The main crime of the Spanish and French colonizer against Catalan Nation is not the systematic looting we are subject to, nor the neglect on the infrastructures that hinders our economy, nor, even, the physical genocide that Catalans historically had to suffer, to be more specific in the thousands and thousands of Catalans dead or forcibly exiled because they had defended their homeland. Being as terrible as they are, these are only collateral to the fundamental one that the colonizers have condemned Catalan Nation to, negating Catalans their own way of life.
For more than three centuries of forced submission and more than forty of formal democracy, but oppression and psychological manipulation, it has been made impossible to Catalans to show our self-consciousness as a country.
To let the own consciousness as a Nation disappear is the most alienating thing that exists. A lot more alienating than physical destruction.
Because the misery of the soul is sadder than material poverty, as it was well reminded by our beloved President Macià!!
What is the value of progress, money, wellbeing when the country is losing itself?
The biggest poverty, the most profound psychological misery flow from this loss of collective soul.
Because the most fundamental ontological need of any country is to be who is within that territory. And only with a full expression of this collective soul lies authentic freedom. And this authentic freedom is what is negated both by the colonizers and the regionalist politicians that have agreed to marginalize and make unnecessary this Catalan way of life within our own Nation, thus condemning us to a more than sure folklorization and disappearance.
In the freedom process that our Nation has begun, is necessary to acknowledge what the most resist to accept, which is that a nation that is not the owner of its own homeland and its not allowed to express in plenitude their way of life is a slaved nation.
It is this what they understood with perfect lucidity the patriots who we homage here and now. Patriots who assumed that if they were negated the right of living as free men, expressing fully their collective soul, would die as free men.
This is the spirit of the men who fought with the price of their blood to prevent the subduing yoke to negate them what today is reviving throughout our nation, against the Catalan political class and making evident their regionalism and in what measure they have abandoned their principles. Against who allows the slow blurring of our identity, our character and our language.
It is in this spirit that these proud men and women who the nation’s heart beat within. Where the presence of the authentic Catalonia is shown, this Catalonia that strives to demonstrate shattering the corset in which is trapped.
This presence, our genuine and deep way of life, the heart of our nation, beyond false identifications that so many centuries of submission have weaved, it is the objective and the ultimate reason for our freedom. It is the ransom that will return the joy of being Catalans, the creative spark and the material abundance.
Maria Torrents
Councillor Catalunya Acció
Speech made at the Fossar de les Moreres, Barcelona on September 11th 2009
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