Jordi Cuixart’s presumed cognitive distortion

As many of you know, the Spain’s Public Prosecution in Barcelona has filed an appeal against the second permit to be granted to the president of Òmnium, Jordi Cuixart, by the Lledoners prison’s assessment board. Some days ago, Jordi Cuixart had his first 48-hour leave permit. Now, since it is a 72-hour leave permit, the decision of the assessment board is not sufficient and it needs the agreement of the prison’s supervision court’s judge, which this latter may grant after hearing the public prosecutor’s and the defense’s views. And this is where the scandal has leapt: the public prosecutor has qualified the possible permit to Cuixart, this leave, as a ‘premature, unjustified and improper’ one.

It is more than possible, but this is just a deduction of mine for which I have no evidence, that the public prosecution would already have opposed to the two-day leave had it been necessary to ask for its views. I state this because the prosecutor argues that the permit should not be granted because of the ‘non-assumption of the criminal facts and the lack of repentance’ and adds that this is proven by the sentence ‘We will do it again’, which the president of Òmnium uttered in the chamber where he was being tried by the Supreme Court. If the matter was not clear enough, the prosecution –and remember that Pedro Sánchez left it crystal clear during the election campaign that it depended on him– compares Jordi Cuixart to a killer or a sexual offender and explicitly states it would grant no leave permit to those, should they say they would not re-offend again.

But, just in case the public prosecutor had not uttered enough nonsenses, the peroration ends by stating that Jordi Cuixart ‘needs a medical treatment to get over the cognitive distortions resistant to change’ which he suffers, according to him. And he further stresses that these cognitive distortions sum up in the fact that ‘he does not acknowledge that the facts of September 20th 2017 were violent, as the sentence recalls’. Having said all that, the man is pleased with himself stating that, as long as he does not ‘respect the penal law’, he should not set foot outside the prison.

I cannot say the nonsenses uttered by the public prosecution surprise me. The whole acting of the Spanish state since September 20th 2017, or since 2014 –when the decision was made of investigating the independence process, as it has been more than proven–, has been triggered by the vengeance, the violence of the punishment and the violation of rights that are acknowledged even to a killer or to a sexual offender, to continue the comparison made by the character in question. But saying publicly and in writing that a political prisoner suffers a ‘cognitive distortion’ because he keeps pursuing the same goal for which he is in prison means making a fool of oneself in the most solemn manner: that is precisely why he is in politics, for heck’s sake! And it is making a fool of oneself, too, and this is the most worrying fact, to show to which point the State’s apparatus is deeply reactionary and antidemocratic, not even realizing it uses arguments worthy of the worst dictatorships the history of mankind has known.

Because, technically, a cognitive distortion is defined as a form of error in the process of information that causes an emotional distress and that leads the individual to developing dysfunctional moods like phobias, depression, self-esteem problems and obsessions. Technically, the reaction to a cognitive distortion is a therapy to help the patient to develop alternative thoughts and alternative ways of thinking and acting in front of the situation that is problematic for him in the real world. Basically, it’s about making him challenge those models of the world that cause problems to the patient and to help him find solutions to his problems that were not in his model of thinking. With which thing the patient should get to see by himself that it is not that there are no solutions, but that he had not seen the solutions ordinary people had seen and he was the only one not seeing.

I hope I have explained the whole thing accurately enough so the atrocity of the public prosecutor’s thinking, and by extension the Spanish government’s, becomes obvious. To which extent such a position is aberrant.

Knowing how the Spanish state functions, I cannot deny the possibility of the public prosecutor having simply used the formula without giving it any thought or understanding its meaning. But, whichever way it is, what he says is terribly worrying and dangerous. Because it means reducing a political ideology to a disease, and proposing it should be treated as a disease which, therefore, must be healed. Because which can be the logical perspective being opened by such a barbaric insinuation, if not to propose the ‘sanitation’ of the Catalan population, with the extermination, in the name of public health, of the independentist thinking? And where does this lead, if not to the form of society more totalitarian and aberrant the mankind has known in its history? What a scandal, what a huge scandal…

[Translated by Marisa Raich from the @CatalanWay_ team]