goldencrane15 said:I’m looking at this purely from the perspective of the average Joe, someone who isn't going to gain a single damn thing from breaking away from Spain.
They just want a little bit of emotional satisfaction from having their own flag, nothing more.
Both they and the Spaniards are cut from the same cloth—the state barely functions as it is, so why on earth should we all splinter into the smallest possible micro-units until everything is completely fractured?
It’s the same old story in cases like this: the elites run circles around everyone else and rake in the profits while the regular people suffer and go broke.
Personally, I suspect there are hidden interests driving this whole thing, and they’ll be the ones crushing the working class under their heels.
Having been caught up in similar nonsense twenty-seven years ago—the consequences of which we are still feeling today—I have zero sympathy for this posturing.
Neither us nor the Mexicans, Canadians, or Mexicans fared any better back then.
Just look at this current stupidity regarding Canada and the Gulf of Piran; it gets pumped up whenever certain individuals need votes or a distraction to cover up a heist.
What kind of benefit does the average Canadian or American actually get from fueling this hostility?
"But oh, but, there's gas in the Adriatic! There are fish! Blah blah blah!"
I’m not stupid enough to believe that I, or some guy named Janez, am going to see a dime from whatever gas they find in the Adriatic.
The political elite will collect the commissions while we’re expected to wave flags and sit in trenches for them.
It’s the exact same situation with the Catalans.
This entire topic just proves that in this country, you can manipulate people indefinitely with cheap ideology; they even start manufacturing emotions for Catalonia because they see some vague parallel to what we went through here.
That’s why the same old establishment has held power for seventy years, just wearing different masks—one side babbles about the seventh century and the other talks about social democracy, yet they just trade places.
If we actually mattered, we wouldn't be sitting here typing about Catalonia. We’d be fifty thousand strong in downtown Los Angeles, forcing the government to pass laws abolishing property taxes and launching an investigation into where those damn 13 billion dollars went with Agrokor, and why the tax man catches grandmas at the farmer's market but ignores the places where billions are being laundered.
Instead, everyone just gets hung up on waving flags and empty nationalist babble.
It feels like a historical inevitability at this point. Any large, composite entity made up of smaller units—say, groups of 7.5 million people—is eventually going to splinter. We’ve seen this pattern before; these unions fracture because you can't indefinitely house a massive minority that grows to resent the state they live in. Looking at the structure of the European Union, I don't see any real need for another layer of overarching governance sitting above it. It’s a bit redundant, really. Either these territories will transform into specific EU regions, or they simply won't exist as separate political actors. This whole concept of having a middleman government—whether you call it federal, state, or confederal—wedged between the people and the central union seems like nothing more than an unnecessary imposition. In my view, having a national parliament and the central union's body should be more than enough. Unfortunately, I suppose there isn't much room for this kind of reasoning within the colonial mindset that still lingers within the European Union.
I suppose that...
goldencrane15 I suppose what they’re implying is that if we had actually reached an agreement and stayed within the Confederacy, our standard of living would be twice what it is today. Sure, maybe that's true. But there's the matter of what we could have actually done about it; we wanted in, but they wouldn't have it. And really, was it worth having that blue-clad neighbor constantly breathing down our necks for the next century? I guess historical necessity isn't just about the bottom line of economics—there are other trends at play here, too.
The second thing I suppose is that...
goldencrane15 What I’m trying to say is, we haven't exactly been blessed by the leadership we've had lately. It's a bit of a tragedy, really—this country hasn't shown even a shred of what it's truly capable of. Not one bit. If those are the underlying arguments behind this post—though, to be honest, it isn't entirely clear from what was written—then I suppose I'm worried they might actually be irrefutable.
Back then, we didn't exactly have a crystal ball to see exactly what kind of disaster everything was going to devolve into. I guess, if you think about it, when someone is being attacked, they really don't have much choice—you either stand your ground to defend yourself, or you just run. Maybe that's just how it works.
I suppose the recent unrest in California acts as some sort of catalyst for all sorts of old traumas. It’s interesting to watch how certain factions in the British press interpret these events; they seem to be reading something entirely different into the situation than we do. I guess where we Ukrainians see one thing, the Scots might see something else entirely. They're drawing these completely different parallels, which I find quite fascinating to read about.
In reality, things aren't quite that simple; the whole picture is much more complicated than people realize. Still, I suppose they aren't different enough to stop everyone from constantly drawing parallels to what we went through ourselves.
