Is a phrase we need to be using a lot right now when talking about Catalonia.
Because of a lot of people are going to present the police brutality happening in
Catalonia as an interruption of ‘proper’ democracy. It’s not. The truth is, this brutality is western democracy as usual, but without a lot of the usual window dressing. Ask yourself: When was the last time you got to vote on something your government did not want to put up for debate? Never, right?
There is a lot more that could be said about the referendum in Catalonia right now, like the fact that choosing between a ‘yes’ to a Catalonian State and a ‘no’ to stay with a Spanish state isn’t much of a choice at all and the fact that there are other answers than nationalism. But let’s start from the baseline of letting people decide their own fate.
And let’s keep talking about the fact that what we see today is what ‘democracies’ do when the people have a desire they do not want to hear.
“If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal” is not a hypothetical. When people try to use a vote to create any change that the government does not want, that vote is declared illegal and they’ll try to stop it through state violence. If we chose to organize a vote on the things we care about (say, abolishing capitalism, abolishing prisons, firing all cops), the governent would shut that thing DOWN.
So I thought the most common argument in the aftermath of all this would be that the police brutality happening in Catalonia as an interruption of ‘proper’ democracy. I was wrong. It’s worse.
Today I had to listen to a liberal say that a ‘democractically elected’ government has a right to visit any amount of police violence upon its people to stop a vote that that government considers illegal.
Like, oh my god. His head was that far up his arse. He really thought police attacking crowds lining up to vote was not even a failed democracy but a democracy doing its job properly. Like, he didn’t see ‘making voting illegal’ as remotely problematic.
We need to change the saying to “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal, and people indoctrinated into the myth of the just democratic state would applaud it.”
