Shortly before the summer, a friend told me that he had gone to one of the royal palaces in Madrid (I don't remember now if it was the Royal Palace or Aranjuez) and that he did not like seeing the books that were sold in the shop of that royal place. Alongside the usual catalogues of works of art and collector's items, the visitor guides, the obligatory hagiographies of the Hispanic monarchs and some historical novels, there were a series of titles that are presented as history books, when they are works with a cynical and unashamed ideological burden, authentic manuals of the most outdated Spanish nationalism. My friend's anger (do you think that in places of the National Heritage they should sell these things?) made me remember that four years ago I too had been surprised by the book offer at the Royal Monastery of El Escorial shop. I took note of it, in case it was a good time to comment on it one day. There were pieces like La leyenda negra, historia del odio a España, by Alberto G. Ibáñez, Imperiofobia y leyenda negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio Español, by María Elvira Roca Barea, and La Reconquista contada para escépticos, by Juan Eslava Galán. All these books are the literary version of junk food: they also sell by the bucketload even if they are unhealthy.If you have ever leafed through any of these titles (for the sake of my mental health I have never read one in its entirety), you will already know that, even though they are presented as new contributions to the historiography of Spain, they rarely exceed the level of a brother-in-law-style byproduct intended to fuel the crudest revisionism. Some do it with a humorous and casual tone, others with a pseudo-academic veneer to disguise the crudest manipulations. The common denominator of all of them is an ultramontane nationalism resistant to any filter of reason. The problem, however, is not so much that at the royal sites (which are public institutions of the State, be warned) they sell this mental junk, but that you cannot find the alternative there, works with a minimum of rigor and with a more hygienic narrative. Because we are talking about a public institution that, it is assumed, must help to educate, or at least inform with veracity, its citizens. At that table in El Escorial, the most 'alternative' thing I saw was Defendiendo a España: verdades y leyendas de nuestra historia, by the British Hispanist Henry Kamen. I would bet anything that in no store in the places that make up the Patrimonio Nacional will we ever find a book like the one recommended to me by my friend Ismael Pelegrí (he is never wrong), and which I have read with fascination this summer: Una i eterna. Sobre el nacionalisme espanyol, by Ferran Garcia-Oliver. It is an extraordinary exploration of the roots, development, and perpetuation, right up to the present day, of the construction of the great nationalist myth of Spain. It turns out that the Patrimonio Nacional is in reality Patrimonio Nacionalista, even in the times of the gobierno más progresista de la historia. All of this makes one quite pessimistic regarding the possibilities of a hypothetical reform of Spain, or at the very least of the conception that Spain has of itself. It is frightening the number of people who, deep down, continue to see Spain as an empire diminished by the fault of the everlasting foreign conspiracy, with the complicity of the successive representatives of the internal anti-Spain: Jews, Moors, Reds, Freemasons, separatists, faggots, and other degenerates. Cyclically, the intelligentsia of Spain takes it upon itself to put things back in their place, to revive, with new voices but always with the same music, the only history of Spain that can save the pride of being Spanish and very Spanish. The editorial secretions we have discussed are only an epidermal eruption of a much deeper disease. The state of infoxicated opinion caused by the great diffusion given to this type of book – many of its authors are regulars on radio talk shows and certain TV channels – helps to understand why Spain finds it so difficult to understand the terrible human drama that has been experienced in Ceuta for a long month now, and why the Spanish nationalist outcry overrides any humanitarian discourse, which becomes anecdotal. How is it possible that state funerals have not been organized for the victims of this tragedy? The discourse of anti-Spain is resurfacing. The enemy is always the other, and the victim is Spain, not the poor migrants (minors, invaders?), sick and starving, thrown onto the streets and beaches of Ceuta. Spanish nationalism always needs an 'a por ellos' to maintain its narrative. Nine years ago it was the Catalans. Now it is the Africans whom misery pushes to flee towards the north. None of the books we mentioned ever provide the keys to truly understand the history of Spain, with all its contradictions. They never explain the truth of what happened in Morocco during the time of the Spanish protectorate, a hundred years ago. A colonial conflict that was never resolved, that is never wanted to be faced, and that still lingers. And because it is never explained, we do not understand anything.
