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Sept. 27, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
18:03
Trump Says 'No' To Catalan Independence

Despite the State Department's official position of neutrality, President Trump could not help himself. After meeting with the Spanish prime minister he declared himself opposed to an independence referendum in Catalonia. Is it really his business?

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Time Text
Catalonia's Secession Vote 00:11:07
Hello, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you, Dr. Paul?
I am doing fine.
And we're going to talk about little government versus big government, an ongoing problem that's been in history forever and ever, but we'll continue to talk about it.
Yesterday we talked a little bit about the vote about the Kurds becoming independent in Iraq and having their own country in a referendum.
But this is another referendum that's supposed to come up on October 1st, and that is the Catalonia referendum, where they're seeking independence, secession, and separation from Spain, which is very, very interesting because it's getting maybe even a little bit more attention, slightly different than what the Kurds were doing.
They were sort of asking to start a new country and break away.
This is not a new country.
Catalonia has been known as an entity for hundreds, if not thousands of years, literally, and it's a portion of Spain.
But there's a lot of people resisting it, resisting this referendum and the separation.
And of course, the Prime Minister of Spain was with Trump yesterday, and all of a sudden, the policy for the United States government changed in the midst of the press conference.
Because up until now, the State Department, in Trump's position, not too bad a position.
We do not take a position on the breakaway efforts of Catalonia from Spain.
But all of a sudden, Trump was all for it.
So I guess we're joining the bandwagon because it's the nature of governments, and especially the bigger governments, whether you're talking about the EU or other entities, they always take the case, regardless of exactly who wants to separate themselves from whom.
They're always for keeping it together.
You can't break up the state.
The state is all-powerful.
If anything, we want bigger government.
We want international government.
We want UNs and WTOs and much more integration, IMFs, and this sort of thing.
So this vote is significant in a lot of ways.
It's getting a lot of attention.
And I imagine as we get closer to October 1st and have this referendum, it could turn into something as interesting and as important as the Brexit vote, you know, with what the British were doing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the timing of the Spanish Prime Minister's visit is interesting.
You know, I would think if the U.S., if Trump really did not want to take a position on, he would have said, let's meet after the referendum.
Because even if he hadn't spoken up and said, you know, they'd be crazy to leave Spain, just being there together at a photo op or at a press conference a couple of days before, knowing the position of the Spanish prime minister, would send a signal, you know, that the U.S. is standing with him.
So in a sense, he didn't have to open his mouth, but he did.
And he waded into it.
Well, so far we've heard some threats thrown around, especially by the government of Spain.
And they're even lining up a few police officers or troops just in case and intimidating and threatening the president and threatening and arresting the president.
But they also know the political downside of becoming too aggressive in trying to challenge this referendum.
Yeah, it is a delicate balancing act, but there are three cruise ships that are docked in Catalonia now.
They hold 16,000 riot police ready to spring off of their cruise ships.
That's more police than in all of Catalonia.
So essentially, they have their own army there ready to go against Catalonia if it gets to that.
And as you point out, they have shown themselves to be very aggressive.
They seized 10 million, police seized 10 million papers related to the referendum.
They were voter lists, signs, other paperwork.
So they're doing everything they can.
They're strong-arming this thing to try to prevent a vote.
And if you look at the optics of them doing that in the EU, this great democracy, it doesn't look good from a PR perspective.
Well, you know, there's always a moral philosophic justification for this, and one that is being used by those who oppose the separation is that they're threatening democracy.
They're undoing our democracy.
And this can't happen.
It'll lead to chaos.
It reminds me of something that happened at the end of the Cold War in 1989 and 1990 because Bush was president, Bush number one.
And I was always amazed at his position because, you know, after it was, you know, in the midst of occurring, this sounded like good news.
It doesn't look like there's going to be war.
There's going to be separation.
There's going to be secession.
You know, and it's going to be a breakup.
And he was opposed to it.
He says it could loot to chaos.
And I think he represents a certain mentality of big government and international government.
And there's no arguments about where he was on that.
But to literally say that, it seems like even if you weren't, it wouldn't be a good idea to say, no, what we really need is to do our best to keep the Soviet system together.
But that goes to show what's really going on behind the scenes and what the deep state is actually thinking.
And that was on the Yugoslavia breakup that he was particularly, you know, he discouraged it.
Don't break up, don't break up.
In fact, getting involved, I think, caused the problem and the war to be much worse than it would have because, of course, the U.S. then flip-flopped and began to, especially under Clinton, began to fan the flames of secessionism, to fan the flames of nationalism, Croats versus Serbs, et cetera, et cetera.
So we've actually, our intervention was wrong on both counts.
Yeah.
You know, the largest Spanish newspaper, you know, came out real strong, and they were actually saying it's Russia's fault.
They're the instigator.
And I figure, you know, it looks like it's Russia bashing time.
I don't even know if Russia has stated the position on this.
I think they have enough to worry about with Ukraine and a few other places closer to home.
But anyway, I thought it was interesting that Russia was being blamed.
But the European Union has taken a strong stand and, of course, it's philosophic and good.
We need unity and democracy.
We need order.
And so therefore, the European Union strongly opposes the separation.
And, you know, this is the other thing.
You know, we just had elections in Germany, which the mainstream media covers as, oh, well, Merkel won a fourth term.
That's not really not exactly what happened.
Both her conservative Christian Social Union, Christian Democratic Union, and the Social Democrats had the worst defeat they've had since the 40s.
Their share of the vote has gone down just dramatically.
And what's happened, the Alliance for Germany has cropped up out of nowhere with about 13% of the seats in parliament.
This, I think, reflects the undercurrents of what's happening in Europe.
This is the anti-Brussels movement.
This is Germany saying we've had enough of Merkel's refugee policy.
But I think this is the undercurrent.
And we saw it, you know, to a degree in France with Le Pen having a very good showing.
This is what's happening, and this is what Brussels is desperate, desperate to quelch, and the U.S. too.
Oh, I think you're absolutely right.
I think that is the movement.
We live in a time when the people are starting to believe there's no need for bigger and more intrusive government.
And it's sort of like it's an idea whose time has come, and the powerful governments and their military won't be able to stop it.
And unfortunately, though, they're going to try very hard, and it's going to be an attempt.
But this is not new for Catalonia.
Historically, this is an interesting story and also dangerous.
But they've been around for a couple thousand years, and even Roman days, they were fighting over this.
It must be a beautiful country, and their traditions must be something.
They have wealth and they have wonderful beaches, and also it's prized.
But they also are an independent people, actually have their own language.
But I think the significant part of the recent history is 1931 to 1939, because they became an independent republic in 1931.
And then, of course, the authoritarians got together and they weren't going to have this.
And that's when Franco came into power.
There was a three-year civil war.
And of course, Franco was aligned with the Nazis, and they participated in this.
And of course, in 1939, you know, the Catalonians were defeated and they became part of Spain again.
But this is a date that most people use that ushered in World War III.
I'm not quite sure that's the whole answer.
World War II.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
That's next time.
World War II ushered it in.
There were a lot of other factors, but a lot of historians picture this, that this was really the precipitating factor that really got the fighting going in Europe.
Yeah, and I think, as we were saying before, the show, because it reflected, I think, the undercurrents at the time, and we're seeing the same thing again.
And what we're seeing in Europe is the rise of the idea of secession, of subsidiarity, which of course has a long history in Europe.
You know, Germany had hundreds of little kingdoms, many kingdoms before it was unified, as did Italy and elsewhere.
So it's a return to this idea.
But we had the Scottish independence referendum.
We had the Brexit vote, as you mentioned earlier.
We have Budapest, Hungary, defying Brussels when it comes to being ordered to take refugees, which I think was a factor in the German elections.
So you do see this undercurrent going against Brussels, going against, and in favor of secession and subsidiarity, which it's hard to not share that.
Look how it was squashed in this country, you know, when there was a suggestion of secession.
And we know that history all too well.
But, you know, the other thing that should be of concern to those who are aggravating, thinking that, well, we'll just suppress this and we can do this, even if there's a little war going on.
We have more troops already in Catalonia than they have, and we can stomp out this idea.
But sometimes it's underestimated, especially if the people are ready for real change.
And I think that it won't necessarily work.
A little war to compel Catalonia to behave themselves may lead to a bigger one, sort of like even leading up into World War II.
But what about just our little wars that we fought?
The remaking of the Middle East.
Individual Sovereignty Matters 00:05:34
That's no problem.
I mean, what were they talking about?
Six months we could take care of Iraq and we could establish a republic and we could have the oil and just on and on.
And all of a sudden, after 16 years, it's worse off than ever.
So this is the reason why events like this can morph into something else that is much more serious than they think it is.
And I think the danger for Madrid, I think, is you probably have a lot of people in Catalonia who don't really have a strong opinion either way.
The polls earlier, they did a test run a while back and it was very high in favor of independence.
But you do have a lot of people probably sitting on the fence.
But when you see violence, if you see your crackdown, if you see Madrid coming in and ripping out the ballot boxes, I think you're going to get people becoming a lot more motivated by this.
They become a lot more interested in it.
Here's the foreign affairs chief from Catalonia.
Here's what he said.
And he talked about having the rhetoric on your side.
He said, there is no alternative.
There are two projects now on the table, a democratic project or repression.
Not a very good choice there, is it?
I mean, the dangerous choice.
So this is something, though, that I think is very serious.
And generally, as I said even yesterday when we talked about the Kurds, I think smaller units of government, I think individual sovereignty, I mean, sovereignty in the smaller units.
But ultimately, a libertarian believes in a lot about individual sovereignty, that we own our lives and the products of our labors.
And maybe there is a political entity, but only to protect the right of the individual to be sovereign himself or herself to be responsible and benefit from the fruits of their labor.
And of course, the demagogues and the socialists and the Marxists and the rest of them come in.
And because there has been pain and suffering from a group of people, like this morning I saw an article showing what portion of the country are really depressed in spite of all the wealth.
And that's easy to demagogue, but they were only talking about how are we going to curtail this person from making wealth raise taxes here because it's the discrepancy in wealth distribution.
But they never really talk about, well, maybe it's the economic system, maybe it's the lack of liberty, maybe it's the Federal Reserve system, maybe it's socialism and welfarism.
And just look at Puerto Rico, you know, here we're dealing with a socialist state that needs a huge bailout.
And are they really talking about why and what should be done?
No, they're talking about one thing.
Any type there is a time there's a complaint, whoever seems to be penalized from the system is more government, more spending, more interference, and more forced redistribution.
And that's been the whole problem because the system we have today has been responsible and it has been expected that if you have a system like ours, interventionism and welfareism, inflationism, you always set the standard of helping one group versus the other.
And the people, the super wealthy, get wealthier and the middle class gets smaller, but they don't question that.
They just say, well, we have to do more.
So unfortunately, in politics, they don't look at the real problems.
And they want to always seem to drift toward bigger government.
This hope we're right about suggesting that maybe the time has come and the people are going to be with us on this.
And I think essentially, I mean, there are many reasons for this movement, but essentially it is a tax revolt.
You know, they pay a disproportionate amount of taxes to Madrid and they don't get back as much.
So really it has its heart in that sort of thing.
You know, things are going around the world too.
This is not just these two places that we've talked about.
I think when people list them, big and small, and when people look at city encroachments on small communities around the cities, there's complaint about it, and towns are trying to break up because of the inefficiencies of big government.
But the Scottish would like to see a little bit of separation.
Venice would like to see some separation.
And how about even Quebec?
If you think about it, Quebec ought to be a natural, you know, because it's French and different language and all.
But there's no reason why it has to be violent, and there's no reason why it has to be this.
Why don't they just loosen up on the controls?
You know, and I've mentioned this many times before, is the suggestion by the founders wasn't such a bad suggestion.
Stay loosely knit and share in the prosperity and travel and in friendship, but not in assuming this centralized control and power and authoritarianism and war overseas.
They said, our founders said, stay out of wars overseas.
There's so many things that could be done, but I think you can have separation, at least move in that direction.
But so often it's never granted, and that's why actually I think the Catalonians are actually more angry now than ever, you know, when they hear about how much suppression is coming from the Spanish government.
Conspiracy and Improvement 00:01:10
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, you talked about Russia being blamed for being part of this.
We know they're blaming Russia for the German events, the German elections.
Maybe that's the case.
We'd have to see evidence.
But I do wonder whether our State Department and CIA are not involved in this referendum either.
Daniel, I have to say, you're so attuned to conspiracy.
And there's one thing that bothers me.
Too often you're right about those conspiracies.
But of course, you know, conspiracy has been made to be a bad term, but it's anticipation and understanding what the events are.
And when it's done secretly, then it's a conspiracy.
But I was told once that it's always a conspiracy of ideas that happens.
You know, the bad guys are conspiring.
And those of us who would like to see a different world, we conspire too.
Occasionally we get together and we have conferences and we conspire on ideological things on what we must do to improve the situation in this country and improve the opportunities for freedom and individualism as well.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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