Historia de Barcelona

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[ref2819]:

In the measure that Macià was criticized, both from outside the ERC as well as from inside, he relied on the nationalist youth, a circumstance that the JEREC squads used both to attack his critics (damage to the printers of the satirical weekly El Be Negre) and to make a political fashion statement of sorts and appear uniformed and «militarized» (in a parade, on Sunday October 22, in which the «escamots» marched in olive shirts and single-star flag armbands from their numerous centers in the city up to the Olympic Stadium on Montjuic hill). The political reaction to this parade was enormous, with all manner of aspersions regarding «Catalan fascism» being cast about in the Barcelona newspapers, especially since elections for the Spanish parliament were only weeks away, in mid-November. The anarchosyndicalist publications logically made much of the «danger», but the Esquerra’s many electoral enemies (including the new PNRE’s L’Opinió) were equally harsh. The scandal even made it to the Madrid press, where in particular the rightist dailies gleefully howled with calculated indignation at this alleged paramilitary threat. ERC’s electoral partner, the Unió Socialista de Catalunya, threatened a division if the youth groups were not dismantled. The reaction was so strong that, on December 3, an extraordinary national assembly of the JEREC formally dissolved the «shock groups» (as they were called), although in reality nothing changed73. The furor set off by the parade in uniform fixed forever more the image of a «Catalan fascism». In reality, however, «shirt corps» were the stuff of 1930s politics everywhere, regardless of ideology74. In Spain all the «worker» left -the Socialist Youth, the Communist Youth, the BOC (with its GABOC, or «Grups d’Acció del BOC»)- had uniformed «shock groups», armed when possible, and also carried out shootings and similar actions, which by no means were a monopoly of the radical right. The question, therefore, was one of demonization: if paramilitary forces and private armies were common across the board, why did the tarbrush mark the extreme right as exceptional? A possible reply might be that while leftist parties might share a common fashion with the radicalized right, such a question of style, however relevant, was nonetheless not essential to their political identity; on the contrary, «fascist» groups could not publicly distinguish themselves from exalted conservatives without the recourse to a defining style.

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