Amother thing I hate is the idea that if a work of literature narrates the experiences of a victimized group, it cannot possibly be of a low artistic quality. 

There are crowds of writers who do veritable torture porn of pathetic literary quality on the subject of Spain’s Civil War Republicans. The crap they churn out is commercially successful because everybody loves a good tear-jerker but I’m tired of the idea that any criticism of this swill means you sympathize with fascists. 

Spain’s protest movement failed to achieve anything worthwhile. The same party of austerity is in power, and its leadership is as proud of austerity measures as ever. Protest movements have failed in all countries of advanced consumerism because consumers make for disengaged, indifferent citizens.

You’ve all heard me say this before but the reason why I’m repeating it is that I can’t say this in my research. In Humanities, we have a severe censorship that doesn’t allow us to depart from the accepted line of thought on many issues. For instance, anything that departs even a bit from a complete, slavish idealization of protest movements (refugees, ETA, Catalan independence seekers, etc) is censored out. 

Maybe one can publish something a bit diverging from the party line in Spain if one finds an ideologically less leftist academic journal. Maybe one can publish something like this in the UK if one finds a quirky editor. On this continent, however, this options don’t exist. 

The censorship exists because people are sincerely convinced that questioning the party line and saying, even in a casual conversation, things like “Don Quixote is a work of art and Justin Bieber’s songs aren’t” or “there is a lot more sexism in Latin America than in the US” cannot possibly come from a place of reason. I saw a group of academics flatly refuse to accept the story of a colleague who had lived in the Basque Country and experienced terror because of ETA’s activities. The accepted line is that the etarras walk on water and evil Civil Guards unfairly victimize them. Good luck to that colleague with publishing her research on the subject in North America.