Actually yes. A democracy is there to specifically not just adhere to any whim any minority might have. That's why there are votes that are decided by a majority. If you go against that democratic principle you will end up in a shitshow like the US where the minority decides who will ruin the country next.

You still haven't told us though how the Catalanians are oppressed. What will terrible thing will happen to them if they don't get their own country?

Yeah, claiming that we're going deep into fascism is a stretch, but remember that we have people being fined for making comments in Facebook about the police.

True that, true that... we also have some ongoing judges at tribunals that should be fired at this point.

Yeah, but somehow those aren't the ones that end up being replaced. I wonder why?

I have 137 theories about why.

You're correct. If certain individuals listened to the police, force wouldn't be necessary.
I'm sure the police didn't run towards them and started hitting them without giving them a chance to go home (or somewhere else) first. Resist and you're getting thrown out of the polling station or aren't allowed to get in.

This wasn't addressed at me, but anyway. That's one of the weaknesses of democracy, and it's called tyranny of the majority. As long as there's democracy, there will be tyranny of the majority. They're fundamentally together, whether you like it or not. Democracy sucks, but as far as I know, every other form of government sucks even more.

If millions do something illegal, that's a huge societal issue that needs to be dealt with - and probably relatively quickly. At that point, it doesn't even matter if it's illegal or not, but suppressing illegal activity of such scale using force becomes pretty difficult without making the lives of millions of people miserable. If millions do something illegal, it sounds more like a problem in the way things are rather than in what the people are doing.

Quebec had a referendum to leave Canada twice. More people voted to stay (just barely) but I think if the Canadian police started wacking people with sticks who voted to leave they would have declared their independence by now. Catalonia reminds me of Quebec.

I do understand that Spain does not want Catalonia to become independent. I also understand that the referendum is pretty much illegal so it is not worth anything.

The big problem here is how Spain handled the situation. Beating up voters and using tons of violence is ridiculous. That the level of repression is only increasing the amount of support that the separatist movement gets.

I think that Spain should just have labeled the voting illegal, but not using force to try to avoid it from happening. Just let people vote and then say that the result is not valid. Without the use of violence the support that the movement would get would be weaker and it would be easier to just ignore it and probably a lengthy legal battle would try to determine who is correct, time would pass and people would kind of forget about it. It could be that simple.

They just made the population really stop to think if they want to be treated in such a manner and I believe that now the separatist movement really is a thing.

As a side note, that was not Fascism at all. This is probably one of the most misused terms of all time. To be fascist, you have to basically become an almost communist state, but replacing the concept of class conflict with a extreme idolization of the state. Communism tries to make the state absorb all means of production, while Fascism leaves them to the private sector but regulates it heavily so they only serve the interests of the state. It is a type of anti-communism that operates quite differently but reaches almost the same grim results.

A better title would be: "Why is there no thread about Spain reverting to violent repression?"

Trying to oppress a group that wants self-determination is stupid. Imagine if the UK government did that to the Scottish vote, I have no doubt that Scotland would've become independent.

On the other hand, not attacking people and instead offering legitimate reasons why staying with the original country is preferable gets better results. Even if a vote is carried out and the results want to secede, it's likely that only a small percentage of the population would even care to vote (obviously the most nationalistic ones who want to secede no matter what), which can easily make the results void in the eyes of most countries.