Josep Ramon Bosch has been exploiting to its fullest the anonymity of the web. Apart from using an anonymous Facebook account for threats, also set up by the president of Societat Civil Catalana. Several experts followed the leads provided by the first Facebook entries in 2012 and found a great amount of fascist propaganda material, including several videos with the voice of Josep Ramon Bosch himself. As a consequence of the information published yesterday, the YouTube user eliminated all his videos -which we reuploaded to El Món’s YouTube channel- however leaving a perfectly recognisable trail.
This YouTube channel is registered under the username Josep Codina, which points directly to Bosch, since his full name is Josep Ramon Bosch i Codina. This account, created 7 January 2011, held seven videos, six of which had been uploaded by the user (the last one on 30 April 2014), while the other was a link to a video uploaded by another person. This video is an interview with Josep Ramon Bosch on the program El Cascabel of 13TV, a commercial TV station. Ironically, at minute 15:00 of this interview Josep Ramon Bosch says: “Esquerra Republicana [a leftwing pro independence party] is not leftist. Esquerra Republicana is pure fascism.”
Support for Francoism
Two of the videos stand out because at the beginning of each of them there is a voiceover. These videos are about the Carlist military unit Tercio of Our Lady of Montserrat, which fought together with the Francoist troops during the Spanish Civil War. In the first video, titled “Terç de Nostra Senyora de Montserrat”, there is a 35 second voice-over with a voice that is very similar to that of Josep Ramon Bosch. The videos continues with the old version of the Catalan national anthem Els Segadors, sung by Rafael Subirachs. In the images we can see some of religious origin, like the Saint Andrew’s Cross used by the Carlists, Spanish flags with the words “Visca Catalunya! Amunt Espanya!” (Long Live Catalonia! Onward Spain!), even a map of the Catalan Countries, followed by photos and names of Francoist combatants. The video ends with a picture of the monument dedicated to the combatants of the Tercio in Vilalba dels Arcs (Terra Alta, Catalonia). This is the same monument we can see in a photograph of another founder member of SCC and its precursor organsation Somatemps, Javier Barraycoa, in an event organised by the Comunión Tradicionalista Carlista, of which Barraycoa is one of the leaders in Catalonia (Photo: Barraycoa, kneeing in front of the cross of this monument).
The other video with what appears to be Bosch’s voice-over is titled “Terç de Nostra Senyora de Montserrat IIa part.wmv” (i.e. the second part to the above mentioned video). It starts with the Carlist slogan “Catalunya foral, espanyola i carlina” and follows the same tone as the first video, showing Carlist combatants, Spanish flags and Francoist monuments.
Forensic analysis to determine who is the narrator of the videos
El Món contacted ForensicLab, the laboratory of forensic linguistics of the University Pompeu Fabra (UPF, Barcelona), with which the association of lawyers Drets has an agreement of collaboration. A representative of the lab told El Món that it will undertake a thorough phonetic analysis into the probability of the voice in those two videos matching that of Bosch, based on recordings of his voice in SCC events made by Drets. The representative, however, pointed out that the result would be conditioned by the shortness of the voice-overs.
Additionally, El Món has ordered a preliminary study on the possibility of coincidence of the voice samples, using a program called Easy Voice Biometrics. The result was that the degree of coincidence between the voice samples of the video and the voice of Josep Ramon Bosch is quite high, over 70%. This high degree of coincidence, even taking into account the differences between read and spontaneous expressions, added to the first impression of hearing a deep and sonorous voice much like Bosch’s, are added reasons to doubt Bosch’s assertion that the Facebook account mentioned in yesterday’s article has nothing to do with him.
Support for Nazism
The other videos follow the same ideological pattern of revisionism from the point of view of a Hispanic Catalanism, represented by an extreme rightist current of which Bosch is one of the leading figures. They show well-known Catalans with links to the Franco regime, such as Dalí and Pla. These videos, however, do not have a voice-over. One of them, titled “Anticomunism”, is especially frightening. It is a clear homage to Nazism of a duration of about 9 minutes.
To better understand the nazi symbolism used in this video, El Món contacted Roger Suso, a journalist living in Germany who is specialised in right-wing movements there. Among other things, Suso highlighted the music. One of the songs used for this video is Erika, known for having been used for marches during the Third Reich. The second song is in Italian and of unknown origin, the third is the SS Marschiert, used for Waffen-SS parades.
This video shows many images of officers of the Waffen-SS, the elite combat corps of the SS, the security organisation of the Nazi party during the Second World War. Among the officers shown is, for instance, Ernst Barkman (minute 9:16). Barkmann was a famous commander of the tank division Panther on the Eastern Front, at the battle of Kharkiv, and in Normandy. After the war he became the head of the fire brigade in his native village Kisdorf, where he was mayor for the local CDU from 1976 until 1994. He died as a free man in 2009, never having been judged for war crimes.
The video also includes posters of the Croatian Ustasha, an organisation allied to the Nazis led by Ante Pavelic and known for having committed massacres against Jews, Serbs, Roma and partisans during WWII. Pavelic died in 1959 in Madrid, having been granted refuge by Franco. There are also other posters, such as those of the División Azul and other organisations of Norwegian, British, French and Italian volunteers; all adorned with Nazi crosses, SS runes or the Totenkopf symbol. The maker of this video has certainly some degree of knowledge about nazi iconography, its history and myths.
