In 2017 some leaders in Catalonia decided to allow people to vote for independence from Spain. The entire thing ended up in a lot of violence, particularly from the side of the Spanish police who was deployed to basically destroy this voting initiative. I was in Catalonia at that time. I remember it was a lot of violence of that sort.

videos.trom.tf/w/rfdBrDfQ1MQdb…

Of course people should be able to decide if they want to be independent, and not have their heads smashed by the police for trying to vote for independence, but all that considered, everyone is free to speak Catalan in Catalonia, express their cultural traditions, and so forth. The school is primarily in Catalan. Everything is in Catalan first or Catalan only. No Catalan is treated differently from a Spaniard.

So why do they want independence now?

Money? Politics? The hope that if Catalonia becomes a nation then their living standards will be higher and their culture will be more important? Their language has more chances of being preserved?

A hope for a better life if they become independent maybe?

It is hard to see how this can be the case because being an “independent” tribe is hardly doable today. Your stuff, imports and exports, media, tourism, the trade society itself, will push and pull on your language, society and culture and morph them in the process. Just like it does now. Look at the “island nation UK” who has 0 neighbors basically, is independent, is a bloody island. And yet many there complain about their culture loss, immigration, difficult living conditions, etc.. Being independent, your own tribe, is hardly a shield that can preserve your culture.

But since this Catalonian region went through a lot, it also changed in the process. Is like someone kidnapped a kid from Japan at age 8, takes her to US where she grows up. Then at the age of 40 she is free from the kidnapper. But when she returns to Japan she realizes she is not simply the same 8 year old Japanese girl. And Japan is also a different place. She speaks English and was enculturated into the American tribe.

Is she Japanese still? And what does that mean? Things have changed, and she needs to embrace her new identity.

The Catalan language is quite similar to the Spanish one nowadays because they have merged in many ways. There are so many foreigners here too from the rest of Europe but also South America. Spanish is spoken by more people in Catalonia than Catalan. Catalonia is a different girl, and no one is saying she has to forget the past trauma, but she cannot come back to before the trauma. She needs to embrace her new identity.

Snippet from Culture Cancer - tromsite.com/2026/07/culture-c…

#catalonia #catala #catalans #spain #independence #tromarticles #trom

The Catalans experienced a sort of stage 3-4 Culture Cancer in their past.

Between 1939 and 1975 Catalonia was under the dictatorship of Franco. A terrible idiot ruling over the entire Spain, but who was particularly anti Catalonia and anything that has to do with Catalonia. He was violent and banned the Catalonian language, alongside other languages in Spain. Only the Spanish language was accepted!

No one in Catalonia was allowed to write books in Catalan, even speak Catalan. They were under a complete siege. A total destruction of their culture is what this douchebag wanted.

In one of the Catalonian towns they shouted: “Catalan dogs! You are not worthy of the sun that shines on you.”

Needless to say Franco’s hatred against Catalans was nuclear. Many got killed, most of them oppressed and imprisoned. Fear, anxiety, how the fuck can you live like this?

Luckily after nearly 4 decades of terror that idiot died and with him his powers. Catalonia regained its culture, language, institutions, a regional independence and so on. For several decades they have tried to unglue themselves from this Spaniffication.

As you can see there was a lot of trauma when it comes to the people living in Catalonia.

So maybe this is the reason why some people in Catalonia are so desperate to hold onto their language and culture, and as a result marginalize the outsiders?

Snippet from Culture Cancer - tromsite.com/2026/07/culture-c…

#catalonia #catalan #catala #history #spain #culture #trom #tromaticles

The height of the hypocrisy of holding tight to your own culture and land is the fact that ALL inventions, research and human knowledge that is at the basis of any society, all of that comes from people from all around the world.

Without the British Isaac Newton we would not understand how objects move on this planet, maybe we would be unable to build many of the infrastructure of our modern cities.

Nuclear energy, modern cosmology, or GPS technology would not be possible without the US German immigrant Albert Einstein who studied in Switzerland.

Would we have telescopes or even the modern science without the Italian Galileo Galilei? Or medicine and healthcare without the French Louis Pasteur?

The Internet, gadgets, buildings and blueprints, discoveries and experiments, are all a mush of work being done by humans from all around the world, from different tribes. So it is astonishingly hypocritical and primitive to “hold onto your own tribe, your own culture” as if you did anything for it or it belongs to a particular group of people.

#science #culture #tromarticles #trom #tromsite

Ideas revolving around religion, family, sexual orientation, and so forth, have been changing and mutating a lot over the years. What was once prohibited in one culture has become the norm in the same culture, and vice versa. From women being allowed to vote, to gay marriage, or the separation of religion from state. In our book “Morality and Ethics” we showcase how the norms, traditions and what it was accepted as “normal” in the past, changed over millennia, from culture to culture.

Therefore any discussion about “our culture, language, traditions” should always be put under the powerful light of history in order to understand that these “things” are remixes at best, and will always be. This, I think, is crucial in order for us, humans, to be able to have relevant discussions about them, without being too emotionally entangled with them. To put everything into a historical, and realistic, perspective.

Snippet from Culture Cancer - tromsite.com/2026/07/culture-c…

#culture #culturecancer #trom #tromsite #tromarticles #traditions

Have you heard of the vulgar-latin? That’s Catalan.

In other words a “vulgar”, non Latin, or “bad” Latin language. Because, of course, all languages are mixes of previous languages. We wrote a 600 pages book about the evolution of languages where we explain in detail how there is no such thing as Spanish, Catalan, English and so forth. Languages are in a constant movement and are comprised, just like those “sarmale” food, of many kinds of flavors. Catalan, French, Romanian, Italian and so forth, are languages that have evolved from Latin. And Latin evolved from other language(s).

To my Catalans readers, to put it simply, the Catalan language (and this applies for every single language) is this:

ONE:

A “bad” version of another language that over time mutated into its own language.

By “bad” I mean people will start to speak an official language (like Latin) in different ways (accents, new words, new ways to write it, etc.) and in the beginning this is considered as “bad” since it deviates from the “rules of the current language”.

But this “bad” will become the “rule”, just as the “rule” was also “bad” at some point. That’s how languages evolve.

TWO

A language that stole words from other languages. Directly, shamelessly, and constantly.

Do you know how Catalans call the “Internet”? Well, “internet”. Inter-Net. Borrowed from the Americans.

Catalan, like all languages, is full of these stolen words, expressions, and meanings.

THREE

A language that is vastly different from its own origins.

The Catalan that was spoken hundreds of years ago is vastly different from the one spoken today.

That’s the case with every single language.

#catalan #catala #language #trom #tromsite #catalonia

In the same sense that there are many tribes who speak the same language but have vastly different cultures, there are tribes with totally different languages, but their cultures are very similar. I was born in Romania and my friend Roma was born in Russia. Romania and Russia look so alike culturally that it is quite eerie. The buildings, food, attitudes, even the babushkas. But the languages are vastly different.

For example we call this “traditional Romanian food” as “sarmale”:

My mother always makes it for all of the important Romanian holidays. If you search online for “Romanian national holiday” plus the word “food”, you’ll see this dish as the main one. So this is a Romanian dish!

Well that’s what I thought. Turns out that Roma knows this food very well and he calls it “Голубцы”. He says it might be Russian. But Wikipedia tells me that is a traditional food from the “Ottoman cuisine”.

But the fact is that this “sarmale” food is not a “thing”, but a “flavor of things”. Some “sarmale” are made with meat and rice, some just rice, some with cabbage leafs and some with grape leafs. Different condiments. Cooked differently. They differ today from tribe to tribe, and even within the same tribe.

So is this “sarmale” food Romanian? Russian? No. Nothing is.

Snippet from Culture Cancer - tromsite.com/2026/07/culture-c…

#food #culture #romania #russia #trom #tromsite #traditions