Ignorance and justification for Franco on TikTok: The cocktail that pushes young people towards historical revisionism

“We are the only country in the world where history has been written by the losers […] The great mistake of the Transition was to legalize the parties that had provoked the Civil War, including the Spanish Socialist Party [...] There is nothing more dangerous than a red in power about to lose. Just in case, I am not going to take a train in the days leading up to the elections...”

These are extracts from a video by the YouTuber InfoVlogger, who has 414,000 subscribers. The title, They want to return to ‘36, is very similar to the song — We are going to return to ‘36 — that, together with music group Los Meconios, he sang in October 2022 at a Vox concert in the arena where the annual Mad Cool festival is held. The lyrics: “We upload videos to the internet; we are on Twitter too, we always piss off communists, feminists and progressives […] The left that governs is already called the Popular Front […] We are the resistance, we are fascists.”

“My room is very patriotic,” boasts a young woman on TikTok, holding up the pre-constitutional flag while the Falangist anthem Cara al sol (Facing the Sun) plays in the background. “Some people only see the bad things about Franco, but they forget everything we have thanks to him. Remember that the Civil War was started (sic) by the left because they did not accept their defeat in the elections and, logically, those on the right had to defend themselves,” says another user. “Let someone like him come back,” asks a TikTok user, displaying an image of the dictator.

TikTok is especially popular among young people, and according to the latest annual survey by the Reuters Institute, it is already the main source of information for 20% of those under 35 years of age. On November 26, 2024, Manuel Mariscal, a member of parliament for the far-right political party Vox, celebrated from his seat in Congress: “Thanks to social media, many young people are discovering that the period after the Civil War was not a dark period, as this [Socialist-led coalition] government tells us, but a period of reconstruction, progress, and reconciliation to achieve national unity.”

There are no major national studies on the degree of knowledge about Francoist repression among young Spaniards, but in 2022 the fieldwork carried out to prepare the report Barriers among young people to accessing knowledge of democratic memory, compiled by the social and market research institute CIMOP for the Descendants of the Spanish Exile Association thanks to a government grant, already revealed deep gaps among students. Interviews with young people aged 16 to 30 from Madrid, Seville, and Valencia, from private and public schools and including secondary school students, university students, and vocational training students, or those already working in different sectors, revealed exchanges such as these:

— How did the war break out?

— People were against the dictatorship and they rebelled.

— And what happened after the war?

— After the war, Franco died and democracy and the government came into being. If there had not been a Civil War, we would be worse off now, bankrupt.

The latest historical memory law from 2022 establishes that “the Spanish educational system will include among its aims the knowledge of Spanish history and democratic memory and the fight for democratic values and freedoms,” for which “the educational administrations will adopt the necessary measures.” Education is a responsibility devolved to the autonomous regions, of which 11 are currently governed by the main opposition Popular Party, which signed up to Vox’s theory that this type of content constitutes “indoctrination.”

The syllabus is extensive and the way of addressing Francoist repression often depends on the will of the educational centers and the teachers themselves, who now have to compete with the popularity of supposedly historical content posted on social networks. There are institutes, such as Núñez de Arce high school in Valladolid, that organize visits to the Cuelgamuros Valley, the former burial site of the dictator, to perform the fascist salute, while others take their students to witness the exhumations of mass graves of opponents shot by the Franco regime.

Historical revisionism and justification of the Franco dictatorship have crept into the generation that has grown up in freedom through the widest gap: that of ignorance. In the face of the bombardment on social networks that the Vox deputy Mariscal boasted about, there is no sufficient wall of knowledge and it is increasingly common to see young people at protests carrying the pre-constitutional flag or raising their arms in fascist symbology: 26% of males aged 18 to 26 declared in a recent 40dB survey for EL PAÍS and SER radio network that they preferred authoritarianism to democracy “in some circumstances.”

Professor of contemporary history Julián Casanova, who is publishing a new biography of Franco on February 19, warns of this dangerous “cocktail” and of the difficulty high school teachers face in transmitting to their students “the relevant information of historiography in the face of propaganda and what they have seen on social networks.” “It has been,” he adds, “a light rain for a long time, but it has increased in recent years with new models of digital propaganda. What do they tell them? That democracy is not doing anything for them while the establishment lives very well.”

Casanova is part of the scientific committee that advises the government on the calendar of events scheduled for the 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death this year, grouped under the title Spain in freedom. The program is focused on young people and even includes a traveling escape room, a game where, to leave one room and enter the next, you have to learn something about the dictatorship, an initiative that provoked mockery on X. The professor also criticizes his own profession: “How many historians are fighting the battle on the networks, taking this seriously? Very few. We have to be there and write so that we are read. It is useless to write a perfect monograph on Franco’s repression if 2,000 people read it. You have to use all avenues: the media, teaching, networks, comics...”

The ignorance behind ‘Cara al sol’

Seeing this lack of knowledge, José Antonio Martínez Soler, a 78-year-old journalist, and his son Erik, a screenwriter who was born in 1978, the year the Constitution was approved, decided to write the book Franco for Young People. Erik says that at his high school, they never spoke to him about “the horrors of Francoism” and compares the need to be informed about the traumatic past with the family history of an illness: “Knowing your vulnerabilities allows you to live longer and better.” His father says that when he showed him the first chapters of the book, he “threw them down because they were boring.” “I told him,” Erik explains, “that it was better to write a Franco seen from today and to explain what it had been like for him to live under a dictatorship.” When they finished it, they gave it to a 16-year-old boy, Bruno Martín, to read, who sent them the words he didn’t understand, such as “homily.”

“In my fourth year of compulsory high school education,” Bruno explains, “I studied the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, but they were facts, dates, events… When I read the book, the first-hand experiences of someone who had suffered through it, you really see the injustices that were committed. I understood better what it was like to live under a dictatorship. On social media, and among some classmates, they say it wasn’t that bad. I think those who record themselves on TikTok singing Cara al sol or with the Francoist flag don’t really know history, they don’t know what they’re talking about, because when they explain it to you properly, you realise that this man didn’t do anything good. It has to do with misinformation and, sometimes, with wanting to attract attention.”

“So that the same thing that happened to me and to many other Spaniards who suffered the violent repression of the dictatorship doesn’t happen to you, I want to tell you who Franco is,” writes José Antonio Martínez Soler in the opening pages of the book. He is referring to his kidnapping on March 2, 1976, just three months after the dictator’s death. His assailants were dressed in civilian clothes, but they weren’t civilians. They burned his face with a liquid, put adhesive tape on his eyes and took him, permanently at gunpoint, to a remote place where they tortured and interrogated him to reveal his source for an article on the dismissal and transfer of moderate Civil Guard generals that he had published in the magazine Doblón under a pseudonym.

Until he was 27, Erik did not fully understand the circumstances in which his father had been kidnapped by an extremist Civil Guard unit. “For 30 years I didn’t talk to anyone about it,” admits José Antonio. “My father,” he explains, “was a lieutenant in the Republican army and was in a concentration camp. My mother had two socialist brothers in prison and she always told me: ‘Don’t stand out.’ I grew up in the silence of fear. In our house, in the houses of the losers of the war, we never spoke, but in those of the victors we did. We have been too cautious. And now I go on TikTok and I am shocked by the amount of falsehoods they tell about Franco. Freedom is like oxygen: you don’t value it until you don’t have it. If those kids knew what it was really like to live in a dictatorship, they would stop recording themselves singing Cara al sol.”

Erik says that at his place of work, a production company, he was asked not to link the business with the book on Franco. “They told me that money is quickly lost.” The fear, the discomfort, the prejudices, are still present, as was a bust of the dictator in the Royal Casino of Madrid, in the heart of the capital, until 2023, when Erik and some friends, after visiting it, decided to make public what they had seen. It was subsequently removed.

Although the problem has grown, it is not new, and nor are the initiatives to try to tackle it. In Navarre, between 8,000 and 10,000 children between the ages of 15 and 18 participate each year in the different activities run by the Schools with Memory project, which was created in 2016, driven precisely by history teachers who detected this lack of knowledge about repression and the dictatorship. “There were teachers,” says Josemi Gastón, director of the Navarre Institute of Memory, “who did not want to address this period with rigor or, simply, they were not developing solid educational projects that would value the rights that cost so much to achieve and that could compete with what the children see on social networks.”

In addition to plays, documentary screenings, and literary workshops on the subject, they organize visits to mass grave exhumations and meetings with victims of repression, such as Josefina Lamberto, who until her death in 2022 dedicated herself to spreading her story so that it would never happen again. She was seven years old when the Falangists took her father and her 14-year-old sister, Maravillas. They found the girl dead, naked in a vacant lot. She had been raped. “It is impressive to be in the Sartaguda Memorial Park with the victims and 650 people in absolute silence, listening to them,” recalls Gastón. “Teachers can explain the historical contexts, but when students listen directly to those who were repressed, they internalize it in a different way and their democratic conscience is strengthened.” Their reactions demonstrate this. “They were killed for thinking differently,” says a student during the exhumation of a mass grave in Navarre, after anthropologist Lourdes Herrasti shows them the skulls riddled with bullet holes. “They were a few years older than you: 19 and 21,” explains Ana Ollo, councillor for citizen and institutional relations, who was present on one of those visits.

“You’ll see when your grandfather finds out you’ve been with a red”

Aware that empathy has always been one of the best tools for transmitting knowledge, Luis Pérez Lara, 88, who was persecuted by Franco, has visited schools on about 20 occasions to recount his experience. He says that he uses some tricks. “At first you arrive and there is laughter, jokes... You hear, for example, one person say to another: ‘You’ll see when your grandfather finds out you’ve been with a red’ or things like that. If I see someone with long hair, I tell them that, surely, during the dictatorship they would have been arrested. I tell them what the dances were like, the sexual repression that existed, that the age of majority was 21... and when I see that I have established contact, little by little, I start to talk to them about prison, about torture...”

A member of the Spanish Communist Party, Pérez Lara suffered all kinds of beatings and humiliations at the General Directorate of Security, the current seat of the Madrid regional government: blows to the penis, threats at gunpoint... they even pretended they were going to throw him out of a window. One of his torturers was the infamous Antonio González Pacheco, “Billy the Kid,” who was awarded government medals that increased his retirement pension by up to 50%. Today Pérez Lara calls that click — when he notices that the kids are listening to him — “opening the door.” He believes that it has been closed for too long, that they have arrived too late. He is also worried about “not having replacements,” but he is convinced that to scare away authoritarianism, it is necessary to understand it, and that is what he has dedicated his entire life in freedom to: bringing to light what happened to so many people like him.

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