Anglocondescension

It’s a long word, one that I’ve invented, and you’ll have to forgive me for it. But it’s necessary to describe the insufferable sentiment of Anglo American superiority that we have been suffering since the October 1 referendum in Catalonia.

Poor Spaniards… how they used to love us. Our culture, our Civil War, our bullfighting, flamenco and paellas, and eventually, our transition to democracy, where we showed them that we knew how to stop killing each other. How charming we were.

Their fine-tuned detector of Castilian late-era Francoism has set alarm bells ringing, prompting them to give us all kinds of advice

But now they’ve been left distressed. They are crying in their editorials and opinion columns about the huge disappointment they feel because we have not been able to buckle in the face of the national-populist blackmail of Carles Puigdemont and company, and because we want to defend our Constitution as they defend theirs (ferociously, in many cases, and if necessary invading other countries to do so).

They don’t like Catalan nationalism, that’s true, but their fine-tuned detector of Castilian late-era Francoism has set alarm bells ringing, prompting them to give us all kinds of advice and taps on the shoulder. It’s as wretched as when they used to write about ETA calling the terrorist group “Basque separatists.” They loved and admired us so much… that they left us alone to face the danger. Like now. But for our own good, of course.

The worst part of all of this is the condescending tone with which they orate on our “young” democracy, its supposed problems assimilating Francoism and, once again, the racist insistence in the temperamental character of the Spanish, and – here it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry – the nonsense that in our language the term “compromise” does not exist or has a shameful character, something that, of course, explains everything. It’s cheap orientalism applied to the south of Europe.

All of this has shamelessly flowed from the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries that have committed collective suicide in the last year in the view of the whole world as part of a boorish, populist reality show, starring the most rancid elements of the right wing, the most mediocre politicians, and the most dishonest media outlets, all working together to bring a corrupt clown such as Trump to power, and prompting a folly on the scale of Brexit, something that not even they can find a way out of. Exemplary behavior.

We are sorry to have disappointed you. But perhaps we’ve just grown up and are tired of being lectured. @jitorreblanca

English version by Simon Hunter.