This wonderful creature, able to devour itself and kill with its gaze, seems to us the most appropriate symbol of this tormented 78-year regime. Evidence of the transformation of the 1978 regime into an institutional cathoblepass is everywhere. But perhaps no trial is more abhorrent than the one that just took place in the Supreme Court against state Attorney General Álvaro Garcia Ortiz, and has yet to be decided. A trial in which the defendant is the Director of Public Prosecutions. And there we see prosecutors acting as defense attorneys for defendants, prosecutors filing common charges, prosecutors testifying as witnesses, and acting as career prosecutors in court. Can you imagine a more tragic picture of autophagy? The Catoblepas imagined by Plinio and Flaubert is just a novice next to this trial, which will prove the toxic and purulent nature of the 1978 regime, which transformed the public prosecutor’s office, an institution that should act independently of political power as a guarantee of legitimacy, into an institution that functions at the behest of power, trampling all procedural guarantees. And it is not satisfied with just degrading the institution until it turns into feces, but turns the prosecutors themselves into coprophages who devour each other. It is shocking to think that Minister Buñuelos intended to hand over control of criminal proceedings to that degraded public prosecutor’s office.
But institutional cathoblepass doesn’t stop there. During the trial, Dr. Sánchez had no qualms about granting an interview to the state attorney general to declare his innocence “urbi e orbi,” putting unbearable pressure on the Supreme Court justices. He unleashed a dog pack of toxic reporters against the Supreme Court justices, who had been attacking them for months in advance. As a curious bystander in the sewers that idiots call the “rule of law,” I am surprised that these statements of Dr. Sanchez did not cause a scandal. And it is scary that the Judges Association and the so-called General Council of the Judiciary have not publicly condemned them. Is it possible to have a political system in which the president of the government declares a prisoner innocent or guilty without waiting for a court’s decision and without being punished by an addicted media? Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a lower level of populism, or a more abusive intervention in the judicial arena.
Another example of the institutional cathoblepass promoted by the 1978 regime is exemplified by the sorry state of state journalism, which has ceased to fulfill its mission of external control of power and has become a mere overreach. The trial is also a devastating example of the level of subordination and humiliation of state journalism, which sought to present the trial as a threat to “freedom of the press” (“lissum teniatis”), as if journalists’ “professional secrecy” was a kind of security guarding their collusion with and cover-up of crimes while exempting them from the obligation to cooperate with the judiciary. But it so happens (and this is also a “feat” achieved by that monster Catoblepas, the regime of 78 years) that the Spaniards, fueled by the filth offered to them in the ideological negotiations of the left and the right, are engaged in a vile demogresca. In this way, half the country wants the verdict to be acquittal and the other half to be guilty. But few people want to know whether the state’s attorney general leaked individuals’ personal information to attack political opponents, either on Dr. Sanchez’s orders or to gain credit for him.
However, the Catobrepas of 1978 succeeded in turning the Spanish people into anti-social people sick with democracy, fighting duels with clubs, accepting partisan slogans that reduce democracy to slavery, and hating the truth that makes democracy free. Meanwhile, the campaign to discredit the state attorney general’s case is at its peak, with the judge openly presented as a predeterminer (thus, for example, the attorney general’s defense has not hesitated to disqualify him from investigating the case). At the same time, it seeks to spread the belief among a cretinized public that no one can be convicted on circumstantial evidence. All of this is an attempt to justify unthinkable abuse in case the verdict in this case is not what Dr. Sanchez and his mariachis intended. If the Supreme Court’s verdict is guilty, Catoblepas is ready to accept the final mandate, definitive autophagy. I don’t think so to appease the beast. But once this surrender is complete, the beast will be able to kill us with its gaze after devouring itself.
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