Julián Casanova, Historian: ‘Goebbels Needed To Occupy Countries To Introduce Propaganda. Elon Musk Needs Three Minutes’

Julián Casanova still writes by hand, just as he did when he started out. He fills countless index cards that help him organize ideas, prepare lectures and build the books that have tackled the major European conflicts of the 20th century, the Russian Revolution, anarchism and, above all, the Spanish Civil War and the figure of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, to whom he devoted a biography published last year.

The professor of contemporary history at the University of Zaragoza, who was born in Valdealgorfa, in the province of Teruel, in 1956, is retiring, and his most immediate concern is where to put his books in a world that no longer seems to want paper. We meet in Barcelona, where he sits down with EL PAÍS between talks and events marking the 90th anniversary of the Nationalist uprising that sparked the Spanish Civil War.

The son of shopkeepers who worked hard to put their four children through university, Casanova studied history in Zaragoza. His interest in anarchism led him to José Álvarez Junco, who made room for him in his home in Madrid. From there, he moved to the United States in 1981 thanks to his brother José, a sociologist of religion already established in New York. He then went to England in 1985 under the guidance of Paul Preston and other Hispanists.

“They taught me about the public role of history,” he says, visibly moved. “The idea was that history should not be read only by historians in their ivory towers, but also by an educated public that wanted to know.”

Driven by that philosophy, he has taught and conducted research at Harvard, Notre Dame, The New School, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Weiser Center for International Studies at the University of Michigan, and the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. He has authored more than 30 books and supervised 37 doctoral dissertations. His perspective is both deeply specialist and broadly universal.

Question. You’ve spent your career studying the 20th century and its many forms of violence. Is it already possible to identify the defining features of the 21st century?

Answer. The most striking thing is the breakdown of values that had been consolidated in the second half of the 20th century and that were not the result of an evolution but of deep reflection after the moral atrocity that was experienced. There was optimism and a single path for everyone: modernization, redistribution of wealth through fiscal policies, democracy, liberalism… There was no alternative. And that breakdown is the great change of the 21st century. The difference from a century ago is that the state has been strengthened, it keeps the monopoly on violence, there is no paramilitarism or guerrilla warfare, there is practically no terrorism like in the 1960s or 1970s, and it controls mechanisms of coercion so that all the noise, shouting, insults and politics of hatred in parliaments today face far greater obstacles to causing major institutional ruptures than they did at the beginning of the 20th century.

Q. Is the world order breaking down?

A. Yes. Since [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s second victory, there has been a rupture of that order. No one is saying that democracy cannot be rebuilt, even if far-right parties are going to make life difficult for us. But the left no longer exists as a counterproject, as a mass movement. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were significant social counterprojects, like the Russian Revolution, and that is no longer the case today.

Q. Is there a danger of fascism?

A. There is a danger, yes, although it likely has counterweights in the judicial system and the military. When fascism emerged in Italy and Germany, it was an outsider movement. It came from below; it struggled to convince people that it could restore order, and that is what Trump is trying to do. For a while, people were skeptical and downplayed it, believing it wasn’t destroying anything fundamental, but now a form of fascism is emerging that is shattering all of that, permeating the lower classes and drawing on a broad social base. But fascism without militarism strikes me as difficult to conceive. In any portrayal of 20th-century totalitarianism, torture, prisons, the military and repression are presiding over everything, and that seems harder now because democracy has more defense mechanisms.

Q. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States is a form of militarism. So is the way the Pentagon uses artificial intelligence.

A. Yes, that’s true, and so is the way immigration is being handled. That’s the root of it. Any intellectual in the U.S. already believes that after Trump, there will be “Trumpism,” and that adds to the pessimism. Trumpism without Trump will endure because it is the product of a breakdown — of a white working class that lost its jobs, of law-abiding, conservative people who suddenly believed that wokeness, feminism, or the dismantling of masculinity had transported them to another world. I place a lot of emphasis on the subordination of the military to civilian authority because I believe that’s where the great breakdowns — wars, ethnic cleansing, and policies of extermination — have always come from. I see dangers, but I don’t see this. Perhaps they no longer need coups d’état, but for us to see dead bodies in the ditches, there would have to be another radical rupture. Democracies advanced because they realized that militarism, ethnic cleansing, and extermination had been disastrous.

Q. Why is the far right gaining ground?

A. Because a sector of the democratic order collapsed with the destruction of the industrial base. The golden age of democracy was built on a working class in industrial sectors that enjoyed rights. In U.S. capitalism — which is ruthless — the only ones who had rights were those working in the big auto industries. When capitalism shifted from the secondary to the tertiary sector, a significant portion of the working class lost out. In Europe, they’re better protected, but the same thing happens there, too. They feel that capitalist democracy no longer offers the benefits it once did; work has become precarious and relies on a workforce that is no longer native — one that comes from a different multicultural world, where the Muslim presence and race play a very important role. And that fuels hatred among those who feel disadvantaged. At first, it’s a labor issue.

Q. Work is at the center.

A. At first, it’s a labor issue, yes. In Marseille with [French far-right leader Marine] Le Pen or in rural Austria with [Jörg] Haider, that line of thinking emerges for the first time. There’s a concept of Christian order — white, male — that’s beginning to crumble. First, they’re taking my job away; then, my health care benefits; next, feminism is undermining my masculinity; on top of that, Muslims are arriving, and identity struggles begin. This is the breeding ground. And then part of it depends on the left, which lived relatively peacefully after the fall of the Wall and didn’t offer an alternative. Social democracy failed to replace that crisis with something different. So a good portion of the working class blamed socialism.

Q. If communism is no longer an option and capitalism is rife with inequality, what do we have left?

A. When the Soviet bloc fell, the myth was shattered and the communist parties lost their credibility. The only ideology left is that of the distribution of capitalism’s benefits and democratic consolidation. But it’s very difficult because socialism has become entangled in a system of corruption in so many places. It has disappeared as a political party. It remains only in Spain and Germany — not in Italy, not in France. Look at the United Kingdom: [Keir] Starmer had to step down. Therefore, part of the blame lies with a form of socialism that failed to manage all of that. When [former Spanish prime minister] Felipe González speaks out against [Spain’s current Prime Minister Pedro] Sánchez, he isn’t defending his model of the welfare state; rather, he’s aligning himself with what the anti-Sánchez camp on the right is saying. They’ve lost faith in that and a broad social base.

Q. Do you understand why many people in Spain are once again defending Franco?

A. When people asked me why there was no far right in Spain, I always said that while it was true there was no party as such, the shadow of Francoism loomed large because there had been no “de-Francoization.” In the media, however, there was a media-driven far right. In the 1990s, historians like us who wanted to sell serious books were pitted against Pío Moa, César Vidal, and their ilk, who were backed by a very influential sector of the media and publishing industry.

So the Civil War and the Franco regime left a very significant legacy that we were unable to dismantle at that time. Now it’s reemerging with force through these new social bases that no longer believe in democracy. And the [conservative Popular Party] PP has joined in. It’s a neo-revisionism that’s global. The collapse of communism led many to say: “You’ve been deceived by anti-fascism because the evil lay in communism; don’t feel guilty about the Holocaust.” That’s the narrative Jiménez Losantos espouses.

The digital age also rapidly undermines the legitimacy of education. Today, something learned in the classroom can be dismantled in two minutes on TikTok. We’re losing sight of the power that discourse holds. In Germany, people also thought such a development was unthinkable, and it is happening.

Q. In Germany too, the far right has also returned, despite denazification.

A. It has returned. You have Trump, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin reminding Russians of the Nazi defeat while avoiding reminders of the civil war or Bolshevism. In other words, everyone is trying to hide the shameful aspects and praise the glorious aspects of identitarian nationalism. Ultra‑nationalism has returned with force.

Q. What went wrong in Spain’s transition to democracy?

A. That generation believed it had done the right thing by consigning the past to oblivion and ensuring it did not interfere with the present. In the early years, during a closely monitored and very difficult transition in which Francoism was fading away very gradually, it took three years to draft a Constitution. But once socialism became established under Felipe González, the opportunity was missed to do three things that are now weighing heavily: they did not want to grant dignity to the memory of the vanquished side, which had been overwhelmingly defeated. They didn’t know what to do about it, and they did not want to deal with it. They didn’t dare to change the system of state-subsidized private schools and create a French-style national system. And on top of that, they had to carry out two or three very dirty deeds: deindustrialization and the GAL [state-backed death squads that operated between 1983 and 1987 in the fight against the Basque terror group ETA].

Q. Why does the right have so much difficulty embracing memory policies?

A. Because it comes from the parties UCD [Union of the Democratic Center] and AP [People’s Alliance], that is, from Francoism. The big problem is that the long [Franco] dictatorship [1939-1976] got to shape collective memory, and for a very long time that history never made its way into the classroom. There was also a first generation of intellectuals who did not want to stir the past. The fact that Spain was unable to reach a consensus on recovering the bodies still lying in roadside graves goes beyond any political dispute. It was an ethical obligation of democracy. It’s the biggest shortcoming, and we’re paying the price for it.

Q. Do you think a shared historical narrative is possible??

A. No society has a shared narrative with a very clear consensus. For the one that seemed to have it — England — colonialism has shattered it. The same goes for Belgium and the Netherlands. France had a triumphant narrative until the truth about Vichy came to light. There should indeed be a shared narrative — one that we historians lack — which is that the Republic was overthrown by a coup d’état that replaced words and parliamentarianism with weapons. But the dictatorship lasted for decades afterward, and that has had repercussions on the political uses of the past.

Q. What do you mean?

A. The political use of the past has been revitalized. It is typical now to adjust it to the present and claim that the left of the 1930s almost destroyed Spain. It is the discourse of [Argentine President Javier] Milei, of Trump, and in Spain the PP has joined in. The idea is to show that the good part of Spain always wanted to defend it, while others always wanted to destroy it, like Sánchez. In that scheme, I am not interested in knowledge, but in the image I want to project. I remove the uncomfortable parts of the past and adjust it to what suits me. That is what they are telling young people about Franco: that the Republic caused the war, that violence against the clergy was perpetrated only by some, while others defended civilization. And that we live well by looking to the future, as opposed to those who want to drag us back to the past. The far right has relaunched that political use of history. We still don’t have a war museum or even a basic consensus that education should be based on knowledge.

Q. Do you detect traces of that support for Franco in the Catholic Church today?

A. When Franco died, no martyrs of the war had been beatified, but under John Paul II there were mass beatifications, and at the same time, a refusal to exhume the bodies from the mass graves. In the Catholic Church, there is still a lingering residue that does not exist in the military. For the military, the Civil War is not a topic for discussion.

Q. Do you see traits of a dictator in Trump?

A. Yes, yes. Whether or not it’s fascism is open to debate, but he undoubtedly exhibits traits of a dictator: authoritarianism, dictatorial behavior, his way of operating, contempt for opposing forces, contempt for civil society that doesn’t align with his own, and exclusionary policies.

Q. Do you think there is a danger that truth could die in the age of Elon Musk, Trump and the technocrats?

A. Today it is the greatest danger, especially with artificial intelligence and the digital era. [Nazi propaganda leader Joseph] Goebbels needed Germany to occupy countries to introduce propaganda. In the digital era, Elon Musk needs three minutes to change the global algorithm. It is much more dangerous. And that’s where I believe there is no longer any truth. We used to think that truth was never absolute, but there was a relative truth and agreements about it. And there was an exaltation of knowledge. Now there is contempt for knowledge. That is the big difference. No one had dared to attack universities in the U.S., and Trump does it because critical reading and knowledge do not interest him. Analytical thinking is failing today. There is no history without critical reading; it leads you to diversity, plurality, to change your ideas when something better comes along. The analytical mind requires listening, contrasting, changing your arguments if necessary, and there is no space for that because in talk shows, everyone arrives with their preconceived notions already set. Critical knowledge is a privilege independent of political ideas.

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