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A
palace never lived-in, a cathedral where he is not graved in. The first
one keeps up there, among the gardens of the Alhambra, the paradise
on earth of the Nasridi, the last Muslim reign in Europe.
The
second lays at the bottom, just where it begins the old town that seems
to explode from the square that hardly rounds it. If exercising memory,
none place is most useful than the Granada of Carlos V, national arriving
point and imperial starting point. In the portrait by Tiziano of Carlos
V to celebrate the splendour of the battle of Muhberg, the sovereign
goes war bringing with him the modernity, the harquebus and the light
cuirass. Looking at the past helps to understand the present.
Last
months, a hurricane of polemics advanced and followed the military parade
hold in Barcelona. The Catalonia president, Puyol, saw in it a crack
to the Catalan autonomy and a buffet to the republican and separatist
soul, pacifists stated it as a dangerous wartime wake, the government
deemed it as a due act toward an important body of the civil and social
life in the country.
The parade was carried out, but it was not broadcasted, there was neither
the Civil Guard nor the Legion: Puyol assisted, but he slighted by not
going to the following royal reception: “I must attend a Communion”,
he said. Pacifists manifested and hissed the army, guests and spectators
applauded him, hissing Puyol and pacifists. Press, a little embarrassed,
accounted for everybody's position, but in the whole it made understand
that it's time to stop deeming Armed forces as the anteroom of dictatorship.
And
nevertheless, twenty years of return to democracy are not enough to
put right ancient clashes and to cauterise definitively old wounds.
Aznar moves under the shield of the renewed national project and the
names called to the government moves this way: Josep Piqué, minister
of foreign affairs, comes from the socialists and the Catalan autonomy;
Anna Birulés, Catalan too and now the ministry of Science and Technology,
has a communist past: the new “Defensor del Pueblo”, a kind of high
level ombudsman and Enrique Mugica, socialist, Basque, a brother of
him killed by the Eta and an Hebrew wife.
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