Catalonia is on the brink of revolution. Which side the police choose will decide this weekend’s outcome
The situation in Catalonia is degrading rapidly. The Spanish government is in the process, like the NFL, of committing ritualistic suicide in its crackdown on Catalans simply attempting to peacefully end their official relationship with the rest of Spain.
Martin Armstrong yesterday fielded a comment from a local about the police beginning to choose sides, which Martin rightly identified as the fulcrum on which everything in Catalonia will rest.
COMMENT: Mr. Armstrong, the police in Barcelona are starting to defend the people against Madrid. Thank you so much!
REPLY: The critical moment in any revolution is when the police/army switch sides to the people. Yeltsin stood on the tanks in Russia and the army stood down. In Ukraine, I warned that the people had to get the police to switch to their side and the revolution would succeed.
This morning Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange followed up on this point with a very important observation about the scale of the problem for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish police and military:
#Catalonia: Every person arrested takes 1-3 police for processing. Will Catalans deal with the attack on their polling stations by having themselves peacefully arrested? Students alone are ~750k. Civil Guard + National Police just 15k. It seems easy to exhaust capacity.
— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) September 29, 2017
Understand the Police
The police are key here. My father was NYPD from 1958 to 1982. Before that he was a New York State Trooper. He worked all of the major race riots and the blackout of 1976 in New York.
And, while my dad rarely talked about the job I got him to open up by interviewing him for a high school writing assignment. He told me exactly what Assange just told the Catalans, make them arrest you. Take police off the streets when you do.
In the riots that my father worked they arrested few, if any, looters and rioters. Why? Because they felt it was far more important to protect the people who weren’t rioting from the rioters.
Now, police practices have changed in the last 50 years, but the law of large numbers still holds. When you are out-manned 20 or 30 to 1 it becomes a very quick calculus to figure out where your loyalties lie, with your community or the guy who (for the moment) pays your salary.
Understand also that this ties directly into the protests coming from the NFL players. This is a designed response to further divide the people of the U.S. into camps that defend the police and those that are ready to go to war with them.
Most of the commentators egging athletes on are completely deaf to these implications.
Now we see white, middle-class, kids arming up under the guise of fighting fascism to take on the police and white America for their privilege. It’s one thing to see Catalans attempt a peaceful revolution against systemic societal looting be fought by a central government intent on continuing that looting.
Police will side with the people over this.
But, here in the States, like it or not, that’s what Trump’s election was all about — a peaceful means to undo three generations of looting by the political class and their quislings in the media, corporations and a minority of voters (when you subtract out the egregious voter fraud).
Since then, the violence is rising. And the police will not side with Antifa but with the MAGA crowd — who are all better armed anyway. The police are on the side of order first, law second, regardless of the slogan. Antifa and BLM vs. guys burning NFL jerseys and saluting the flag? Easy choice for every cop I’ve ever met.
Catalonia’s Bigger Picture
This is difference between what’s happening in Catalonia right now and the U.S. Rajoy and the EU are making the wrong stand at the wrong time. But, the EU Uber Alles is where their bread is buttered.
They’ve lost the war, but they’ve sunk so much capital into the EU that they will not let it go without fighting every last inch of territory.
With the breakdown in German political unanimity, this is what will happen in other places around Europe in 2018 and beyond. The Germans will not be able to, nor do the German people, want to hold the EU together at any cost, despite the grand plans of those who stand behind the Rajoys, Merkels, Junckers and Macrons.
This has serious implications for the future health of the euro. I wrote about some of them earlier this week for Seeking Alpha and everywhere else. Ignore what’s happening here at your own financial and political peril.
Watch the police they will determine whether we have the ending of V for Vendetta (where the military stands down) or Kiev, where it devolves into violence and civil war.
Don’t worry about the euro. If there’s anything that Europe’s history shows, it’s that a United States of Europe’s states is hard but that a united European currency is quite feasible. Thaler and florin flourished beyond the countries that minted them. The symbol of the British Pound is £ because pounds, shillings and pence is from the Roman libra, solidus, and denarius (£sd). While political unions between countries are fleeting in Europe, commercial ties are much more permanent.
So here’s my prediction: the subcontinent will move to a more local government. The European Union will fall apart in nation states and regions, and in some cases – Molenbeek in Belgium, Rinkeby in Sweden – even towards city-states. But the reigning elites will do everything they can, and sacrifice whatever needs to be sacrificed, including the European Union itself, to keep the euro.
That is very true, they will. But expect the euro to fall to $0.70 versus the dollar here and a number of countries will be out — Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal.
The Visigrads will never join the euro and likely leave the EU. To keep the Euro is to keep a Northern European currency bloc that will not have the same power it does today…. not by a long shot..
But Germany won’t care because they will have, in the process, sucked up most of the wealth of Europe to themselves, similar to the Fed and Banking Cartel here in the U.S.