Since today is April 25th, National Day of the Valencian Country, I wanted to share this.
Video by alfonselblue on Instagram, English subtitles added by me.
If you are wondering why that man on TV (who is a famous fascist, by the way) compares people who simply speak their mother language to Hitler's Brownshirts, there is not much to be explained because there is no sense in it. People speaking a language can in no way be compared to genocide.
Catalan/Valencian (two names for the same language) has been persecuted and illegalized by fascist regimes, we have survived an ethnocide but there are still people doing their best to finish the job. The people who still believe it's an inferior language that should be eradicated make up all kinds of lies about it and its speakers, born from their hatred. For the last 8 or 10 years more or less, some of them have started saying that it's Nazi for people to speak Catalan/Valencian because that is excluding Spanish people, and instead Catalan/Valencian should die and its speakers should always switch to Spanish which is the "international language". This was extremely shocking when they started saying it because the movement for the right to speak Catalan/Valencian has always been part of anti-fascism, and fascist dictatorships have strongly persecuted the language. But they keep repeating it and repeating it, they will say anything as long as it paints Catalan/Valencian people (and other minorities like Basques and Galicians) in bad light and makes switching to being monolingual Spanish speakers sound like the only viable option for the future.
They will say that we should abandon our "useless, illiterate, backwards" language and "for our own good" or "for the good of our children" pass down only Spanish, which is the "international" and prestigious language. But they will never bother to ask: Why is Spanish "international" (spoken in so many countries)? Why do we Catalans/Valencians speak it in the first place? Only as a consequence of imperialism and fascist imposition.