Anti-Catalan sentiment
Reflections can be found in the literary works of Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Petrarca, Luigi Alamanni, Pietro Aretino or Serafino Aquilano.
He states that it was an anti-Catalan sentiment that was more cultural-linguistic than political-territorial, due to the protests over the election of Alfonso de Borja in 1455 as Pope Calixtus III for being "barbaric and Catalan".
"[6] The Nueva Planta decrees were royal measures aimed at suppressing those who were defeated during the Succession War, and it initiated the creation of a French-style Spanish centralized state in accordance with the laws of Castile, and for the first time founded the Kingdom of Spain.
The dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), not only saw the suppression of democratic freedoms, but also the Catalan language and culture were crushed at an unprecedented level, being excluded from the education system and relegated to the family sphere.
During the Spanish Civil War period, despite the presence of Catalans serving in the Rebel army, the retoric use of Catalanophobia by the Rebel faction led directly to menaces and outbreaks of ethnic conflict of genocidal nature, as Paul Preston points out in "The Spanish Holocaust":[7] "In the days following the occupation of Lleida (...) republican prisoners identified as Catalans were executed without trial.
The arbitrary brutality of the anti-Catalan repression reached such a point that Franco himself had to issue an order stipulating that mistakes that could later be regretted should be avoided”..."There are examples of the murder of peasants for no other apparent reason than that of speaking Catalan" Even the Falange member Maximiano García recorded the extreme forms of Catalanophobia from the Rebel Faction: "You could frequently hear in certain media the statement that Catalonia should be sown with salt.
It reaches such high levels of xenophobia that it would be General Franco himself who would issue an order to stop the genocide that was being committed" Scholars Rafael Aracil, Joan Oliver and Antoni Segura considered that until 1951, the persecution of Catalan language was "total".
[13] The regrowth of anti-Catalan sentiment in Spain during the first decade of the 21st century was marked, among other reasons, by the reform of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia and the demands from Catalan society for the return of the "Salamanca Papers", a series of documents massively confiscated from individuals and organizations in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War by Franco's army in order to enact a harsh repression.
[14] On the other hand, in the autonomous community of Valencia, anti-Catalanism has been part of the strategy of the political right since the democratic transition, being instrumental the Valencian right-wing regionalist movement known as "Blaverism".
On 11 April 1993, the pro-Catalan independence and anti-fascist Valencian activist Guillem Agulló was assassinated by a group of neo-nazis and Spanish nationalists in Montanejos.
[15] In the 2010s, some organizations and fake news blogs such as Dolça Catalunya, closely linked to the Spanish far-right and the ultra-Catholicism, have maintained and become a vehicle of anti-Catalanism, pseudohistory and language secessionism.
[27] The dissemination of pseudo-historical arguments was facilitated by media and individuals opposed to Catalonia's self-determination and by those linked to the political right, as well as the diffusion by social networks.
