Spain remains at a crossroads when debating the Civil War. Arturo Pérez-Reverte has organized a series of debates in Seville with the less-than-ideal title 1936: The war we all lost (In the end, they put the slogan in question marks to soften the blow of criticism.) The writer David Uclés, who had committed to attending, withdrew upon learning that José María Aznar and Iván Espinosa de los Monteros would be participating. And the inevitable backlash on social media, including threats of boycott, precipitated the cancellation of the conference. Pérez-Reverte lamented the lost opportunity for the "reconciliation" of Spaniards. But the best way to come to terms with the past is to accept it, and accepting the Civil War means admitting that there were victors and vanquished, and that the victors behaved as such long after the guns fell silent.

Today marks eighty-nine years since the coup d'état in which the fascists and a portion of the Spanish army took up arms against the democratic and legitimate government of the Republic. We must begin by writing this down, which for a long time has been considered obvious, because it has begun to cease to be so. Stories blur, ideas are distorted. Denialism is the first step of far-right, authoritarian, illiberal thinking. First, they deny the existence of what bothers them; then, even though they claim it doesn't exist, the drive to destroy it appears. The memory of the Civil War is, for the Spanish far right (that of Vox, but also that of a good portion of the PP), a bastion to conquer, a banner they also need to take from the left. The Reds, the left-handed people, as they call it now, adopting the open war language of Milei and the Latin American far right. The reds, the left-handed people, all those people who hate so much.

Augusta Hall, the first of the two poems – moving and shocking – contained in the new book of Sebastián Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972), begins with a movie screen projecting the image of a ship moored in the port of Palma. The beam of light takes us on a journey back to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The reader soon learns that this ship, the James I, was converted by the Falangists into a prison for a few weeks in 1936. The cinema where the film is shown had also been, during the war, "a prison for locking up the Reds", known as Can Mir, because it was owned by a Falangist family with that surname.