Anatomy of a Catalan Cybernat

Identifying some common themes among English-speaking Catalan nationalists who harassed critical journalists on Twitter in 2017-8

"Easter Rising 1916" by DFArchives is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Back in the mid 2010s, I decided it was my duty as a Barcelona-based journalist to publicly fact check some of the tenets of Catalan nationalism on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The results were nuts! However, I have a bloody-minded streak and kept doing it despite regular attacks from a bot army provided by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and too many long conversations with cybernats* who couldn’t live with the cognitive dissonance generated by random strangers disagreeing with their worldview.

I tried to tell some of the human beings my views on how to think critically, but Twitter was never a great format for it and the cybernats were always more interested in converting others to the church of nationalism than in hearing hard truths about the coup attempt underlying the fake referendum in 2017. I got blocked or muted by many of the cybernats; and I also blocked or muted a fair few when the axe grinding got a little too intense. This blog is a healthier extension of the same project. Weekly essays on Substack give me a space to make a thoughtful case against nationalism.

I believe in a polite, open attitude and engaging with reply guys, so I had many conversations with Catalan cybernats. I tweet in English, so most (but not all) of the follow-up conversations stayed in English (I also speak rather good Spanish and my Catalan is a work in progress). At the risk of generalising too much, I noticed seven interesting strands among the English-speaking cybernats who were worried that journalists, including me, were being too critical of the movement.

La meva dona

First of all, surprising numbers of the English-speaking cybernats were men who had fallen in love with Catalan women and moved to Barcelona and surrounding areas. I always found this quite charming. Unfortunately, though, these men often took tour-bus attitudes way too far.

The great critic of nationalism, George Orwell, developed a psychologically astute theory of “transferred nationalism,” as we have mentioned before. This involves people who would cringe at the thought of waving their own national flag around in public adopting another nationalism as their own. In Orwell’s words, the people who do this can be “more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest” about someone else’s flag than they can about their own.

Many of the men who married Catalan ladies thought of themselves as being socialists or progressives. However, they never seemed to notice quite how right-wing the views of their adopted families could be in practice. I had many frustrating conversations with these people about former Catalan First Minister Quim Torra, a man whose regressive attitudes about Catalonia’s Spanish-speaking majority were quite correctly described by 50 university professors as being “pre-fascist.” These conversations often descended into extreme “whataboutism.” I did get one guy once to admit that Torra maybe wasn’t progressive, but that was about as far as it went.

There were also variations on this theme. I remember one bloke with Catalan roots who had grown up in London. He proudly described how his much-loved middle-class Catalan grandmother had taught him to be xenophobic about working-class migrants from Andalucia. He failed to see this as problematic in any way, shape or form. I disagreed and he ended up blocking me.

Irish men

Although I never kept an Excel spreadsheet with exact statistics, my impression was that Irish men were definitely over-represented among the cybernats. Of course, many Irish residents of Catalonia were critical of the movement, despite some of their peers shouting loudly about the alleged benefits of independence. I found it interesting that many of the Irish cybernats would describe me as an “English” (instead of using a more neutral word like “British,” which more correctly reflects my diverse roots).

At the risk of being accused of amateur psychology, I often felt the Irish cybernats had grown up with stories about the Easter Rising of 1916. They seemed thrilled to have the chance to cheer on an allegedly similar revolt in the 21st Century. I still feel that the parallels never quite worked. Catalonia has been a core part of Spain for millennia, with just a handful of brief interruptions, as we discussed here. It has never been colonised, unlike Ireland.

On the other hand, one consequence of the industrial revolution has been widespread population movements from poor rural areas to richer lands with factories. Ireland itself was long a land of emigrants to the UK, the USA and other countries around the world. Many of the migrants have been met by xenophobic reactions, as immortalised by folk songs like No Irish Need Apply. I always felt that the Irish cybernats would have found much better parallels if they’d thought about the reaction Spanish-speaking migrants had received when they moved to Catalonia. Their descendants still face shocking discrimination in Catalonia.

Linguists

Regular readers will be unsurprised to learn that I often took my cybernat reply guys into the weeds on political theory. I found the results to be disappointing. Nobody had ever read John Locke and nobody seemed interested in starting!

Although the level was generally fairly low, there was one big exception. I spoke to a handful of very passionate university lecturers in linguistics, nearly all of them female. These conversations tended to be more interesting than many of the others, even if they did eventually fall into axe-grinding territory.

The linguists’ case looked a little like this (with my reaction in brackets afterwards). The Catalan language nearly died during Francisco Franco’s long dictatorship (an exaggeration with a big grain of truth); and only survives now due to strong institutional support (probably true up to a point). Spanish is helped by its status as a major international language and will tend to over-power its weaker cousin in a straight fight (probably true). Catalan can only thrive if elected officials put a finger on the scales (probably true up to a point). The best way of doing this would be for an independent Catalonia to adopt the language as its national tongue (definitely maybe, but we need to factor in any switching costs).

The argument is actually not too shabby. I always responded by asking about the ethics of social engineering. None of the linguists was ever able to show that they had thought about this crucial issue in any depth, let alone read Karl Popper’s thoughts on an open society. In a society where there are more Spanish speakers than Catalan speakers, why do we need to support an abstract concept like a language rather than actual human beings? Many Spanish-speaking teenagers get bad results in the Catalan school system, as we have mentioned before. Shouldn’t that be a higher priority for politicians?

As a deeper point, why, exactly, do we want to preserve a language in aspic? Catalan evolved first from Vulgar Latin and later from Old Occitan; and continues to evolve due to daily contact with Spanish. Why is this a bad thing? Change and hybridisation have been constants in linguistics. When did experts in the field gain the right to stop these long-standing processes dead in their tracks?

Classifying people like insects

Orwell nailed something essential in his essay on nationalism from the 1940s, which we mentioned above. He defined nationalism as a particular way of seeing the world. “By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”

This sentence remains incredibly insightful, as I used to see in most of my interactions with Catalan nationalists on Twitter. They seemed determined to define every single member of a group as being fully good or fully bad. For example, after a huge and and unprecedented anti-independence march in Barcelona in 2017, Catalan nationalists had great fun finding photos of the tiny (and idiotic) minority on the fringes of the march with fascist and neo-fascist symbols. The cybernats tried to imply that every single person on the march was a fascist.

This worked the other way round too. When some radical separatists from the Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDRs) were caught red-handed with bomb-making material, many defenders of independence came up with some frankly weird arguments. “My Mum is on a CDR and she wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I’m sorry but that is not an argument for the innocence of a completely different CDR member.

Funnily enough, I see exactly the same tendency with supporters of Spanish nationalist party Vox, who are equally annoying on the internet. Just the other day, I mentioned that Vox punches above its weight with divorced men on X (the new name for Twitter). A Vox supporter started arguing that he is not in fact divorced. So what? Many critics of nationalism believe in statistics rather than in innate characteristics.

On a more general point, it should be obvious that groups of people will always be diverse by their nature. When it comes to human beings, there will be exceptions to every rule, as Orwell realised many years ago. Instead of assuming that all members of a certain group speak with one voice, moderates have a duty to criticise any headbangers who claim to represent the same cause. If you defend the excesses of extremists, you will soon find yourself becoming an extremist yourself.

Tinfoil hats

One of the big themes of Sharpen Your Axe is the way that conspiracy theories act as the bodyguards to failing ideas. I used to see this regularly, often in support of weak attempts to classify large groups of people like insects. So, for example, mainstream nationalists were quick to assume that the CDR members caught with explosives must have been set up by the Spanish police.

This point seemed very obvious to people who had drunk the Kool Aid, but bewildered others. Let me repeat: they had been caught red-handed. While we have to presume innocence until a guilty verdict, the conspiratorial case has always looked weak. It is worth mentioning that all the members of the amateur bomb squad are likely to be freed from all charges under the controversial amnesty deal that was agreed in November.

As well as the duty of moderates to criticise headbangers, I strongly believe in double-loop learning, or questioning your assumptions, which made the conspiratorial turn to nationalist politics very hard to swallow. Of course, Orwell also noticed this back in the 1940s. In his words:

Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.

Tribalism

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, many cybernats seemed unable to cope with any cognitive dissonance at all. They literally couldn’t handle random strangers questioning Catalan nationalist groupthink, which made them very annoying on the internet. Their worldview was often very tribal, consisting of half-truths, misunderstandings and exaggerations spread by tribal leaders and loyal publications. It was based on one very crude model (Catalan good, Spanish bad).

The cybernats seemed very bad at understanding the arguments put forward by critics of the independence movement. They were often quick to assume that people like me must be “bad” by definition. Maybe we were fascists or Spanish nationalists? The cybernats seemed bewildered when I defended diversity and liberal democracy instead of making the arguments they assumed I should be making. When I defended abstract principles like the rule of law, they reacted as if I were speaking Hungarian.

I found the cybernats had several tactics to reduce the cognitive dissonance created by living in an open society, where anyone can criticise anything. One was insulting any critics of the movement and immediately blocking him or her. Another was blocking whole lists of people who questioned the tribal truths. I was surprised to see Carles Puigdemont, the former first minister of Catalonia, had blocked me, even though I had never commented on his tweets. Of course, some critics of independence had patched him into my threads that fact-checked the tribal narratives. He must have found my fact-checking very irritating indeed.

Duracell

The most annoying way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance created by living in a world where some people question tribal truths deserves its own section. Some cybernats would turn into toxic reply guys. They would go on and on and on and on in the comments. They would constantly change the subject whenever I got close to showing them that one aspect of their worldview was based on half-truths. They would never respect my requests to stop so I could concentrate on my full-time job. It was very annoying!

I particularly remember when elderly cybernat at the start of the first lockdown in 2020. He decided he was going to spend the whole pandemic arguing with people on the internet. I asked him to stop, but I don’t think he actually read the other side of the conversation at all. I had to block him for my own sanity in difficult times.

Guess what? Orwell also noticed this!

As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort.

Of course, my experiences on Twitter were just a small example of a divisive force in Catalan society. Families split down the middle; friendships ended; and random acquaintances accused potential friends of fascism. The underlying reason why the populist narratives spun by the separatist side were so toxic is that they were largely based on being unreflective and smearing the other side. Criticism of the tribe was seen as treachery rather than a necessary feedback loop.

Luckily, many ordinary residents of Catalonia have agreed to make independence a taboo subject in recent years. Also, Putin ended up switching the bots to other causes after the movement failed. Support for independence has also fallen as many voters have come to realise that it is a pipe dream more than a realistic strategy - a recent poll showed that the vast majority of younger voters are blithely uninterested in the creation of a new state.

As I’m sure you will have all guessed by now, the comments are closed, as usual when we discuss Catalan nationalism. Life is too short to spend it reading sharp retorts from reply guys who can’t cope with cognitive dissonance and who have failed to see that the writing is on the wall. See you next week!

Further Reading

Nationalism: A Religion by Carlton J.H. Hayes

*The term cybernats was originally coined to refer to dogmatic supporters of Scottish independence, but it deserves to be used more widely for internet supporters of Catalan independence too.

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Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky, Mastodon, Post and X (formerly Twitter), are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.