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Friday, November 7, 2014

Is Spain inflating the Catalonia soufflé?


Is Spain inflating the Catalonia souffle?


A Student holds a sign saying, 'November 9, we want to vote' during a protest in October, 2014
Catalonia and Spain are moving apart at a fast pace, and very little is being done to bring them back together.
Until a few years ago, support for Catalan independence from Spain - independentisme - had its own steady niche of around 15% in polls and elections.
Since 2010 it has mushroomed to 45%, 50% - or, in a few polls, nearly 60%. The Catalan independence movement has also broken its own records for the largest entirely peaceful demonstrations in Europe. About 1.5 million people formed a human chain across Catalonia in 2013, and as many as 1.8 million - 23% of the population - formed a giant V (for "vote") across Barcelona in September, to demand the dret a decidir, or "right to decide", in an independence referendum.
This could be, if sustained, a ground-changing transformation. A string of reasons are commonly given for it:
  • The rejection by Spain's Constitutional Court in 2010 of a reformed Autonomy Statute for Catalonia that seemed to close off all established routes to change
  • The ongoing argument over whether Catalonia pays more to the Spanish state than it gets back
  • The financial crisis and austerity, which many Catalans feel are made worse by the financial constraints on Catalonia's regional government, the Generalitat
There is also a pervasive sense that the central government never listens to Catalans and treats them with contempt -menyspreu, a much-repeated word here.
Tens of thousands of Catalans in red and yellow shirts waving independence flags (Esteladas) gather in Barcelona's Gran Via on Catalonia's national day to form a giant 'V'
The conservative Popular Party (PP) in power in Madrid under Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has a "recentralising" Spanish-patriotic agenda, and Education Minister Jose Ignacio Wert, has spoken of the need to "espanolizar" [or Spanish-ise] Catalan children.

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There is a machine for making Catalan independentistes - the government in Madrid”
Manel BrinquisCatalan Socialist Party
Beneath all this, many argue further shifts are happening. Germa Bel, an ex-Harvard economist and a former Socialist MP in the Madrid parliament, used to believe in a "plural Spain" and still doesn't consider himself an independentistaas such - "it's just that any other option became impossible", he argues.
There is a deep gulf of mistrust between Catalonia and the rest of Spain at an official level, Bel says, resulting in a dysfunctional relationship that prevents the solving of problems and creates endless frustration. Something, he suggests, has snapped. He and many others have "given up on Spain", and to get out of this unhealthy dead-end, he believes, Catalans need to "change parameters" and create new solutions.
A key moment came at the end of 2012, when Generalitat President Artur Mas - who comes from a party that had never previously pursued independence but only political and economic concessions from Madrid - declared his support for the "right to decide".
With official blessing, ideas of independence and above all the right to vote on the future moved from the political fringe to the mainstream. As in Scotland, the pro-independence cause has grown by going beyond the nationalist core to offer the promise of a new kind of politics, a catch-all for post-crisis discontents. The pro-vote campaign was begun by grass-roots organisations, and the unlikely alliance of political parties supporting it runs to the Candidatures d'Unitat Popular or CUP, an assembly-based, street-politics leftist movement that proposes direct democracy and "radically different institutions".
Mariano Rajoy (L) and Artur Mas (R) Mariano Rajoy and Artur Mas
The fundamental difference between the Catalan situation and that in Scotland is the response of the central government, which has been not political but legal. The Rajoy government insists that any referendum on independence for a single part of the country is inadmissible under Spain's 1978 Constitution, and simply illegal. For months government and Generalitat have engaged in a bizarre game of courtroom cat and mouse. To get round the ban on a full referendum President Mas and his colleagues proposed instead a non-binding but official consultation on independence, and set a date for 9 November 2014. The Madrid government still referred it to the Constitutional Court - and it was declared unconstitutional.

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Whatever happens on 9 November, this thing is not going away”
Eduard LopezEsquerra Republicana
In mid-October, faced with the impossibility of carrying out any official vote without state machinery - such as electoral registers - but after months of promoting 9 November as a decisive date, Mas took a step back, cancelled the full "consultation" and announced there would only be a "process of citizen participation" in which anyone who wanted to could vote but without an official register - a widely ridiculed proposal that makes the big day only one more form of mass agitation.
In Madrid the government initially seemed inclined to let this ramshackle vote go ahead, but last week they referred this too to the Constitutional Court, which led a visibly infuriated Mas to launch his own legal action accusing Rajoy of "abuse of power".
Beyond sending in the lawyers, any political approaches by the Rajoy government or attempts to mollify any sector of Catalan opinion are remarkably hard to find. The legalist stance allows Prime Minister Rajoy to present an image of dignity as defender of the Constitution and the Rule of Law, "because without law there is no democracy". But all evidence suggests it's been counter-productive in terms of reversing radicalisation in Catalonia. If support for independence polls at around 50%, that for the "right to decide" comes in at over 80%.
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More on Catalonia
Barcelona
  • Roughly triangular region in Spain's far north-east corner, separated by the Pyrenean mountains from southern France
  • One of Spain's richest and most highly industrialised regions
  • Many Catalans think of themselves as a separate nation from the rest of Spain
  • This feeling is fed by memories of the Franco dictatorship, which attempted to suppress Catalan identity
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People are now equating three different things - the right to decide, democracy and independence - says Eduard Lopez of Esquerra Republicana, the historic pro-independence party that is the chief political beneficiary of the current crisis.
"The Spanish government's closed door to democratic dialogue has helped us a lot… and extended our support much further than we'd expected," he says.
Manel Brinquis of the Catalan Socialist Party - which does not support the unilateral "consultation", but with the Spain-wide Socialist PSOE proposes a federalist reform of the Constitution - says bluntly: "There is a machine for making Catalan independentistes - the government in Madrid."
With so much focus on the right to decide the benefits or otherwise of independence often disappear from view. Poll support for independence may hover at around 50% but that still leaves half of all people opposed or unconvinced.
The nearest thing to a locally based No campaign is Societat Civil Catalana, Catalan Civil Society. Founded only in April, it has begun to make its case - presenting, like earlier equivalents in Scotland, a disastrous picture of the potential economic consequences of separation.
Pro-Independence Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) supporter marches to hold a tribute to Former President of Catalonia Lluis Companys on October 15, 2014
Susana Beltran, its vice-president, says they speak for a "silent majority" who feel both "Spanish and Catalan", but even she suggests, diplomatically, that the government "has not known how to explain its position well".
According to Jeffrey Swartz, a Canadian art and design teacher, long resident in Barcelona and with a Catalan family, there is if not a silent majority "a big, silent minority" dubious of independence. But "nobody's ever seen a 'No' option, there's no place to say 'No'," he says.
One argument deployed by the Madrid government and its sympathisers is that the independence campaign has created a "fractured society" in Catalonia, in which Spanish-speakers are not just silent but "silenced". Behind the happy, family-based face of the pro-independence demonstrations is a steamroller intolerant of dissent, they argue.
Susana Beltran and local PP spokesman Enric Millo speak of families divided, and anti-separatists subjected to "social pressure", their children labelled "traitors" at school.
But on the streets of Barcelona - a city that is half or more Spanish-speaking, but where according to polls over half the population support a vote - a social "fracture" is hard to see. Socialist Manel Brinquis from Hospitalet, a town with a 75-80% Spanish-speaking population, and so, supposedly, most hostile to nationalism, says "there is concern", but no great alarm.
"There are arguments in families that can get tense, but social conflict, no," he says. "This intolerance is a myth."
Pro-independence and anti-separatist demonstrators shout slogans outside the Catalan Parliament on September 19, 2014 in Barcelona, Spain.Pro-independence and anti-separatist demonstrators shout slogans outside the Catalan Parliament in September
One feature of the Catalanist movement that its followers point to with pride is that it has used entirely peaceful and democratic means - violent incidents have been very rare and small scale. Nevertheless Jose Maria Aznar, former PP prime minister, has claimed that "identity-based nationalism" sought to "finish with democracy".
Extravagant comparisons are also routinely made between Catalanism and Nazism. In early October a European Parliament MEP for UPyD, one of the anti-Catalanist Spanish parties, sent a letter to every member of the parliament claiming that the current situation in Catalonia was similar to "Italy and Germany in the 1930s". This provoked an angry retort from a German CDU MEP, who said the comparison left her "speechless" and demanded an apology for this "trivialising of the Nazi regime".
In Catalonia these arguments do nothing to reduce feelings of menyspreu.
Catalanists are still determined to hold some kind of vote, even in the street, on Sunday.
With their own poll ratings in free fall across Spain, due to an avalanche of corruption scandals, Rajoy and the PP have perhaps even more of an incentive to stay firm to pick up anti-Catalan votes in other regions.
In Catalonia, some put their faith in a change of government in Madrid next year, but if the stand-off continues others propose a "unilateral declaration of independence" or mass civil disobedience. Another plan would see all pro-vote candidates standing in regional elections next spring on a manifesto with just one point - a vote on independence. If they won, they would then have a clear democratic mandate that the Spanish government could not deny.
In August "government sources" were quoted as claiming that a No vote in Scotland's independence referendum would "deflate the Catalan souffle". Since then, says Eduard Lopez, the government's policy has only been "inaction, and hoping the souffle will go down". But he adds: "Whatever happens on 9 November, this thing is not going away."
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Footballer Deniz Naki flees Turkey for Germany after attack


Footballer Deniz Naki flees Turkey for Germany after attack


Deniz Naki compositeDeniz Naki (L) playing for his club Genclerbirligi and (R) with the black eye after the attack
A Turkish-German footballer targeted in an allegedly racist attack has left his club and flown out of Turkey.
Striker Deniz Naki, who plays for Turkish Super League club Genclerbirligi, was attacked in Ankara on Sunday and got a black eye as well a minor injury to a hand.
He had recently expressed support on social media for the Kurds defending the strategic Syrian border town of Kobane from Islamic State (IS) attack and posted comments and pictures criticising IS militants.
Naki told the BBC he was attacked by three men while out buying food.
Once they recognised who he was, he said they they started insulting him for being of Alevi-Kurdish origin - a religious and ethnic minority in Turkey. Turkey has an Alevi population of up to 15 million, including both ethnic Kurds and Turks.
"They were swearing and asking: 'Are you that dirty Kurd? Are you Deniz Naki?'" he said.
"Then they said: 'Damn your Kobane, damn your Sinjar'. I tried to calm them down. But suddenly one of them punched me in the eye. Trying to defend myself, I punched one of them back and started running away.
"As I was running I heard them shout: 'Was the first warning not enough? This is your second and last warning. Leave this country, leave this city, leave this football club!'"
He boarded a flight back to Germany on Tuesday night.
Deniz Naki's right arm with a tattoo
Naki was targeted on social media six months ago because of a tattoo he has on his right arm that reads "Dersim 62", the traditional name and vehicle number plate of the eastern Alevi-Kurdish town of Tunceli.
He played for German clubs St Pauli and Paderborn before being transferred to Ankara top-flight team Genclerbirligi last year.
His decision to leave Turkey now was not down to fear, but rather concern for his family and friends, he said.
This time he was punched, but what if next time he ends up stabbed or shot, he asks.
"If I go out with my team-mates and one of them gets injured, how can I live with that? If I go out alone, I might get attacked again three or four months later.
Deniz Naki playing for SC PaderbornNaki's most recent German club was Paderborn in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia
"My parents live in Germany. They were worried. They couldn't sleep at night. That's why I chose to leave."
Asked about his future plans, the 25-year-old told the BBC he had no intention of returning.
"There is no tolerance. I would only go back because I love my country, I love my hometown. That's it. I will carry on with my career in Germany."

'Irish alcoholism nature' reason for job rejection for Irish teacher in South Korea


'Irish alcoholism nature' reason for job rejection for Irish teacher in South Korea


Katie MulrennanKatie Mulrennan has been teaching English around the world for a number of years
A teacher from the Republic of Ireland has been turned down for a job in South Korea due to the "alcoholism nature" of Irish people.
Katie Mulrennan, from County Kerry, had applied for a teaching job in Seoul.
She was told by an agency that their client did not hire Irish people due to their perceived drinking habits.
The 26-year-old told the BBC that she could not believe the email was real at first.
"Usually when you apply for a job and they don't want you, they don't send a reply," she said.
"Or they tell you they would prefer someone from North America, because some schools prefer the accent.
"But this reply was a first. When I got the email, it was so abrupt and short. I actually laughed when I read it initially.
"But then I wanted to write back a really angry response.
"In the end I took a deep breath and sent back a reply, that was a little bit sarcastic as I couldn't believe the email I had received. But I haven't heard anything back since."
Katie MulrennanKatie Mulrennan received the reply after she applied for a job teaching English in Seoul
'Your kind'
The teacher had emailed the application when a job was advertised on listings website Craigslist in September.
She told the agency that she had been teaching English for over three years, in Barcelona, Oxford and Abu Dhabi as well as South Korea.
Last week, she received a reply that said: "I am sorry to inform you that my client does not hire Irish people due to the alcoholism nature of your kind".
Ms Mulrennan said she did not know who the recruiter was as their details were not listed on the site.
However she has reported the advertisement to Craigslist.
"It was disappointing because these employers did not even get to see me," she said. "They never spoke to me and didn't get a chance to hear what I sounded like."
The English teacher has since found a job and said that she can laugh about what happened.
"I was annoyed about it. But I can also see it was a little bit hilarious as well. A friend saw it and encouraged me to post it online as it might go viral.
"I thought: 'Really? It's just another silly thing poking fun at Irish people'. But then I put it online and people started getting in touch.
"I still love the country and being in Seoul."

Who are the bad guys in Hollywood? Russians, Arabs, Chinese, Muslims, non-white and the poor

The Reel World

Hollywood stereotypes: Why are Russians the bad guys?


(United Artists)
(United Artists)

Hollywood often resorts to national stereotypes when portraying movie villains - but why would they want to alienate part of their audience? Tom Brook investigates. 

From a sadistic former KGB operative in The Avengers to the Russian evildoers in A Good Day to Die Hard, there’s certainly been no shortage of Russian villains on screen recently. Russian politicians and filmmakers have now made clear their displeasure with the US movie industry’s ongoing depictions of Russian characters as villains. There has even been the threat of a Russian boycott of Hollywood movies, highlighting the risk studios take when they demonise a nationality.

The Russian news agency Interfax reported in August that Batu Khasikov, a member of the culture committee at the upper chamber of the nation’s federal assembly, had stated that “movies where everything related to Russia is overtly demonized or shown in a primitive and silly way should be banned from theatrical distribution.”

Depicting the Russians as villains has a long history. “Even before the Cold War, Russia was represented often as a geopolitical threat to the West,” says James Chapman, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. “But [that stereotyping] takes on a particular ideological inflection during the Cold War when you get the association [with] not just Russia but also Soviet communism.”
Surprisingly the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t bring an end to Russian villains onscreen. Perhaps for a while their presence eased off but Russians remain the studios’ favoured villains.

“You can’t even turn the TV on and go to the movies without reference to Russians as horrible,” says US-based Russian-American professor Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

(Paramount Pictures)
Kenneth Branagh played a sinister Russian billionaire in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Paramount Pictures)

Khrushcheva, who teaches at New York’s New School, follows how Russians are portrayed in American entertainment and in her estimation the prevalence of Russians as villains hasn’t really abated since the days of the Cold War. “It never really eased up enough for Russia to feel that it is not a constant enemy,” she says.

Scholars see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tough stance as the reason for the increased presence of Russian villains now. “I think particularly since the reemergence of Putin and a much more hardline regime, [especially] with the problems now in the Ukraine, there’s been this sense that Russia remains a geopolitical threat and a hostile power – even if it’s post-communist – and I think that’s really the reason you see this type of villainy,” says Chapman.

What’s old is new
The Russians might be the villain of choice right now but over the decades many different races and nationalities have had their moment in the evildoer spotlight.  Around the time of World War II, for obvious reasons, Germans appeared as villains in US films – as did the Japanese.

One group that’s been demonised for decades with varying degrees of intensity is Arabs – and Muslims. Even before the days of Rudolph Valentino’s roles in silent films like The Sheik in 1921 the cast was set for depicting Arabs as questionable characters who stole and murdered. In the Arab-American community Hollywood’s depictions over the decades have been seen as suffering from the ‘3B Syndrome’, in which Arabs were shown to be either belly dancers, billionaires or bombers.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks there was growing concern among Arab-Americans that they were being typecast as terrorists.  Although some films did appear with more rounded portrayals of ordinary Arabs, Dr Jack G Shaheen, author of Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, maintains there hasn’t been enough change. “Unfortunately, Arab and Muslim villains still appear regularly in film and TV shows,” he states.

China has contributed its share of movie villains going back to the time when Fu Manchu appeared as a distrustful Chinese character in the early days of talking cinema. When MGM released The Mask of Fu Manchu 1932 the Chinese embassy in the US delivered a formal complaint because the title character was depicted with such hostility. But nowadays there’s hardly a trace of a Chinese character with evil intent in any Hollywood film because China has become a vitally important market for the studios.

This became clear with the remake of the 2012 US war film Red Dawn. It was filmed with Chinese villains, but because of concerns that might jeopardise its entry to the Chinese movie market the villains were transformed into North Koreans in post-production – at considerable expense. Given that there’s no distribution of Hollywood movies in North Korea the producers knew there could be no loss of box office revenue by alienating that country.

(FilmDistrict)
The 2012 remake of Red Dawn turned its Chinese villains into North Koreans during post-production (FilmDistrict)

Hollywood’s depictions of villains can have very concrete and tangible consequences.  As is the case with Russia they may make politicians angry – they may also possibly provide them with role models. In her blog, Nina Khrushcheva, who is clearly no admirer, makes the grand claim that Vladimir Putin has been significantly influenced by Hollywood’s parade of evil Russians.  “He moved into that villainous image that was presented by Hollywood of Russia or Russian leaders. He watched all those movies. He was like, ‘Well you’re going to portray me as a villain anyway, so I might as well go and start biting off other parts from other countries.’”

Whether or not Putin has been inspired by Hollywood bad guys the reality is that there’s serious talk of limiting the presence of Hollywood movies on Russian screens. Khrushcheva thinks the US film industry could indeed find penalties are imposed. “It is entirely possible that the Russian market would be somewhat closed to Hollywood,” she says.

Given that Russia represents the seventh biggest movie market in the world why would the studios risk antagonising one of its more significant customers? One possibility is that Russia’s complaints over Hollywood movies may have a public relations impact that plays positively in the studios’ favour. “They’ll be glad for the interest and the attention,” says James Chapman. Also, Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, says, “I think Hollywood is far more concerned about the Chinese market.”  Indeed there’s almost an obsession over China in Hollywood – but now that Russian displeasure could depress box office revenues there may be some reassessment.

Hunting new villains

With so few nationalities left that Hollywood can safely demonise it clearly needs to find fresh evildoers.

The Islamic State could be a source of villainous characters, but it’s fraught with difficulty because it’s made up of so many different nationalities drawn from the Middle East, North America, Britain and beyond. Dodds says, “I think with ISIS you’ve actually got what you might call a representational challenge. What kind of person or persons would stand in for ISIS given that it’s such a multinational affair in terms of those who [count] among its membership?”

Given the complexities of today’s geopolitics it’s conceivable that villains will cease to be defined primarily by their nationality. Upton says, “One of the trends you’re going to see probably in the near run is bad guys will be polluters or climate deniers.” In fact, enemies of the environment have already been the villains in the highest grossing film of all time, 2009’s Avatar.

The problem is that none of the villains in today’s films have the heft of those from yesteryear. During the Cold War, especially during dramatic times like the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Russian villain on screen was far more menacing because moviegoers knew that US and Soviet nuclear missile launch control centres were poised to go to war. Thankfully, that kind of immediate nuclear threat has lessened but as a result it’s defanged our villains. We’ll just have to make do with environmental enemies and the general threat of terror until Hollywood in a flash of inspiration reinvents the movie supervillain. Or heaven forbid, real-world geopolitics gives us an enemy of sufficient imminent obliterating power that a character representing that country suddenly gains an ominous topical resonance.

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