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—“Some gentlemen asked to break up Spain;
others wanted a revolution, all wanted to destroy Christian culture.
And that was what was fought for in the [Spanish civil] war.
Some in favor and others to prevent it and those who prevented it won.
“That was what allowed Spain to become a united and prosperous country again.”
—“There was not a single democrat in Franco's prisons.”
—“Democracy comes from Francoism and all threats to it come from anti-Francoism.”
—“What was the reason for the collaboration with the terrorist group?
The underlying ideological affinity between the PSOE and ETA, something evident.
The PSOE and the ETA were and are socialist parties, radically anti-Franco, supporters of memory laws, gender laws, etc.”
The author of these statements, Pío Moa, paradigm of so-called historical revisionism, has sold tens of thousands of books.
In 38 years he has written more than 40. In 2006 he published five.
In 2007, another four.
He is so prolific that the titles often resemble each other, as is the case with
Adiós a un tiempo
(2023) and
De un tiempo y de un country
(2002) or
El derrumbe de la II República y la Guerra Civil (2001);
1936, the final assault on the Republic (
2005) and
The Republic that ended in the Civil War
(2006).
In addition to this editorial frenzy, Moa, a former member of GRAPO, has a blog, a weekly space on a radio station, is a regular fan of the favorite television products of the extreme right and has been summoned to give talks in public libraries by councilors of Vox, a party that also invited him to a conference in Catalonia and that replicates his theses.
“This is the worst Government in 80 years,” its leader, Santiago Abascal, declared in the Congress of Deputies: literally, with Franco we lived better.
The association Pie en pared, of which, among others, Juan Carlos Girauta and Marcos de Quinto (former members of Ciudadanos), Esperanza Aguirre, of the PP, and Alejo Vidal-Quadras (founder of Vox), also included him in a talk titled “The historical denialism of the PSOE”, held, in this case, at a university, the San Pablo-CEU.
An undeserved honor to present Don Pío Moa in #Majadahonda by organizing as Councilor for Children and Family the event
Young people have come with their parents, this is how we encourage a critical spirit as they listen to a novel approach to the history of Spain
👏 goal achieved!
pic.twitter.com/1SPZ9aSusL
— José Rodríguez Cuadrado (@JRCuadradoV) December 13, 2019
“To make Franco's biography or
The Spanish Holocaust
,” recalls Hispanist Paul Preston, “I invested more than 10 years of research.
In fact, I continued to add information in later years.
And like me, Julián Casanova, Enrique Moradiellos, Ángel Viñas… in short, all serious historians.”
To all of them and some more, Moa also dedicated one of his books,
Gallery of Charlatans
(2022).
When Casanova, professor of contemporary history, regretted, in an article in EL PAÍS, that José María Aznar had turned to Moa, “who is not a historian,” to “counteract the 'myths' of historians whom he never needed to read", the aforementioned replied: "In 2002, Aznar and his party of gentlemen allowed themselves to condemn the uprising of July 18 that freed Spain from disintegration and Sovietization.
Which shows that, contrary to what Casanova says, Aznar did read the historiographic garbage of the memoriadores and, what is worse, he swallowed it whole.
The first president of the PP had confessed that among his readings was
The Myths of the Civil War
, Moa's great hit.
Esfera de los Libros reissued it last year.
The promotional note ensures that it is “one of the best-selling works of history in recent years, with 53 editions and more than 300,000 copies.”
His translation into French and a controversial interview with the author in
Le Figaro
caused a stir and protests from the newspaper's own journalists.
In a video, the newspaper came to accept Moa's thesis that it was the socialists who started the Civil War.
France was scandalized by something that happened in Spain every Saturday morning, when Moa collaborates on the radio.
"What the socialists wanted was to break up Spain," says Pío Moa #negacionismohistorico #PSOE pic.twitter.com/4VEXPqKAq7
— FOOT ON WALL (@pie_en_pared) November 7, 2023
They are called revisionists, but the experts interviewed for this report, all of them authors of reference works on the Civil War and the dictatorship, warn of the misuse of the term.
“To call them that,” Preston says, “is to give them a gravitas that they lack.
What the historian does is continually review his work.
They are more like propagandists.
They launch sensational statements for commercial and political purposes.
There are people who still dislike people speaking ill of Franco and that happens because the dictatorship was a 40-year brainwashing process.
But all these books that whitewash Francoism deny what is already an irrefutable truth.
There are very serious investigations into Franco's repression in every town, city and province.
Saying that that didn't exist or that it wasn't a big deal is insulting.
And not only for the investigators who have made it their life's work, but for the families of the victims.”
“One thing,” adds Casanova, “is revision and quite another is revisionism, which is a disease within historiography.”
“The past,” recalls Ángel Viñas, “is incommensurable.
Does not exist.
What the historian does is approach with a flashlight and shine light on the archives, the sources that help you explain why what happened happened.
But these people are not interested in documents, sources, research... they only have opinions.”
The phenomenon is growing, thanks to or in parallel with the presence of Vox.
“Revisionism,” continues Casanova, “is a translation of what happens in politics to historiography.
Before it was the other way around: history was used politically.
“All this started when we published
The Hidden Past
[one of the first major works on Franco's repression], it grew as a result of the opening of graves and the memory laws and now coincides with a generalized rise of the extreme right.”
Viñas agrees: “Revisionism is the cause of polarization and in turn causes it to increase.”
In Germany, they remember, denying the Holocaust is a crime and high school kids are taken to visit concentration camps so that they can learn about their history.
Education, historians share, is the vaccine against this revisionist virus that eats away at knowledge, since it allows us to dismantle prejudices and build citizens with a critical spirit.
Today, remembers the professor of political science, sociologist and historian Alberto Reig, “in the protests in front of the PSOE headquarters in Ferraz you can see kids singing Cara
al sol
and shouting 'Long live Franco!'
Protest in front of the PSOE headquarters on Ferraz Street, in Madrid, last November.
Jaime Villanueva
It seems like a profitable business.
The Actas publishing house, founded in 1990, presents itself as “a necessary cultural project” against “official history” in a “revanchist Spain.”
One of his latest releases is
The Repression of the Postwar
, by journalist Miguel Platón, highly recommended by Moa —“it puts an end to the falsehoods about the execution figures and the supposed arbitrariness of the trials”—;
by Andrés Trapiello in
El Mundo
and on the website of the Francisco Franco National Foundation, which often reproduces the author's theses.
Today, according to historian Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, more than half a million court martials can be consulted.
Plato's study, he criticizes, analyzes 30,000 with “biased” data.
When asked by this newspaper, Plato reduces the total number of trials to 125,000, admits that “the justice of the victors” was “excessive, even cruel,” but at the same time, he assures that “the vast majority of those executed after being sentenced to death they had blood crimes.”
“When you look at the charges, file by file, that is the conclusion you reach.
There were tens of thousands of crimes, then someone committed them.
And the principle of in dubio pro reo
was always applied
.
Asked about cases such as those of the 13 roses, executed in August 1939, he affirms that it is “due to acts committed after the Civil War” that do not enter into this investigation.
Pío Moa, whom Plato considers “a very interesting author,” refused to answer questions from this newspaper.
Casanova points out the qualitative leap that it represents for someone like Trapiello, who knows how the university works, to suggest that they are not serious historians.
“Do you think a North American faculty hires me because of my ideology?”
The prologue to Plato's book is by Stanley G. Payne.
“For me,” says Viñas, “he is the worst of all, because he is a historian and the only archive from which he draws is that of the Franco Foundation.
Payne writes without papers.
That was in the seventies, when the archives were closed tight, still, but today he has no justification.”
Preston also regrets that “Payne, who has admirable books, now defends Franco” and remembers: “The courts-martial are only part of the repression, the majority were extrajudicial executions.
In trials, 40 or 50 people were sometimes tried at once.
"The fact that not all the sentences were death does not erase the long sentences, in inhumane conditions, or all the deaths that occurred in prison."
Protest at the San Isidro cemetery in Madrid on April 24, 2023, the day of the exhumation of the remains of the founder of Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, until then buried in the Valley of the Fallen.
Marcos del Mazo (LightRocket/Getty Images)
The proliferation of titles of this type, published by publishers such as Actas or SND, which sells works such as
Tejero, un hombre de honor
or
Franco, memoria indelible
, in addition to a kind of trivia about the dictator — “we are very proud of our ancestors” — has given rise to the idea that there are right-wing and left-wing historians.
Preston denies the biggest one: “I consider myself a democrat, but that has never prevented me from recounting the mistakes of democratic politicians, as I did with Largo Caballero in
A People Betrayed
.”
When I begin an investigation, I have an open mind, ready to reach conclusions as I am guided by evidence from archives or sources.
When I started the biography of Santiago Carrillo, for example, I admired him a lot.
I did not imagine that the final result would be as critical as it finally was, almost devastating.”
The rise of revisionism poses a dilemma for serious historians.
“There was a time,” says Casanova, “when books by revisionists like Moa flooded the shop windows.
Its impact is less now, but we have entered a dynamic in which good historians have to finance their books while these people occupy spaces without deserving it.
When the media welcomes people like Moa or journalists who write books of this type, historians are discredited and knowledge is despised.
And there are several positions: those who pass by, those who believe that we must respond to them and those of us who believe that the way to counteract all this is to continue investigating and participating in media and social networks, that is, understanding that the digital age is changing the way to teach history.”
The historian Alberto Reig decided to answer.
In 2006 he published
Anti Moa.
The neo-Franco subversion of the History of Spain.
He recalled, among other things, that the prolific author limits himself to “copying Francoist historians” who constructed the story to legitimize the coup d'état and the Civil War.
In 2017, Reig continued debunking the revisionists with the book
The Criticism of Criticism.
Before, in 2004, he participated in the TVE documentary series
Memoria de España.
“I received death threats from Franco's chapter.”
Last year, the book
Vox in front of history
(Akal) was also released on the market, a collective work in which several historians combat, with their proven track record and research, “the proliferation of myths and misinformation by far-right demagogues who have making national history one of the axes of its fight for cultural hegemony.”
The
hits
of the revisionists, among whom those interviewed cite Moa, César Vidal, Luis Togores or José María Marco, draw on Franco's story, namely, that the war was inevitable;
that the repression was not so harsh, etc.
Viñas points out striking coincidences with some political speeches today: “Spain is breaking up, the country is disintegrating and, curiously, the bad guys in the film are no longer the communists, but the socialists, who have 'totalitarian' desires.
It is not coincidental.
They feed on the revisionists.”
Love is reciprocal: “There is only Vox left, the only party that clearly defends the unity and sovereignty of Spain,” Moa repeats.
Reading List
Frank. Caudillo of Spain
Paul Preston
Debate, 2015 (updated edition of the 1993 text)
1,088 pages.
31.26 euros
The Spanish Holocaust
Paul Preston
Debate, 2011
864 pages.
23.65 euros
Who wanted the Civil War
Ángel Viñas
Crítica, 2019
504 pages.
21.90 euros
Franco, Hitler and the outbreak of the Civil War
Ángel Viñas
Alianza Editorial, 2001
608 pages.
32.95 euros
The hidden past. Fascism and violence in Aragon (1936-1939)
Julián Casanova, Ángela Cenarro, Julita Cifuentes, María Pilar Maluenda and María Pilar Salomón
Mira Editores, 2010
492 pages.
26 euros
The church of Franco
Julián Casanova
Critica, 2022
384 pages.
16.90 euros
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