At the table where I write I have a beautiful facsimile of the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812, maximum exponent of our rich historiography. In its first article highlights an admirable article that expresses that the Spanish nation is the meeting of Spaniards from both hemispheres, understanding nation as “birth”, as “homeland”, a word that alludes to the word “father”, the loved one who bequeaths to his children their tangible and intangible assets, among which is the language, capital invention of the human being that helps to understand us and not to ignore us.
That is why I do not understand, as in the current political debate, politicians only interested in their personal income, can at a stroke, and without any embarrassment, abolish and squander in certain territories a ancient language spoken by five hundred million people in the world, and in which literary wonders such as the Lazarillo, One hundred years of loneliness, the Celestina, Bomarzo, O The Quijote.
It is indolent abandonment of an inheritance received as an exceptional and very rich patrimony, it is inconceivable, and even more so that these populist and pro-independence politiciansHer mentors, not only persist in rejecting her in the schools of their provinces, but in destroying her. And the detriment is such that the sister countries of Spanish America are more guarantors of Castilian than Spain itself. Can we call progressives those who, instead of assuming the will to enrich their secular language and pass it on to later generations, try to erase it at a stroke with obvious ignorance?
I do not exclude the rich plurality of Iberian languages in a harmonious unity, but it is obvious that nationalisms break the channels of understanding with their greedy selfishness and contempt for what is different. Unamuno maintained in one of his sonnets that the blood of his spirit was the language in which he wrote and thought: Spanish.
But the stubborn persecution of which Quevedo spoke, alluding to the regionalisms of his time, not only continues in force, but is supported by the guarantor of the Constitution, the government of Moncloa, which commits without palliative a cultural suicide of colossal dimensions for the preservation of Spanish.
Spanish is a language that enjoys the status of universal, and that is accepted by races and cultures around the world, with an increasingly profuse proliferation of cultural centers where the speech of Cervantes is learned. And as the number of Spanish-speakers increases, the eternally aggrieved, nationalists and populists, try, in their mad narcissism and contempt for Spanish, to part with an incalculable ecumenical treasure.
It already seems that it is difficult to claim the centrality of education, but let’s not forget that this was one of the pillars of enlightened thought, in order not to perpetuate an unjust social order. What these abstract defenders of exclusion do is simply manipulate consciences, now that the knowledge of all languages has acquired a nature in world society.
But of course, these rulers united for spurious benefits, giving a clear display of ignorance, defend the fact with admirable self-satisfaction, without assessing the consequences of overthrowing in their schools that language they despise. The Russian writer Isaac Babel claimed that there is no sword that can pierce the heart with as much force as a word. Is that why they want to eliminate Spanish from their lives, recognizing its unifying power?
The government, with this Law of education, has infantilized and impoverished its cultural world, turning it more into a political spectacle than an intellectual development of its young people. Many writers wish that Castilian is not mercilessly devoured by this media complex of politicians who propagate an evasive culture, where the insignificant, the destructive, the exogenous and the provincial, are imposed on the interest and the common wealth of the nation.
Faced with such linguistic disenchantment and seeing that the fact of the exclusion of Spanish plans a cultural depreciation, a group of one hundred writers have decided report the fact to public opinion. The inflamed reality is that the condition of Castilian as an official language throughout the State has been eliminated from the articles of the Constitution, which will imply without palliative the eradication of the common Spanish language in education, both in Catalonia and in the communities that thus decide it in your intellectual myopia.
«The Castilian – maintains the Carta Magna– It is the official Spanish language of the State, and all Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it ». And it continues: “The other Spanish languages will also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes.”
Despite its luminous clarity, and at the request of the independence movement, and assumed as its own by the Government, the condition of Castilian as an official language has been eliminated from its articles without further ado. This will not only deprive these generations of knowing in depth the richness of Spanish language, but will gradually disconnect them from the rest of the compatriots from a historical and emotional point of view. No Spanish-speaker should feel like an orphan of himself when he is forbidden to express himself in the language in which he learned to conjugate the verbs so basic for coexistence, such as love, dialogue, think, dream, imagine, understand and live.
The liberal at heart we want them to rule us with beneficial speeches and without idiomatic exclusions, and not with outright lies. We may be the last romantics.
They have signed this manifesto pro-defense of the Spanish, among others: Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Pérez Henares, Antonio Artola, Ricardo Burgos, José Calvo, César Cervera, Pilar de Aristegui, Almudena de Arteaga, Luis del Val, Fernando Laínez, Luis Antonio de Villena, Eva Díaz, Juan Eslava, Cristina L. Schlichting, Jon Juaristi, Emilio Lara, Joaquín Leguina, Rosa Lentini,, Xabier Pericay, Manuel Pimentel, Antonio Piñero, Carmen Posadas, María Queralt del Hierro, Mari Pau Domínguez, Jesús Fernández Úbeda, Pau Guix , Miguel Á. Quintana Paz, Elvira Roca, Sebastián Roa, Santiago Roncagliolo, Ruiz Amezcua, Sainz Borgo, Sánchez Adalid, Isabel San Sebastián, Fernando Savater, Javier Sierra, Miriam Tey, Ferran Toutain, Margarita Torres, Alfonso Ussía, Julio Valdeón, Luis Zueco, Miguel Veyrat, and the undersigned.
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