What If... ?
Developing a political worldview that is adjacent to the real world can be dangerous [Second attempt]
[The previous version of this email had technical issues - apologies]
In 1967, Scotland beat England at a football match at Wembley. Of course, England had beaten West Germany in Wembley a year previously to win the World Cup for the first and only time. Some Scotland fans joked that their team should now be known as “unofficial world champions.” The joke had legs. A small group of fans started thinking about who would be world champion if football had similar rules to boxing.
In 2003, a freelance journalist launched the Unofficial Football World Championship (UFWC), which retrospectively looked at every unofficial champion since England first played Scotland in 1872. The UFWC and the official world champions are often united. This happened in the 2018 World Cup. Peru went into the tournament as unofficial champions; while France claimed both titles in the final. France is still unofficial champion, despite losing the status shortly after the last World Cup.
This is all good, clean fun. However, this kind of approach - thinking deeply about an alternative reality grounded in but adjacent to the real world - can be dangerous, as we all saw when Vladimir Putin sought to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a strange argument that they are the same nation.
Although I swear like a trooper in real life, I try to avoid vulgarity in this blog. I think we need to make an exception just this once. The Spanish have a wonderful phrase to describe this kind of convoluted thought process - pajas mentales. It can be translated as mental masturbation (MM).
I first became aware of the dangers of MM in politics in the late 1990s. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) called a ceasefire in 1997. Around a year later, a group of dissidents emerged on the scene claiming to be the Real IRA (RIRA). The group’s arguments for continuing to fight were drawn from a pressure group called the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, which claimed that sovereignty was vested in all 32 counties of Ireland. This meant that all political developments since Ireland split in 1920-22 are said to be illegitimate.
Spanish history has a very good example of MM. In around 1820, Infante Carlos María Isidro Benito de Borbón (known as Don Carlos) turned against the liberals. The radical branch of the absolutists saw him as their natural leader. He was hailed as the true king of Spain for the first time in 1827 in a rebellion in Catalonia. In 1830, Ferdinand VII changed the rules of succession, placing the baby Princess Isabella ahead of Don Carlos.
The radical absolutists hated the change and began to rebrand as Carlists. They founded a traditionalist, Catholic and reactionary movement, which acted as a significant force in Spanish politics from 1833 to 1975. Its proponents engaged in significant MM to work out the claims of various members of the nobility after the death of Don Carlos in 1855.
Joaquín Llach (photographed above) was a lifelong Carlist from Catalonia. He fought for the Carlist cause from the 1870s and ran the traditonalist party in Girona in the 1920s. After his death in 1928, the Carlists became a core part of Francisco Franco's coalition of fascists and traditionalists.
Llach's grandson, Josep Maria, fought with a Carlist paramilitary organization aligned with Franco's side. He later became one of Franco's mayors. His son, Lluis, was a rebel, who became a famous Catalan-language folk singer in the 1960s. The censors authorized his most famous folk song, L’estaca, before realizing it was a metaphor for the end of the dictatorship. By the time it was banned, it was too late and the song became very successful.
One of the key characters in L’estaca is “l’avi Siset” or “grandfather Siset.” He is based on a real person - a barber and lifelong republican. Llach, the son of the town’s Francoist mayor, used to sneak off and listen to his stories. Llach later became a passionate Catalan nationalist, like many children and grandchildren of Francoists in Catalonia. He was vague on the details of his family history. This attempt to reinvent the past would be much more forgiveable if the Catalan nationalists weren’t simultaneously trying to smear the grandchildren of working-class republicans as fascists, just because they are native speakers of Spanish.
Catalan nationalists developed a Carlist-like approach from January 2013, when the regional parliament declared that it was sovereign. The motion was passed with 85 votes, while 41 voted against and two abstained. Unfortunately, Catalonia’s regional statutes say that measures like this can only be passed by a two-thirds majority, or 90 votes. The motion also contradicted the Spanish Constitution. It was struck down by the Constitutional Court in March 2014. This didn’t stop Catalan nationalists acting as if the declaration were perfectly valid in their subsequent self-coup attempt.
Connoisseurs of MM in football and politics should keep an eye on the clock when Barça are playing at home. The team’s nationalist supporters let out a huge shout at 17 minutes and 14 seconds. This is commemorate the siege of Barcelona in 1714. Catalonia’s medieval system of governance was abolished soon afterwards. The nationalists have developed a Carlist-like version of history, which hinges on this date, which is seen as the moment that the universe went wrong. See you next week!
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the first-anniversary post, which includes links to a free book.
Opinions expressed on Substack and 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.