed reactions at the time, with some Catholics decrying it as a capitulation to the still-nascent gay rights movement while others said it did not go far enough to combat bigotry in the church and wider society. [...]

“You could see people crying,” he told America, recalling how one person in attendance confided to him that he had not been to Mass in nearly three decades. He said some parents, especially from the Hispanic community, had told him they felt as though they had to distance themselves either from their church or from their gay children, a choice he tells them they do not need to make. [...]

“The church is bending with the times and with the pervasiveness of homosexual activism throughout the country and indeed the globe,” Allyson Smith told the newspaper. “And we feel the church should stand strong as a bulwark against cultural trends.... Our concern today is the church is becoming too accommodating to homosexuality.”  

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The Guardian: 'Families are broken, people have fallen out' | I am Catalan

While the north-eastern Spanish region prepares for the potential declaration of independence, we went to Catalonia to hear from people worried that the mainstream media are not representing their voices. 

Vox: Catalonia will remain a part of Spain — for now

The comments from Catalan President Carles Puigdemont on Tuesday stopped short of the full and unilateral declaration of independence that had been expected since part of his region overwhelmingly voted to break away from Spain earlier this month in a highly controversial independence referendum. Instead, Puigdemont said he was willing to meet with the central government in Madrid “to start dialogue,” and “to arrive at an agreed solution to advance with the demands of the people of Catalonia." [...]

Puigdemont clearly thought he’d found a way to bridge the increasingly fervent insistence on the part of Catalan separatists to break with Spain and Madrid’s desire to hold on to its wealthiest region. He announced that the results of the contested independence referendum held on October 1 gave Catalonia “the right to be an independent state.” But then he offered to suspend those results for several weeks to engage in talks with the Spanish central government. [...]

It was both something of an olive branch and potential political suicide. Nearly 90 percent of the 2.3 million Catalans who cast ballots were pro-independence. But the vote was held under highly unorthodox conditions. The Spanish Constitutional Court ruled the referendum illegal and the central government sent in the Spanish national guard to stop the vote. Police forcibly dragged would-be voters from the polls and shot rubber bullets into crowds, leading to more than 800 injuries. Some 5.3 million eligible voters boycotted the vote.  

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Al Jazeera: Race review reveals gaping inequality in the UK

Black and ethnic minority (BME) individuals are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as white British adults, a government-backed review of racial issues in the UK has revealed.

The audit, published Tuesday by the government's "Ethnicity Facts and Figures" website, also shows that police are three times more likely to stop and search non-white Britons.

Black and Arab Britons are more than 40 percent less likely to own their own home, compared with white Britons, the report said. [...]

The UK's Resolution Foundation, a non-partisan think-tank, said the number Britons of Chinese, Indian and Black African heritage - aged between 16 and 64 years old - with a degree has more than doubled since 1999, but employment rates and income have not reflected that change.

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Quartz: A guide to the key players in Catalonia’s independence dispute with Spain

He is the guardian of Spain’s constitution, and a 2014 poll in Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais, found a large majority of people were in favor of his playing a greater role in mediating between political parties on national problems. But in general, the king, like his father, allows himself to be guided by the national government, and it seems unlikely Catalan separatists would accept him as a moderator. Last year, he declined to meet Forcadell, of the Catalan parliament, after the incoming regional government did not swear allegiance to him.

The Catalan people. In a province of 7.5 million, some 2.2 million managed to vote, 90% of them for independence. But the separatists aren’t speaking for everyone. A segment being referred to as “silent Catalonia” held rallies on Sunday and Monday to call for staying united with Spain. Until recent days, it’s been harder for them to stir up grassroots support, in part, they say, because of harassment at university campuses. [...]

The Spanish people. Again, the silent majority is, well, silent—though it’s likely most Spaniards want Catalonia to stay. Some parts of Spain apparently held rallies in support of the region’s right to hold a referendum, according to a retweet from Puigdemont. But Spaniards who rallied for unity this week didn’t do their cause much good by accompanying their slogans with fascist salutes. The new leftist political party Podemos, which saw a surge of support in the 2015 and 2016 elections, supports allowing Catalonia to have a referendum, as a way to enable a frank dialogue that would feed into some kind of negotiation with the national government, rather than be binding. In September Podemos participated in a protest in Madrid against the actions the Spanish government was taking to stop organizers from holding the vote.

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Social Europe: Merkel Promises To Listen To The Cold Wind From The East

Germany’s economic success would suggest that populism and nationalism will not flourish on this soil. The evidence is noteworthy. Chancellor Merkel presides over a fiscally robust country that boasts among the highest real GDP in the EU, a strong export sector that has produced a trade surplus of about €270bn, and in July this year an unemployment rate at just 3.7 per cent. After a sharp drop in 2009, the global financial crisis hasn’t restrained the upward trajectory of the German economy. Indeed, the Chancellor reminds Germans that they have “never had it so good.” [...]

Their historic breakthrough would suggest sound sustainable economic prosperity is no longer the main criterion for political success. The two main political parties behind Germany’s economic prosperity lost votes. Merkel’s CDU lost 7.4 per cent and former coalition partner, SPD, 5.2 per cent. What could possibly explain this seismic political shift? For the ruling parties to lose votes to a party that did not so much as promise any more economic prosperity, let alone guarantee to sustain it. That Germans have never had it so good clearly does not appeal nor apply to the 5,877,094 who voted AfD. [...]

Merkel has reportedly offered to listen to the “concerns and anxieties” of those electors from the east. How and to what extent her listening will test those safeguards and restrain the AfD within the political establishment is a key question. It is certain their participation within it will change Germany. An AfD leader, Alexander Gauland, is widely reported to have said as much: “we will change this country.” Contemplating how they would do it reminds me of Carl Schmitt, a famed German jurist who later became an unabashed Nazi supporter. He argued in 1932 that parliamentary democracy, as constituted by the principles of liberalism, had failed. He pointed to an impotent “weak Germany” as evidence. To build a “strong state” Germany must do “away with politics!”

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