The rattling of sabres, or at least the faint swish of steel stirring in scabbard, was heard in Spain this New Year for the first time in a quarter-century when Lieutenant-General José Mena commented at a public meeting that should the home-rule powers of the proposed new statute (or Estatut) for Catalonia overstep constitutional bounds, then the military had a duty to preserve the territorial integrity of Spain, by invoking Article 8 of the Constitution … the same tract that was brandished by Tejero and his 1981 golpistas in justification for the country’s most buffoonish indoor use of firearms since the young Prince Alfonso took a lethal .22 in the sole presence of his brother Juan Carlos back in 1956.

And so to the nervous, Mena appeared to be hinting at martial law in Catalonia, as if the autonomous community of seven million 21st century citizens - of Spain - constituted a mere colony of upstart natives. (In this case, according to one’s tribal allegiances, both the proud and the disparaging sense of the word ‘native’ apply.)

General Mena was the best Christmas present ever for countless catalanistas, joyously indignant at such a scarecrow stereotype, a rancid centralist right-winger they could not have hoped to caricature quite so credibly on their own. Adding to the media shrill was the emotive, nostalgia-rich lexicon of the coup d’etat: golpista, crispación, soberanía, pronunciamiento.

Mena, in command of a 50,000-strong ground force, was quickly arrested and later sacked, his replacement a Catalan speaker who lauded Spain’s diversity in his acceptance speech.

In the wake of the affair, the UK’s Financial Times, not usually a close observer of Spanish affairs, called for the Constitution to be amended, warning in conclusion that unless Article 8 is changed and its PP upholders are hushed, Spain is at risk of disintegration.

Others less glib and better informed, notably professor in constitutional law Francesc de Carreras, argue that Article 8 should remain - precisely because it defines and delimits the role of the military within the democratic framework.

A snide FT should have kept its off-the-cuff alarmist comments to itself: there is no risk of the army acting outside its brief. Gabriel Cardona, history lecturer and author of a book about the Spanish armed forces, insists that the generals would not consider acting without Defence Ministry instructions, and reckons that Mena’s sentiments are confined to a few of his peers in the cavalry, a notably conservative outfit by army standards. Security expert Fernando San Agustín considers the Mena pronunciamiento (if one can call a luke-warm and cagily prefaced reading of Article 8 un pronunciamiento) to be a bid for prestige for a military that nowadays, due to its present-day peacekeeping and humanitarian international role, feels like some kind of charitable NGO. Miquel Sellarès, president of the Catalan Strategic Studies Centre, points out that hardly any officers from Mena’s generation remain on the force, and younger officers are far less interested in regime politics than in developing their IT and English speaking skills.

A reading of recent history show that the ultras were losing weight within the officer corps since the early 70s: heads of staff sensibly quashed ultra demands for a violent clampdown following the assassination of Admiral Carrero Blanco and, the aberrations of the Tejero coup attempt and an easily-foiled 1982 plot apart, most ultra activity in the 70s and 80s was carried out by civilian groups of extremists, not by soldiers - raids on liberal-leaning bookshops in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona by groups such as the Fifth Adolf Hitler Command of the PENS (that’s right, they actually called themselves this back in the tacky Seventies), and violent attacks on lawyers who dared to defend workers. The group Defensa Universitaria terrorised students and lecturers who showed reformist tendencies. Town and country alike were rife with reactionary bully-boys out of uniform. Historian Paul Preston points out in The Politics of Revenge that civilian ultras of the era “frequently did work which a state hovering on the fringe of the EEC would find embarrassing to undertake itself”.

And here a likeness - in the “equal-but-opposite” manner that is often adduced to describe pendulum-swing Spanish/Catalan language repression - can be drawn with civilian catalanista thugs, the contingent the FT fails to identify as the truly anti-democratic element lurking behind separatist aspirations. Egged on by hate-fuelled opinion pieces in Avui newspaper (I’ll give some examples in a minute for readers who think I’m exaggerating) and encouraged by a refusal to condemn their actions on the part of ERC separatist party leadership, gangs of nationalist youths barely out of high school (and stuffed with an “education” conditioned by expressly catalanista schooling thanks to ethnocentric Generalitat employment laws just as partisan as Religious Education teachers being church-appointed) act with impunity to vandalise property, intimidate university lecturers and barrack public meetings.

So two points to bear in mind while Defence Minister José Bono douses inflamed imaginations by reminding us that military duty answers to civil powers and not the Catholic Monarchs: a military coup is not a realistic prospect and neither is a sovereign state called Catalonia.

In terms of commerce and of parliamentary politics, an independent Catalonia is just not on the cards: all except the most ardent catalanistas realise that the rest of Spain, representing 80-plus per cent of the market for Catalan goods and services, would shun more than just cava, and Catalonia’s lobbying force in Madrid would be a mere foreign ambassador rather than a power-balance contingent in the national Congress which has in the past successfully wrested major regional concessions in coalition with both González’s PSOE and Aznar’s PP. The broad Catalan middle class doesn’t have the stomach or the pocket for independence; La Caixa savings bank, for instance, now has more branches elsewhere in Spain than in Catalonia itself, and net contributions from Catalonia to the EU, based on GDP, would cut into the coffers quite as much as Catalonia’s so called deficit fiscal with the rest of (poorer) Spain. Indeed, one of the ironies never explained in Avui newspaper or on TV3 is that the finance adjustments attending Catalan independence would shift Europe’s centre of gravity further east and away from Catalonia - yet such is the sourness of Spain’s tribal malaleche that one catalanista I enjoy talking to claims he would rather see his taxes go to Poland than to Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra’s Extremadura.

So what we have in the meantime - and we’ll have more of if the new Estatut comes to pass - is ethnic privilege and repression in Catalonia, enshrined already in Generalitat competencias and continually justified by catalanista media’s unrealisable and disingenuous victim-claim to a phantom independence. Freedom of speech is routinely denied by the simple exclusion of dissident views, and ethnic repression is stoked by an identity-based rhetoric cranked up decibel by decibel during the Pujol years so skilfully that its tribalistic absurdity has gradually become orthodoxy to the denizens of what is often called the Catalan Oasis.

Voices in the wilderness which decry this state of affairs are sent to Coventry, or worse: the Ciutadans de Catalonia group, a nascent political party sick to the back teeth of the paragraph above, have been repeatedly barracked at their public meetings by nationalist youths while hundreds in the audience must wait an hour for the Mossos (Catalan police force) to request the yobs to kindly leave, and only after they have used the forum to chant their separatist hymn. Imagine the outcry - and rapid police intervention - were these to be falangists disrupting an Esquerra Republicana assembly. Members of Ciutadans de Catalonia have had death threats made against them proudly published in Avui and never apologised for.

Voices pointing out these blackshirt tactics become targets for official sanctions - the Catalan media watchdog CAC hasn’t prevented the Godo Group or Flaix from illegally broadcasting their TV channels in Barcelona, yet threatens Cope radio with fines of a third of a million for daring to criticise Catalan nationalist abuses in suitably tabloid terms. Under Generalitat law, CAC doesn’t need to bother with democratic niceties such as a court hearing in order to scythe down critical media groups.

While Cope must show “respect” for Catalan nationalists, Avui columnist Iu Forn can call soldiers’ mothers “whores”, Avui columnist Salvador Sostres lumps Spanish speakers together as “illiterate tramps”, and Avui columnist Oriol Mallo can demand a pistol shot to the heads of academics, novelists and playwrights who object to Catalan ethnocracy.

The 20th anniversary last month of the death of Terra Lluira Catalan terrorist Quim Sánchez, who blew himself up with a home-made bomb, was celebrated in a homage with poetry; JERC, the youth wing of Carod Rovira’s Esquerra Republicana, proudly states its support of Jarrai, Haika and Segi, illegal pro-ETA organisations listed as terrorists by the EU; television actor and scriptwriter Joel Joan is celebrated for trying to shut down an Italian restaurant in Barcelona which employs a non-Catalan-speaking waiter.

This kind of divisive nonsense doesn’t call for martial law, it requires rule of law to be coolly and impartially applied. And the risk with the new statute, FT please take note, is not impending cessation; it lies in far-from-disinterested lawmaking by a regional parliament that has hijacked governance for the furtherance of favoured institutions, including the preposterously over-funded regional media, and a few thousand rent-seeking families draped in the emperor’s garb of nationalism. It is increasingly evident that the real victims of giant-sized Catalan nationalism are not the Extremadurans or the Madrileños, but the mottled majority of Catalonia’s own citizens. As economist Clemente Polo Andrés puts it in El País newspaper: “The wholesale backing in [Catalan] parliament for the statute only goes to show the urgent need for some kind of representation for the legitimate interests and aspirations of Spaniards in the autonomous community of Catalonia”.