Historical revisionism

Historical revisionism is the critical study of historical facts and official accounts, in order to review and eventually reinterpret them. It has a legitimate academic use and a pejorative one. Its academic use refers to the reinterpretation of historical facts in the light of new data, or new, more precise or less biased analyzes of known data.

Revisionism presupposes that among historians, or the general public, there is a generally accepted way of understanding a historical event or process and that there are reasons to doubt it. These reasons can be of different types: the enhancement of new documents, the change of historiographical paradigm; or also the change of the values from which the past is observed. In cases of non-academic revisionism or pseudoscientific, those who practice it are often accused of engaging in the political use of history and of not respecting neutrality and a critical spirit in the relationship with the sources considered basic in the historian's work. One might wonder if there is neutrality in history (as an object of study) or if in fact what the above statement refers to is the objectivity of the historian.

Academic revisionism

In the academic field, reviewing the ways of understanding the past is part of the task of the professional historian. One of the great revisionist controversies came with the second centenary of the French Revolution, with the so-called historians' complaint. The structural and Marxist explanations of the 1960s were questioned by historians who emphasized political decisions and ideology, and who placed terror as their explanatory engine. From this controversy it has been customary in some academic circles to call revisionists to historians who use explanations of historical processes in terms of political culture, ideology and decision, instead of social structures and economic conditions.

In the Anglo-Saxon world and, to a lesser extent, in the French-speaking world, it is very common for the word revisionism to appear in the title of academic works, referring to its broadest sense. literal. For example, S. P. MacKenzie, an American military historian, was uncomfortable with historiography's treatment of soldiers' commitment to the cause in revolutionary armies. Whether it was Cromwell's puritanical army, the mass levy of the French Revolution, Simón Bolívar's Ejército Libertador, the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, or the Waffen-SS of Nazi Germany during World War II, It seemed to him that on too many occasions their good military results were attributed to the ideological commitment of the soldiers and not to their number, their weapons, or the expertise of the officers. He then undertook a revisionist task : he documented himself on those military units and their behavior in different battles, victories and defeats, and compared it with that of regular units. The result seemed unequivocal to him: historians had on many occasions attributed the military successes of these units to the commitment of the soldiers, although systematic comparison shows that in similar circumstances a regular army would have won just as well.

Sometimes, the simple passage of time allows the historian community to change the perspective, since a different point of arrival invites us to evaluate the past historical trajectory in a new way. For example, part of the Spanish economic and political history of the 1960s compared Franco's Spain to European democracies and saw the country's trajectory since the 19th century as a failure: failure of industrialization, failure of political liberalism. In the 1990s, from the same values one could look to the past, especially the restoration period (1874-1923) and find many positive features that led to an advanced democracy at the end of the 20th century. Instead of looking in history for the elements that explained the point of "failure" (such as the non-existence of a bourgeois revolution), some historians reviewed history and looked for precursors of "success" (such as the almost uninterrupted parliamentary practice between 1834 and 1923). These changes in interpretation are often accompanied by historiographical controversy within the academic world.

Non-academic and pseudoscientific revisionism

On the other hand, the activity of reviewing the past can be practiced by any journalist or amateur researcher and, except in exceptional cases, is protected by freedom of thought and expression. In addition, since history is fertile ground for political controversy and on many occasions the legitimacy of current political bets is based on historical trajectories of the past, historical review can be fraught with controversy. (v. Political use of history). Famous cases, such as Holocaust Denial (which denies the existence of a plan for the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany), have given rise to legislation in some countries that treat that version of history as a crime, considering that it is one deals with "a deliberate lie, for political purposes, that has nothing to do with interpreting historical evidence and, instead, approaches the apology of a criminal regime".

Sometimes, the boundaries between academic and pseudoscientific revisionism are disputed. A priori, revisionists from outside the academic world can do an excellent job in historiographical terms. Similarly, an academic historian can work outside the historiographical canon and become a non-academic revisionist of sorts. However, the revisionists who have achieved greater resonance in public opinion have usually benefited more from the existence of a public or media group eager for controversy, than from a original contribution to historical knowledge. The figure of the non-academic revisionist is usually presented as a Quixote who strives to make a supposed truth appear in the face of an establishment that marginalizes him. Some academic historian publishers have also found that engaging in controversy with these media figures helps them sell more books.

Criticism of non-academic revisionism from professional historiography usually refers to its pseudo-scientific nature, due to the fraudulent use of the plausibility mechanisms with which a historical discourse is constructed:

• Acrytic use of documents.
• Use of false or forced appointments.
• Lack of contextualization or capricious devaluation of relevant information.

In addition, denial revisionism has been characterized by its skepticism regarding certain historical facts, especially those considered implausible from a current perspective due to their monstrosity or any other circumstance, as in the case of Nazi crimes.

On the other hand, critics of academic historiography tend to argue that it has never been free of ideological prejudices, and that, on the other hand, when it is constructed as a neutral scientific discourse it does not usually interest the general public and fails in its civic commitment.

Main currents of historical revisionism

Argentina

In Argentina, historical revisionism, often acting as an intellectual support for Peronism, focused on the vindication of the figure of Juan Manuel de Rosas and other caudillos, confronting the official historiography founded on the work of Bartolomé Mitre. This current is also very critical of the Argentine position during the War of the Triple Alliance. Among the revisionist historians, José María Rosa, Manuel Gálvez, Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, Milcíades Peña, Rodolfo Puiggrós, Abelardo Ramos, Fermín Chávez, Norberto Galasso, Marcelo Gullo etc. stand out.

Spain

In Spain, during the 1960s, the official interpretation of the Spanish Civil War began to be questioned (the war as "Crusade" and the uprising as "National Uprising") and the 1930s began to be treated as an object of history and not of political propaganda. During the Transition, the conception of the Civil War as the product of a military rebellion against the legitimate democratic regime (the Second Republic) became a consensual version, which in turn would be questioned by revisionist writers at the end of the 1990s. These revisionists affirm that the Spanish civil war began in 1934 and not with the Pronouncement of July 17 and 18, 1936. This thesis argues that the left, particularly the PSOE and ERC, conspired against republican legality to impose a revolutionary regime to crush the right. According to the revisionist authors, these intentions would materialize in the 1934 Revolution after the non-acceptance by the left of the victory of the right in the 1933 elections, which would have motivated and justified a reaction in response: the military uprising of September 18. July 1936. The writers Pío Moa and César Vidal are the best-known promoters of this current, also supported by Stanley G. Payne. A majority of historians such as Paul Preston, Javier Tusell or Ian Gibson oppose this revisionism, in addition to denying it originality by pointing out that it recovers Francoist arguments. Beyond the origins of the Civil War, it can be said that there has also been a review of the political use of history in Franco's school books.

At the middle of the XX century, a historiographic current emerged, still active, which tried to offer and disseminate a different vision of Arab-Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the VIII century, as well as the process of the Reconquest itself. This theory, de facto, denies that such an invasion took place in the aforementioned century, but rather a slow Islamization and Arabization of the local peninsular population (culminating in the X with the Caliphate of Córdoba) from the prolonged situation of political vacuum caused by the collapse of the Visigothic Kingdom. Figures of this current are the Falangist paleontologist Ignacio Olagüe (who exposed these theories in his essay The Islamic Revolution in the West), the Arabist Emilio González Ferrín (author of a General History of Al Andalus where he delves into the theories of the former) and, only to a certain extent, the American Hispanist Thomas F. Glick. These theses have had weight and still have an echo today in political Andalusians, as well as in certain academic circles in the Muslim world.

United States

Other cases of historical revisionism are North American Afrocentric groups, with theories such as a classical black Egypt, implying that European culture has its origins in deep African roots.

Mexico

In Mexico, Salvador Borrego E. is considered a revisionist, whose works (for example, World Defeat, América Peligra and World Infiltration) have received strong criticism for their alleged anti-Semitism because they place international Jewish capital and ideology as the cause of World War II.

Soviet Union

In the former Soviet Union, during the Kruchev government there were different revisionist movements of a Marxist nature to misrepresent or lie about facts related to the Stalinist past, mostly developed in different acts of propaganda.

Holocaust Denial

Holocaust denial, which emerged practically since the end of World War II, is a trend that questions the reality of Jewish extermination. Currently this current is considered a crime in several countries, including Germany, France, Canada, Austria and Israel.^{[citation required]}