Original text (in Spanish): https://jubilats.assemblea.cat/testimonials-de-jubilats/en-parlem/
To you, Unionist, who seem so convinced
Convince me to stop wanting independence, to stop claiming the right of self-determination that all peoples have.
Carry me away with your dream and show me that it's better than mine.
But don't do so with civil guards (a militarized corps, incidentally), laws, judges, soldiers or kings. Do it with reasoning.
Show me how I'll be better off under a Spanish monarchy, if the alternative is a Catalan republic with Republican values and a 21st century Constitution?
Don't think of talking to me about the size of territories.
I don't want to belong to a large State, but to a State that ensures social and labour rights, freedom of speech, respect for freedom of demonstration, peaceful civil disobedience, the right to collectively decide one's future through a referendum, which respects the language of that Nation, that respects its condition as a Nation. I don't want to be Big (a big donkey that won't budge), when I can be like Holland.
Convince me. But rather than convince me, make me want to be Spanish. In a global world where I read books by foreign authors, watch foreign films and foreign series, listen to songs in English and devote a considerable part of my savings to traveling abroad, tell me in what way I can be proud to be Spanish, when being Catalan is enough for me to know where I'm from and where I want to say I'm from.
You'll have a hard time convincing me to go on being Spanish, because to do so I would have to forget - and I don't think I shall be able to do that for the rest of my life, because I have it engraved in my brain, having seen it with my very own eyes - the way the Spanish national police and civil guards, sent to Catalonia by the Kingdom of Spain, knocked down and beat - viciously and with a good deal of hatred -women, children and the elderly, whose only crime was wanting to vote on their future. Nor can I forget the external debt; job insecurity; cuts in social rights; the future of pensions; or Spanish nationalism (castrating, repressive, authoritarian). When a State has to prop up lies, so as not to manage the truth, that State has become a FUNDAMENTALIST State.
You'll have a hard time denying Catalonias's potential in attracting investment, its ability to export its manufactured products to the whole world, its university system, its ability to train entrepreneurs, the talent and courage of investing its capital in Catalan industry, its natural resources, its ability to attract tourism thanks to the work of its offices abroad, from which, despite its criticism, the whole of Spain benefits: in short, wealth and work.
Over 2,400,000 of us came here looking for work from various parts of Spain, because in our towns there was none; all of this was in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, fleeing from a famine resulting from an uncivil war (a coup that lasted three years), the only war that the Spanish army has won since the loss of its American colonies, waged against its own people, with the help of Germans, Italians, Portuguese, Moroccans and protected by National Catholicism, most of which survives in the Spanish Church even today.
You'll have a hard time burying my feelings, for millions of people in Catalonia share the same dreams as I do.
You'll have a hard time convincing me that a monarchy is the best form of State when, in addition to being put in place by cheating, it was imposed by Franco, the dictator. Convince me that with the scant respect that the Kingdom of Spain constantly shows towards its minorities, 16% of the population that is Catalan can change the Constitution, which prevents us from answering the question that 80% of the Catalan population want to answer: the RIGHT OF SELF DETERMINATION.
Convince me. Or at least try it. Your enthusiasm must be higher than mine and I've already told you that mine is really high, put all your potential into trying to carry me away, and I will listen to you with all the respect that your sense of belongingness deserves.
Paco Martinez
...ooo000ooo...
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