Arquitectos del Terror

Sinopsis

Nueva edición de este libro imprescindible para entender nuestra historia reciente.

La Guerra Civil se libró para anular las reformas educativas y sociales de la Segunda República y para combatir su cuestionamiento del orden establecido. Los rebeldes lucharon a favor de los terratenientes, industriales, banqueros, clérigos y oficiales del Ejército, cuyos intereses se habían visto amenazados, y en contra de los liberales e izquierdistas que impulsaban las reformas. Sin embargo, en los años de república, de 1931 a 1936, a lo largo de la guerra y durante muchas décadas después, se siguió fomentando en España el mito de que el enemigo derrotado en la contienda era el contubernio judeomasónico y bolchevique.

El presente libro no es una historia del contubernio, del antisemitismo ni de la antimasonería en España, sino que adopta la forma de pequeñas biografías de las principales figuras antisemitas y antimasónicas que propagaron ese mito, y de los personajes centrales que pusieron en práctica los horrores que este justificaba. Desmontar sus falsedades es uno de los objetivos fundamentales de esta obra.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

From the preeminent historian of 20th century Spain, Paul Preston, Architects of Terror is a new history of how paranoia, conspiracy and anti-Semitism was used to justify the military coup of 1936 and enabled the construction of a dictatorship built on violence and persecution.

It is the previously untold story of how antisemitic beliefs were weaponized to justify and propagate the Franco overthrow of liberal Spain.

The Spanish military coup of 1936 was launched to overturn the social and economic reforms of the democratic Second Republic, and its educational and cultural challenges to the established order. The consequent civil war was fought in the interests of the landowners, industrialists, bankers, clerics, and army officers whose privileges were threatened. However, a central justification for a war that took the lives of around 500,000 Spaniards was that it was being fought to combat an alleged scheme for world domination by a non-existent 'Jewish- Masonic-Bolshevik Conspiracy'. Even though Spain had only a tiny minority of Jews and Freemasons, Franco and his inner circle were ardent believers in this fabricated conspiracy. They spread the notion that the survival of Catholic Spain, as well as the establishment's economic interests, required the total annihilation of Jews and Freemasons.

Architects of Terror is not the story of fake news, mendacity, corruption, and nostalgia for lost-empire-generated violence and hatred. The book presents vivid portraits of the key ideologues who propagated the myth of the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik Conspiracy and of the military figures who implemented the atrocities that it justified. Among the convictions shared by these individuals was their belief in the idea that Freemasonry was responsible for Spain's loss of empire and in the factual veracity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious fiction about the global domination of the Jews.

This is a history that reverberates in our own political moment.