There are concepts that, despite having been coined just a few days ago, are used as if they had an immemorial history. Some become so successful that they are used left and right, and consequently, they end up being distorted. The concept of denialism It is part of those words that began as designating an ultra-specific fact but later became a kind of multipurpose insult or something even worse, as we will see later. In 1987, the French historian Henry Rousso created and developed the idea of denialism in the essay Vichy syndrome in the sense it has today. The concept referred specifically to the movement that at the time denied the reality of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes in general, both in France and other European countries. He distinguished denialism from what he called "legitimate historical revisionism," that is, a reasoned and critical rereading of history based on new data or perspectives. What exactly does this distinction mean? Claiming that the Vichy regime led by Marshal Pétain did not participate in the deportation of French Jews to the extermination camps is an extreme exercise in denialism, because there is thousands of pieces of documentary evidence to prove it. On the other hand, rethinking the figure of François Mitterrand, or even the resistance hero Jean Moulin, for example, based on documents and photographs that appeared very late, in the 1980s, represents a historical revision of France's true role during the Second World War, not a form of covert denialism. By the way, Rousso is also the author of the successful expression "a passé who passes does not" ("a past that does not happen").

In the battle against Pedro Sánchez for the presidency of the Spanish government, the People's Party (PP) is seeking to rearm itself ideologically ahead of its July congress. This Tuesday, it presented its new political direction, which—following the trend of the right and far right in Europe—focuses on immigration and security policies. Pending amendments that PP members may submit, the PP proposes "eliminating the relationship between registration and access to non-contributory economic benefits for undocumented immigrants." In their opinion, "irregular status cannot generate rights," and they also intend to make "long-term residency conditional on effective contributions to the social security system and knowledge of the Spanish language and culture."

In 1960 – just 65 years ago, which is usually the retirement age – the sociologist Daniel Bell (1919-2011) published a text called The end of ideology. It opened a debate that was, in general, serious, substantial, and long-standing; the communicative context of that time, which we would now consider "elitist," allowed for it (today it would surely translate into a couple of "snobs" on X and two dozen anonymous insults). That debate lasted so long, and drew so many replies, that in 1988 Bell published a second text that referred to the first: Return to the end of ideologyThe fact that it came out just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of real socialism, was considered by some to be a mere coincidence and by others to be a reasoned prediction similar to that made a decade earlier by Emmanuel Todd.