\u201cIt\u2019s a growing phenomenon, and not just in one country, but internationally. History has always been a companion to politics. Perhaps it doesn\u2019t exist as a set of reactions in a laboratory, but the documents do, and we can\u2019t do without them,\u201d states Encarnaci\u00f3n Lemus L\u00f3pez, winner of the 2023 Spanish National History Prize for her work, Ellas. Las estudiantes de la Residencia de Se\u00f1oritas (Them. The students at the Girls\u2019 Dormitory). \u201cThere are several histories, not just one official one. Only dictatorships have tried to construct one. The idea that the past is something questioned and questionable dates back to antiquity; historical knowledge itself inherently involves revision. But in a rigorous way, based on the capacity for verification. Instrumental denialism and revisionism are something else entirely,\u201d adds Umberto Gentiloni Silveri, author of Storia dell\u2019Italia contempor\u00e1nea 1943-2023 (History of Contemporary Italy 1943-2023). Scholars such as Juli\u00e1n Casanova, Paul Preston<\/a>, Gutmaro G\u00f3mez Bravo, Fran\u00e7ois Godicheau, Jorge Marco, and \u00c1ngel Vi\u00f1as have raised similar alarms in recent times.<\/p>\n Those interviewed agree on the importance of experts leading the discourse on the past, and on the need for them to leave academia and participate in public debate. \u201cI am convinced that the gaps in opinion we create by not being present are filled by communicators of a different ilk, with biased arguments and simplistic, essentially false, clich\u00e9s,\u201d Lemus L\u00f3pez observes self-critically. This school of thought maintains that a great historiographical effort is of little use if no one reads it. This presents another challenge: updating their communication to the times and styles of the digital age without sacrificing accuracy. Casanova, for example, has just adapted the history of the Spanish Civil War into a graphic novel, Spain Divided in Two (Planeta).<\/p>\n In March 2023, Gentiloni published an article in La Repubblica detailing his reconstruction of the proven facts of Via Rasella and the Ardeatine Caves: among other things, that the Bozen company attacked by the partisans was a police battalion attached to the SS. \u201cWe are used to dissecting everything, choosing what we like on demand, like picking a fragment of history to support what I want to say at this moment. However, context is essential,\u201d the specialist points out.<\/p>\n However, for others, these experts are already talking too much. In 2017, the late historian Guillermo Gort\u00e1zar coordinated the collective work Under the God Augustus, denouncing that \u201cthe conservative liberal right has allowed a narrative of the past to be taken over by socialist, communist, and nationalist historians.\u201d This movement is now being reinforced by authors such as Stanley Payne and P\u00edo Moa, who has sold thousands of copies of more than 40 books on Spain in which he asserts: \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a single democrat in Franco\u2019s prisons.\u201d He himself has recommended La represi\u00f3n de la posguerra (The Repression of the Post-War Period), by Miguel Plat\u00f3n, which claims to put an end to \u201cthe falsehoods\u201d surrounding the number of executions under Franco. \u201cThis is the worst government in 80 years,\u201d declared the leader of Spanish far-right party Vox, Santiago Abascal<\/a>, about the Pedro S\u00e1nchez administration. An oversight like that of the streets recently dedicated in Italy to Giorgio Almirante: the right-wing politician collaborated with the Nazis and saw how a court endorsed the right of the newspaper L\u2019Unit\u00e0 to call him \u201cexecutioner of partisans.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe right wing also uses history through a certain victimhood narrative, based on a supposed cultural hegemony of the left,\u201d argues Steven Forti, professor of contemporary history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He cites \u201creservoirs and wetlands,\u201d perhaps the most frequently used example in both Italy and Spain to highlight the merits of their respective dictatorships. \u201cThe manipulation of the past is growing. This is because the far right has more power and a strategy to conquer cultural hegemony. And it\u2019s also due to the impact of new technologies, with the viral spread of fake news and conspiracy theories,\u201d the expert adds.<\/p>\n In response to this development, another recent collaborative book emerged, Vox frente a la historia (Vox vs. History), an attempt to dismantle myths and misinformation through rigorous research. \u201cWhat historians do is continually revise their work. They are more like propagandists. They launch sensationalist claims for commercial and political purposes. There are people who still dislike it when Franco is spoken of negatively, and this is because the dictatorship was a 40-year brainwashing. But these books that whitewash Francoism deny an irrefutable truth. There is very serious research on the repression in every town, city, and province,\u201d Preston told EL PA\u00cdS in 2024.<\/p>\n Upon his return to the White House, Donald Trump made clear his intention to rewrite U.S. history<\/a> by silencing what he considers \u201cwoke\u201d distortions that have emerged in recent years in the wake of movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, and which contradict the way the Republican believes the supposedly glorious past of the United States should be told. \u201cNationalism needs its history to define its own identity and make it stronger than others,\u201d reflects Gentiloni.<\/p>\n This past weekend, Trump installed a statue of Christopher Columbus<\/a> at the White House, as part of his campaign to redefine the continent\u2019s history, distancing himself from those who advocate for acknowledging the abuses of colonization<\/a>. In just over a year, the U.S. president has ordered the removal of names of key figures in the anti-racist and LGBTQ+ rights movements, eliminated inconvenient narratives from monuments and national parks, installed a presidential gallery in the White House filled with lies and exaggerations about his predecessors, and issued an executive order to \u201ccleanse\u201d Smithsonian museums of \u201cinappropriate, divisive, or un-American ideology.\u201d This last action has prompted the creation of a group called Citizens Historians, which tracks these changes to ensure that no whitewashing operation goes unnoticed. Citizens have just scored another victory: they succeeded in court in having the panels that the administration removed in January from the President\u2019s House in Philadelphia \u2014 which focused on the history of several slaves owned by George Washington \u2014 reinstalled on February 19.<\/p>\n Everything indicates that Trump will now infuse the celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence with the ideals of \u201cAmerica First.\u201d This means a sanitized version of the history of a Christian and white country, where remembering the traumas of racism and inequality and celebrating the diverse spirit of a nation of immigrants is seen by its rulers as an act of supreme betrayal.<\/p>\n Argentina is also facing controversy surrounding a significant anniversary: \u200b\u200bTuesday, March 24, marked half a century since the last military coup, just as the current far-right government has begun to attack the social consensus that prevailed for decades against the dictatorship. While there has always been a minority that attempted to justify the illegal repression carried out between 1976 and 1983 by attributing it to the armed struggle of some guerrilla organizations, this narrative gained traction under Javier Milei\u2019s rise to power in late 2023.<\/p>\n Through institutional videos and social media posts, the Argentine government is trying to promote the idea that a war was actually fought between two sides: the military and guerrilla organizations. This avoids addressing the issue of state terrorism, despite the more than 1,200 people convicted in court for crimes such as kidnapping, torture, forced disappearances, and the theft of babies. The main proponent of this narrative is Vice President Victoria Villarruel<\/a>, the daughter and granddaughter of military officers, who visited dictator Jorge Videla and others convicted of crimes against humanity in prison. Villarruel denies the figure of 30,000 disappeared persons claimed by human rights NGOs, and her inner circle accuses these organizations of profiting from the compensation granted to relatives of victims of the dictatorship.<\/p>\n In the Buenos Aires provincial legislative elections last year, the government even trivialized Nunca M\u00e1s (Never Again), the title of the report by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons that was used as evidence in the 1975 trial of the military juntas and became a national symbol against the dictatorship. Milei copied the spelling to plaster the province with posters reading \u201cKirchnerism Never Again\u201d as part of a campaign that drew widespread criticism.<\/p>\n In Germany, the message was also \u201cnever again\u201d: any form of Nazi glorification or Holocaust relativization<\/a> is prosecuted by law and socially condemned. But this does not mean that the far right, in its strongest position since 1945, does not promote its own particular vision, which distorts the meaning of Nazism, diminishes its place in history, and laments that Germans must continue to bear the burden of its crimes.<\/p>\n Alternative for Germany<\/a> (AfD), the second-largest parliamentary group after the 2025 elections, criticizes the so-called culture of remembrance and complains of self-flagellation. \u201cHitler and the National Socialists are a bird dropping in the thousand years of glorious German history,\u201d said leader Alexander Gauland in 2018. The current co-chair, Alice Weidel<\/a>, maintains that Hitler was a \u201ccommunist\u201d or a \u201cleftist.\u201d And when, in 2024, Giorgia Meloni was asked at a press conference if she defined herself as \u201canti-fascist,\u201d she replied: \u201cI\u2019ve said everything I had to say about fascism a hundred times over, and I don\u2019t think I need to say it again \u2014 that way, you can keep calling me a dangerous fascist.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThese aren\u2019t outbursts, but rather well-thought-out provocations designed to break taboos and undermine consensus on values \u200b\u200blike democracy and antifascism. They are serious comments because they are unfounded, and also because of who is saying them,\u201d laments Forti. A monologue by the writer Antonio Scurati was intended to denounce all of this on RAI, Italy\u2019s public television, in 2024: its broadcast, however, was canceled amid accusations of censorship. The author has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of M, his account of Mussolini\u2019s life in five novels based on documents. These novels, of course, also include the racial laws passed by Il Duce in 1938, a fascist measure from which Meloni has distanced herself. In 2022, she described them as \u201cthe lowest point in Italian history, a disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOver the last 20 or 30 years, a strong consensus on fascism has solidified among scholars. However, there is a difficulty in its more general evaluation by society, and these controversies demonstrate this: the antifascism of the Italian Constitution was not conceived \u2018against\u2019 fascism, but as a unifying force that includes everyone,\u201d asserts Gentiloni. \u201cIf the discussion is conducted properly, and the analysis seeks truth and is guided by ethics, the discourse should be fairly homogeneous. I don\u2019t believe there can be a left-wing or right-wing outcome,\u201d adds Lemus L\u00f3pez. But more than 21% of the Spanish population considers the years of the Franco dictatorship to have been \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cvery good,\u201d according to a CIS poll <\/a>from last October. And 26% of men aged 18 to 26 stated in a survey conducted by the 40dB institute for EL PA\u00cdS and Cadena SER that they preferred authoritarianism to democracy \u201cin some circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s devastating that these disastrous clich\u00e9s are gaining traction. That \u2018Spain was a great country.\u2019 But people were starving and Spain was capitulating to the U.S., ceding sovereignty,\u201d counters Lemus L\u00f3pez. Spanish conservative politician Esperanza Aguirre recently argued that Francoism was, for the most part, \u201can authoritarian regime very concerned with public order, which allowed for the emergence of a middle class with numerous opportunities for advancement.\u201d The expert clarifies: \u201cGrowth in the 1960s is undeniable, but it had two key factors: it was 25 years behind the rest of the continent, and it started from a very low GDP, which made growth easier. Did the middle class emerge in Spain during the dictatorship? Yes, but in Europe it represents a larger percentage of the population and strengthened earlier with the advance of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Both Lemus L\u00f3pez and Gentiloni point to the same explanation: they associate the whitewashing of past regimes with the betrayal of the present. That is, young people who grow up with the promise that they will live better than their parents, only to discover that this isn\u2019t going to happen. The Spanish historian adds: \u201cThis revision is related to the criticism that there was progress during that period and that democracy hasn\u2019t brought it. There was progress, and currently, after neoliberalism, there is uncertainty, and the blame is placed on the boomers. This false myth is linked to the idea that the dictatorship built a welfare state.\u201d In short, the old notion that the past was always better. To disprove this, one need only look at history.<\/p>\n With reporting by Mar Centenera (Buenos Aires), Iker Seisdedos (Washington) and Marc Bassets (Berlin).\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/R7AO5WRL5BFOVLCSIIVKZ3MXS4.jpg\")
Supporters of the Spanish Falange clashed with police near the San Isidro cemetery upon the arrival of the mortal remains of Jos\u00e9 Antonio Primo de Rivera, following his exhumation from the Valley of Cuelgamuros on April 24, 2023.Zipi (EFE)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/JKVNEASZ6BZOQVGEH7AVNFBCTM.jpg\")
People give the fascist salute during a demonstration with the slogan ‘Remigration. For safe neighborhoods’ on May 23, 2025, in Madrid.Diego Radam\u00e9s (Europa Press)Rewriting history<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/PEOHGPTK5JNPRFFHRQNLTUCQS4.jpg\")
On February 19, workers at the President\u2019s House in Philadelphia reinstalled panels detailing the history of George Washington\u2019s enslaved people, which had been removed in January.Hannah Beier (REUTERS)<\/p>\n![\"Victoria](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/FVZBPYWUTIUBINMBY5XI2OADMM.jpg\")
Victoria Villarruel, vice president of Argentina, at a tribute to the victims of terrorism in Buenos Aires on September 4, 2023.JUAN IGNACIO RONCORONI (EFE)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/E4K7RGP75VC2PLAOWX43MCULJY.jpg\")
A poster of Giorgia Meloni for the 2024 European elections on April 25, 2024, in Naples.Ivan Romano (Getty Images)<\/p>\n