Was going to say. I’m American and that’s the only region of Spain I’ve been to. I was told about the independence movement from a variety of Catalan people, most were for it. I did not encounter a whiff of racism or fascism in their arguments. They mainly felt no connection to the government in Madrid and that it didn’t represent them fairly, and that attitude went back to the civil war. Only once did I encounter anyone being unfriendly towards me due to being American and that was in Barcelona. All of the rural Catalan people were extremely friendly, welcoming and generous.

I went to a concert that had a Catalan pro-independence band that was in Barcelona. I didn’t understand the lyrics but I was told that the message was generally more in line with punk rock, which is the opposite of fascism.

These are just my anecdotes as an outsider who spent six weeks in the region, I don’t pretend to really understand the issue overall. But the argument the first Spanish guy was saying didn’t match my experience remotely