A media outlet aligned with Sánchez points to historians with an author who praised Stalin

The left seems to feel a great nostalgia for the times when political commissars dictated what could and could not be said.

Stalin: data and numbers of the crimes of the bloody communist dictator and genocidal
The more than 100 million deaths that communism caused, divided by countries

On Friday, the online newspaper run by the leftist Ignacio Escolar published this headline: "The far-right 'sneaks' into history books to glorify nationalist myths". The news refers to "a recently published report that analyzes the rise in recent years of the publication of books that reproduce a view of history in line with the far-right. The article points to a process of "academic deprofessionalization" and an increase in works that do not follow the methodologies of historiography, but are presented as rigorous."

The news report from that leftist media outlet points to, among others, historians such as Fernando Díaz Villanueva, Javier Santamarta del Pozo, and Javier Rubio Donzé. It attributes to the latter a series of quotes that Eldiario.es claims were published in his book "Spain Against Its Black Legend: Myths, Grievances, and Discourses". Yesterday, Javier Rubio stated that these quotes do not appear in his book. In fact, the report in question (PDF) indicates that they were published by another author. A curious way of teaching rigor.

Regarding the report, among other things it states the following, resorting to several redundancies: "Faced with the advances made by professional historiography, the extreme right has brought back to the public debate interpretations, narratives and discourses completely surpassed by professional historiography, making use of anti-scientific methodologies and outdated historiographical references". The two authors of the report accuse the "extreme right" of "glorifying the medieval and modern past of the Iberian Peninsula", and add: "With this they try to generate a feeling of nostalgia towards that manipulated version of the past".

The most surreal thing is that, as Javier Rubio points out, one of the authors of these claims has a Twitter account decorated with the hammer and sickle, the symbol of the communist movement, one of the totalitarian movements that has killed the most people in the last century. This certainly doesn't seem like the best position to lecture anyone on rigor, considering that communism is one of the political movements that has most frequently resorted to manipulating history to whitewash its crimes and even justify them.

Along the same lines, this man who intends to lecture other historians has written messages on his Twitter account such as "Viva Fidel Castro" (Long live Fidel Castro), "Eternal glory to Fidel and Raúl Castro", "Viva Stalin" (Long live Stalin), "Slava Stalin" (Glory to Stalin, in Russian), "Let the USSR return and let Stalin rule us", "Stalin saved Poland" (referring to the same Soviet dictator who made a pact with Nazi Germany to invade Poland in 1939) or "Stalin did not cause any famine" (let us remember, in case anyone is unaware of this fact, that the genocide perpetrated by that dictator in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933, the Holodomor, consisted of starving several million people to death, making massive requisitions of grain that left the victims without resources to survive).

In April 2022, in a response to Antonio Maestre, that same author stated that the USSR was "a dictatorship of the proletariat, a bloody and extremely harsh dictatorship for the bourgeoisie, and therefore the broadest and purest form of democracy for the proletariat."

That is to say, a guy who now criticizes historians who do not share his view of the past, calling them "far-right" and accusing them of "generating a feeling of nostalgia towards that manipulated version of the past," just four years ago described as "the broadest and purest form of democracy" a brutal dictatorship that ruled millions of people for 74 years without free elections, violating human rights, invading neighboring countries and deporting a large part of its population to Siberia and many other atrocities.

Certainly, the left-wing media's eagerness to promote the anti-Spanish Black Legend is reaching increasingly grotesque extremes. Resorting to a Stalinist nostalgic for this is yet another example of the left-wing media's curious notion of rigor and strange concept of "historical memory." Who will they recruit next to give history lessons? Perhaps an anti-Semite willing to spout any nonsense about Jews? Maybe they don't have to look far. In July 2022, the aforementioned author of that report responded with the phrase "Massacre Jews" to a tweet that stated: "It starts with M and you love it." Is this the kind of people Escolar's newspaper seeks out to warn against the "far-right"?

P.S.: I have made an automatic copy and a PDF copy of that last antisemitic message in case the friends at ACOM are interested in taking legal action. There are expressions that are intolerable in a democracy.