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Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History

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1 Far-Right Revisionism and
the End of History
Louie Dean Valencia-García

In 2013, members of the French ethno-nationalist youth group ‘Généra-

tion Identitaire’ (Generation Identity) posted a video to the digital video
platform YouTube in an attempt to propagate a fear of immigrants whilst
simultaneously claiming they had ‘discovered’ their history—as though
it were something lost, hidden.1 They asserted in their declaration,
‘We’ve rejected your history books to re-gather our memories’. The black
and white video featured young, white men and women close-up, com-
pleting each other’s sentences:

We’ve stopped believing in a ‘global village’ and the ‘family of man’.

We discovered we have roots, ancestry, and therefore a future. Our
heritage is our land, our blood, our identity. We are the heirs to our
own future… The lambda emblem, painted on our proud Spartan
shields, is our symbol. 2

The members of Génération Identitaire rejected the globalised world in

which they grew up and took a stylised version of the Spartan’s ancient
symbol (Λ) as their own, declaring war on the world they saw as a prod-
uct of the cultural revolution of the 1960s—which was a culminating
moment for anti-colonial struggles and for the civil rights for people of
colour, women and queer people in Europe, the United States and in for-
mer colonies. Of course, these so-called ‘identitarians’ seemed to ignore
the fact that ancient Sparta was never a unifying pro-Hellenic force;
moreover, it had its own very queer history that certainly would have
clashed with how the group imagined that ancient past.3
History, popularly, is a thing which is stretched, invented and made of
stubborn clichés that refuse to give way:

History repeats itself.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Winners write the history.

History is made of fragments. Sometimes these pieces are things jot-

ted down in a journal or a scrap of paper. History is created out of
4 Louie Dean Valencia-García
newspapers, cave paintings, buildings, art, word-of-mouth, ruins, geo-
logical or scientific investigations, statues, fables, excavations and tele-
vision shows. History is saved in museums, libraries, government and
organisational archives, graves, shipwrecks, pyramids, attics and Twitter.
Historians sift through these ephemera in their attempt to reconstruct
and understand the past. When digging through this material, historians
quickly realise the truth of the matter is that nothing repeats exactly the
same—although there certainly are patterns to be investigated. Culture
is not static and sometimes the ‘losers’ also write history—seen in the
US context where numerous American military bases have been named
after Confederate ‘heroes’.4
If visualised, some might think of history as a Picasso painting, dis-
torted, broken in fragments, but screaming with meaning. Others might
see it as Michelangelo’s David, a form that looks perfect from one an-
gle, but in reality, it is distorted to privilege a singular perspective. Yet
still, someone might see history as something like a Georgia O’Keefe
painting, natural but heavily coded. Perhaps it is like the photography of
Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, whose infinitely detailed photos are comprised of
layer after layer of stitched together images of the same place at different
times, conveying some sort of greater truth in the final product. Yet still,
others think of history like the Artemision Bronze—masculine, power-
ful and enduring. As traditionalists, many members of the Identitarian
movement would most likely identify with this latter understanding of
history.
Traditionalism, as the Italian esoteric fascist philosopher Julius Evola
(1898–1974) understood it, is a sort of idealised, static idea of the past
that is deeply rooted in custom and a nation’s spirit, as well as blood. The
traditionalist world is one that is the ‘antithesis’ of the modern world.
For Evola, and those Identitarians who have adopted his philosophy, tra-
ditionalists are those elite who stand in the ruins of modernity, who rise
above depravity and degeneration, who both harden themselves against
change but also have found traditionalist values that they see as now
hidden from most men. To understand how the far right comprehends
history one must understand that for their ideologues our contemporary
age is one of decline and degeneracy. For them, an idealised, imagined
past must be restored.
History has long been thought of a cyclical—at least since Polybius
proposed his cycles of political evolution.5 Traditionalists, like Evola,
conceive of history as a sort of politics of inevitability—that we rotate
between a golden age, silver age, bronze age and dark (or iron) age.6
This type of teleology is prominent amongst many older traditions
globally. In Nordic pagan tradition, a golden age (gullaldr) comes after
Ragnarök, the end of our current epoch. In Christianity, humans began
in paradise, suffered a fall, found redemption, but still face a coming
 Far-Right Revisionism 5
­

Most recently, the belief in history as cyclical found its way into
United States President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric—calling
to ‘Make America Great Again’. Of course, when exactly this great
past was is never specified—but one surmises it is before queer people

Figure 1.2 United States President Donald Trump wearing a ‘Make A merica
Great Again’ hat. The phrase recalls an unspecified idealised
past—a fascistic palingenetic tendency. Windover Way Photography/
Shutterstock.com.
6 Louie Dean Valencia-García
could marry, or even before there were protections for people with
disabilities, or maybe before women had their right to abortion rec-
ognised by the US Supreme Court. Worse, maybe this supposed era
of greatness was during Jim Crow, or before the American Civil War.
Mussolini wanted to bring back the greatness of the Roman Empire.
Hitler looked to the pre-Weimar years. Francisco Franco recalled the
Spanish Empire and the so-called the ‘Reconquest’, which persecuted
and exiled Muslims and Jews. By seeing time as cyclical, something
that can be ‘brought back’, the far right celebrates an idealised past
where the white man was master of his home and the colonised world.
This cyclical thinking is what allows for what historian Timothy Sny-
der calls ‘a politics of inevitability’.10
Indeed, the traditionalist understanding of history as cyclical is inher-
ently challenged by progressive understandings of history. In progressive
narratives there is not a desire to return to the past—the past is past, but
informs our present. Rather than focusing on what was, there instead
is a desire to move towards a future. This type of history, too, can have
its own teleology if there is an assumed end point that must be reached.
Somewhat optimistically, in The End of History and the Last Man Fran-
cis Fukuyama argued,

As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises

of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one
competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially univer-
sal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom
and popular sovereignty.11

However, even Fukuyama wondered if the ‘present trend toward democ-

racy’ was in fact a ‘cyclical phenomenon’.12 Speculating about the role of
economic crises in the rise of illiberal ideologies he wrote, ‘What reason,
then do we have to expect that the situation of the 1970s will not recur,
or worse yet, that the 1930s, with its clash of virulent anti-democratic
ideologies, can not return?’13 Indeed, as Fukuyama later points out,
both trends are possible, there are ‘cycles in the worldwide fortunes of
democracy’ and there is a ‘pronounced secular trend in the democratic
direction’.14 Most resoundingly, Fukuyama worried that the arrival of
an ‘end of history’, a supposed triumphant win of liberal democracy,
could end with a ‘last man’ who is both ‘self-absorbed’ and ‘devoid of
thymotic striving for higher goals in pursuit of…private comforts’. These
last men would, he feared, become ‘engaged in bloody and pointless
prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons’. Moreover, these
last men would not have ‘constructive outlets for [their] megalothymia’
which could lead to a ‘resurgence in an extreme and pathological form’
of being. Almost prophetically, writing decades before Donald Trump
assumed the presidency of the United States of America, Fukuyama
 Far-Right Revisionism 7
worried that for all the recognition Trump (and individuals like him)
received, they were ‘not the most serious or the most just’. For Fukuyama,
despite being in a utopic society, where the world was just and prosper-
ous, there would always be those, like Trump, who could not satisfy
their own ‘thymotic’ natures—that is to say their desire for recognition,
or supremacy. Indeed, as we have already seen in the Trump presidency,
bloody and pointless prestige battles are occurring. In the second decade
of the twenty-first century, pathological megalothymia and a desire for
supremacy have arisen—both in the forms of white supremacist ideology
and American nationalist exceptionalism.

Alt-Histories
Historians Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, Denis Mack Smith and Robert
Paxton have described the fascist palingenetic tendency to recast or ide-
alise an imagined past. In Spain, after the loss of its colonies in 1898, the
fascist Falange party pushed a mythical vision of ‘Hispanidad’, a type
of Spanish-Nationalism that attempted to recast the Spanish colonial
period as benign. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Nazi
sympathisers already were proposing a denial of history and inserting
factually untrue conspiracy theories. Through the creation of alternate
histories and facts, the far right’s impulse has long been to undermine
liberalism (and the Enlightenment project altogether) to re-write and
alter history so that to legitimate essentialist, racist, sexist, ethnocentric,
nationalist and heteronormative beliefs—what they call ‘traditional’ be-
liefs, despite knowing those traditionalist beliefs have more to do with
nineteenth and twentieth understandings of class, race, nation, gender
and sexuality than some ancient past. These beliefs, indeed, lie at the
core of what we now recognise as fascism.
The term ‘alt-history’ refers to both white nationalist Richard Spen-
cer’s ‘alt-right’ movement—which readily misconstrues the past and
then refers to their own alt-history as authority—, and the rhetoric used
by Trump’s counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, who infamously coined the
phrase ‘alternative facts’ to describe her (ab)use and skewed interpreta-
tions of fact when giving an interview on the American political show
Meet the Press in 2017. Conway’s use of the phrase indicated a selection
of ‘facts’ (which for her did not have to be true) to construct a politically
useful narrative—one that is just parallel enough to truth that one must
learn to identify the departures from truth to see where the weaving of
the narrative becomes undone.
In 2016, American Identitarian and founder of the ‘Alt-Right’ move-
ment Richard Spencer began advocating for a post-American world
where a ‘white ethno-state’—‘a homeland for all Europeans from
around the world’—would replace the United States as we know it. For
Spencer, this would happen through a process of a supposed ‘peaceful
8 Louie Dean Valencia-García
­
 Far-Right Revisionism 9
sins the historian can commit, even though our questions are inherently
and inevitably formed by our present. This paradox is unavoidable, but
to avoid faulty logic the historian must acknowledge this simple fact and
work through it to avoid paralysis.
History is altered through historical revisionism, or the modification
or rejection of historic arguments (often based on the interpretation,
selection or availability of archives) and the recovery of new historical
information. Alt-histories are created by: (1) historical denial, which can
include abject rejection of archives and historical evidence; (2) belief in
cyclical, or teleological, history which assumes where we are going or
where we have been; (3) declination narratives which assume a theory
of degeneracy in place of understanding of change; (4) mythologisation
that is created when facts are replaced with chimeras; (5) nostalgia for
an imagined past that often supposes both a declination and attempts to
selectively exclude or underline historical facts and narratives; (6) ahis-
toricism based purely on untruth; and (7) through often fragmented
and biased ways history is remembered and portrayed in popular public
memory (films, textbooks, television shows, etc.).
When we impose our present on the past to justify an understanding
about the present, we risk creating an alternate timeline. These alter-
nate timelines, when abused and given legs, create what we might call
alternative histories—or alt-histories. Through this abuse of history, we
see an attempt to uncritically reject both historical consensus and un-
derstanding of the past—which presents a very real risk to the study
and utility of history itself. Alt-histories are not simply a difference in
interpretation of fact but rather are made by intentional distortion. His-
torians always disagree, but on some level, they still engage with those
with whom they disagree as long as those disagreements are made in
good faith—this is why historians study historiography, or the history of
history. Alt-histories, unlike history itself, reject fact and a genuine inter-
est in knowledge or historical inquiry. Alt-histories use decontextualised
historical fragments to legitimate ideology or belief first and foremost,
and not to understand how things came to be. Alt-histories are an at-
tempt to change political and historical narratives as part of what many
Identitarians call a ‘meta-political’ strategy to legitimate their beliefs.19
In the postwar era, as society began to break away from the bina-
ries of cyclical and progressive views of history, and as access to more
information than ever before became prevalent, we were left with in-
finite histories and interpretations. To add to the fragility of history,
postmodern thought and false equivalency gave away to a ‘crisis of in-
finite histories’—where uncritical thinking left some people distrusting
of scholarly sources and scientific fact through a sort of teleological loop
that justifies ideological prejudices. This postmodern condition that left
students and writers of history with an infinitude of interpretations and
facts is not inherently a bad thing when considered critically. However,
10 Louie Dean Valencia-García

Figure 1.3 Supporters of the far-right Golden Dawn party celebrate after the
early election results at their offices in Thessaloniki, Greece on
17 June 2012. The group uses a ‘meander’ design to recall ancient
Greece, which is also reminiscent of the swastika, another appro-
priated meander design. Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock.com.

today, many have come to distrust scholarly evidence, which ultimately

threatens what we mean by ‘fact’. The alt-histories derived from this
distrust depends on invented conspiracies that let the ideologue reconcile
illogical or simply untrue conclusions—drawing crooked lines between
unrelated nodes. This distrust of academic research has particularly af-
fected the ways some elements of the public accept scholarship across
disciplines—from climate change to vaccine sceptics. People fear every-
thing is subjective—that facts are moulded to benefit bottom lines and
political expediency—which is not untrue. This does leave the common
person asking if everyone has an interpretation and whether all inter-
pretations are equal. The expert thus loses credibility—replaced with
internet conspiracy theories.
To make sense of infinite interpretations, people often fall prey
to false equivalencies and binary thinking—to hear both sides of the
story as though there are only two perspectives. Some might even turn
against the postmodern world, as though it were an ideology and not
merely a description of ways in which people negotiate their lives in
the late capitalist, postcolonial era. This desire to reject the complexity
of postmodernity—for an imagined simpler world of the past—has
turned some to the likes of right-wing traditionalist Jordan Peterson.
 Far-Right Revisionism 11
Postmodernity left us with a construction of time that is neither cyclical
nor progressive, but still has elements of both, shattered into alternate
and competing timelines. The shattering of the illusion cyclical and pro-
gressive history left us trying to figure out ways to usefully study his-
tory given the infinite possibilities. This fractured history has also left
pressure points that were particularly vulnerable for malintent and that
could be leveraged by conspiratorial-minded right-wing ideologues. This
book attempts to locate some of those weaknesses.
Postmodern histories, which are part and parcel of late capitalism,
are indeed subjects for historical debate, and we should be clear about
the dangers embedded in them. However, when mobilised by the radical
right to promote and legitimise nationalistic, racist, sexist, queerphobic,
xenophobic, classist and ableist ideologies, we end up with ‘alt-histories’.
This is also what turns postmodern histories toxic.

Understanding the Tensions and Constructing

Alt/Histories
In the public sphere, charges of ‘revisionism’ are often thrown around
when history becomes contentious. Revisionism is not inherently a bad
thing. Professional historians know that the process of revising history—
looking at new evidence and considering new arguments—is necessary
to the study of history. In fact, historiography depends on revisions and
arguments. However, despite the rigorous scholarship of historians,
there always exists the risk that disproven or outdated constructions of
history can survive, deform and become fodder for ideological purposes.
Often, these distortions are discovered in public memory, or the ways
the general public remembers things of the past—existing not only in
history books but also in television, movies, museums, podcasts, oral
tradition or underbelly message board sites of the internet like 4chan.
Thus, alt-histories exist not only in the minds of ideologues, but are
constantly attempting to struggle to colonise and replace history itself in
the public sphere.
This has recently been seen in the ways that the far right has tried to
replace historical facts surrounding Nazism, and more specifically Hitler’s
politics, with historical fiction—even seeping its way into the works
of otherwise reliable historians. One of the most popular alt-histories
contended by the far right, and spurious right-wing propagandists like
Dinesh D’Souza, 20 is that ‘Hitler was a socialist’. D’Souza published a
book in July 2017 titled The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the
American Left. That book, a prototype alt-history, included conspirato-
rial untruths that were also reiterated in D’Souza’s 2018 film Death of a
Nation. In fact, on the far-right platform 4chan message board, ‘/pol’, the
phrase ‘Hitler was a socialist’ found its peak in the months surrounding
D’Souza’s 2017 book—and still continues to be extolled regularly.
12 Louie Dean Valencia-García

Figure 1.4 T he use of the phrase ‘Hitler was a socialist’ had its peak usage on
4chan during the months surrounding the release of Dinesh D’Sou-
za’s 2017 book, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the Amer-
ican Left. Image produced by Louie Dean Valencia-García using
Peeters, Stijn and Sal Hagen. ‘4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit’
Computer software. Vers. 1.0 (2018).

Such alt-histories can even find their way into the books written by
prominent scholars such as Brendan Simms—currently a professor in
the history of international relations at Cambridge University. This was
demonstrated in an eviscerating review in The Guardian by the eminent
Second World War historian Richard Evans—an emeritus regius pro-
fessor of history at Cambridge and later president of the Wolfson Col-
lege at Cambridge. Evans argues Simms’s biography on Hitler essentially
conflates socialism and Nazism. Evans argues this is seen when Simms
claims, ‘Hitler wanted to establish what he considered racial unity in
Germany by overcoming the capitalist order and working for the con-
struction of a new classless society’. 21 Turning Hitler into a socialist
would result in the ability to vilify socialism, folding Nazism and so-
cialism into one and the same. In his review, Evans rightly points out,
‘[O]verwhelming consensus of historical scholarship has rejected any
idea that Hitler was a socialist’.22
While historians constantly have historiographical arguments about
interpretations of history, Simms’s argument is based upon misrepre-
sentation of the past—pitting history against an alt-history of dubious
 Far-Right Revisionism 13
origin. Disentangling Simms’s alt-history, Evans forcefully argues Simms
attempts to reduce ‘virtually all the major events in the history of the
Third Reich to a product of anti-Americanism’—that is to say anti-
capitalism—even Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom which sent
30,000 Jews to concentration camps. By using anti-Americanism as a
rationale for Hitler’s actions, Simms attempts to cast Hitler as a zealot
anti-capitalist. The stretching and distortions of history do more than
bend truth. Evans continues,

In the end, Simms hasn’t written a biography in any meaningful

sense of the word, he’s written a tract that instrumentalises the past
for present-day political purposes. As such, his book can be safely
ignored by serious students of the Nazi era. 23

Anecdotally, belief that ‘Hitler was a socialist’ has become so prevalent

that even in my survey courses of European history I have even had stu-
dents attempt to make this same argument in class. Those students often
point to Hitler’s own use of ‘National Socialism’ to describe his ideolo-
gies. Simply put, Hitler, like Mussolini and Franco, sent leftists, social-
ists and communists to prisons and concentration camps and frequently
appropriated rhetoric from leftists for political purposes. Fascists were,
in fact, against socialism because of its focus on class issues over those
of the nation. Simms, in promoting this conflation, opens the door for
history to be replaced—altered.
As this case demonstrates, there are serious tensions between history
and alt-history playing out both in the public sphere and amongst schol-
ars. This volume uses the term ‘alt/histories’ to illustrate those tensions.
Moreover, it attempts to understand how alt-histories are created by the
far right—analysing how they move radical ideologies into the public
sphere by using mutated version of facts and history to legitimate such
beliefs. The authors propose methodology and practice on how to decon-
struct and combat fascistic projects. Importantly, this book, a work of
historiography imaginatively conceived to spill outside of the discipline
of history, acknowledges that scholars of all disciplines and non-scholars
alike all have a stake in history. To this end, historians, sociologists,
anthropologists, political scientists, cultural theorists, literary scholars,
neurologists, lawyers, classicists and activists have all contributed to this
book. By bringing such a wide variety of experts together we can learn
ways in which history, law and scientific knowledge have been weap-
onised by the far right more broadly.
Necessarily, because of the fragmentary, layered and constructed
nature of all archives (public and private), the field of history can quite
literally include anything. However, age does not make those frag-
ments into history—only rigorous analysis does that. Alt-histories are
constructed for ideological purposes through the denial of history, the
14 Louie Dean Valencia-García
overemphasis of certain historical facts or an incomplete understand-
ing of historical context. Sometimes they appear as conspiracy theo-
ries attempting to explain something unknown or not understood. As
weapons, alt-histories are used to exculpate the guilty, casting blame
on a marginalised group. Conspiracy theories and the denial of history
are often prominent amongst the far right, especially well-known is
the case of Holocaust deniers, who reject historical fact outright. 24
This rejection of historical fact, uncritically, creates an archive of
knowledge that skews perception of an historical event. Of course,
this is not limited to the far right, but is particularly prevalent amongst
their ideologues.
In his essay ‘Archive Fever’ Jacques Derrida famously described how
what is saved in an archive reflects the biases of the collectors. 25 When
historians do use archives, they must question the evidence collected.
A state archive, when not interrogated, can just as easily create an alt-
history. History is not ‘written by the victors’—but alt-histories cer-
tainly can be. This is because most alt-histories are created because of
a lack of critical inquiry into the past. Academic historians are scholars
trained to collect evidence, reference secondary sources and are expected
to constantly revise history, adding new nuance and details. Historians
must also look beyond the archive to understand historical moments or
actors—often, this is where historiography becomes most helpful. They
must ask what have other scholars written, what have they debated,
what sources have they consulted and what is left to be found and con-
sidered. Alt-histories fundamentally are like alternate timelines that are
reliant upon unprovable, imagined or impossible pasts. Alt-histories are
meant to be biased and avoid the process of historical inquiry.
While it might seem obvious, generally, progressives see history as
unfinished—there is always work left pending to bring forth progress.
Sometimes this is thought of as a fight for equality, sometimes the advent
of a new technology. History is propelled not by the simple passage of time,
but instead by the decisions people make in order to make history—their
agency. Even Karl Marx expected a moment in which after the proletariat
had won the battle against capitalism, there would be a utopia waiting at
the end—the proletariat would become historical actors, take ownership
of their labour and build utopia. Marx was less clear on how we would
arrive to this utopia—a still hotly contested question. Communists of the
Stalin variety saw a need to impose their vision of the future through a
strong centralised state. Anarchists, on the other hand, asked for change
to come through coalition and consensus building, along with the rad-
ical decentralisation of power structures. Democratic Socialists wanted
to install socialism, maintain a strong state, but were determined that
socialism would eventually win the day in parliamentary votes. Fascists
looked to an imagined past for inspiration for their future.
 Far-Right Revisionism 15
Sometimes, history is created by chance. Someone throws a net into
a running river, and that net catches some sort of artefact that gives us
new insight into our past. The historian’s job is to scrutinise each arte-
fact and attempt to find a narrative that explains some aspect of the past
or present. However, this is not how all people see history. For many,
one discovers history by using a sort of harpoon that shoots through the
past and cuts through to a predetermined target. This is what historians
call teleology.
The inclination to see history as cyclical is nothing new. We see it in
the repetition of minutes, hours, months, years—all dependent upon the
simple rotation around the sun. So-called ‘ages’—bracketed-off periods
such as the so-called ‘dark age’ (or what is often referred to as the ‘Kali
Yuga’ in so-called ‘traditionalist’ thought), ‘golden age’ and ‘iron age’—,
necessitate a declination narrative and mythic heroes to somehow turn
the wheel of time. We see this particularly in the construction of the
European Renaissance (or Rebirth). According to G.W. Trompf:

Conceived in its simplest form, the idea of renaissance entails a be-

lief that a given set of (approved) general conditions constitutes the
revival of a former set which had in the interim been considered
defunct or dying. Although enriched by cyclical lines of thought
(by the idea of successive civilizations, decomposition followed by
rebirth, the Golden Age returned, etc.), it falls into a separate cat-
egory, and its history reflects a complex interlacing of classical and
Christian threads.26

As any historian of the medieval period will argue, the terms ‘Renais-
sance’ and even ‘Enlightenment’ impose a bias onto the past—portraying
the time before the Renaissance as ‘dark’ or in decay. Indeed, cyclical in-
terpretations of history have grave repercussions for the ways the general
public understands the past, and potentially can affect the future. In this
way, the past cannot be left in the past—trapping us with no escape into
the future.

Refreshing and Reloading the Reconquest: An

Alt-History
In the wake of the mass murder by a white nationalist terrorist targeting
Latinos in El Paso, Texas in the summer of 2019, which resulted in 22
deaths and 24 injuries, Todd Starnes, the host of Fox Nation, argued,
‘I do believe that we have been invaded by a horde. A rampaging horde
of illegal aliens. This has been a slow-moving invasion’. He continues
to dehumanise refugees by calling them ‘violent criminals’—effectively
depicting them as ‘Other’. In choppy sentence fragments Starnes argues:
16 Louie Dean Valencia-García
When you go back in time and when you look at what an invasion
is—whether it is the Nazis invading France and western Europe.
I mean, whether the Muslims were invading a country back in the
early years. It was an invasion.

In this example, Starnes decontextualises history and strings it to-

gether into fragments so that to leverage it as a weapon. His reference
to ‘hordes’ recalls medieval fears of a Mongol invasion. He then piv-
ots to compare invaders to the Nazis, who were proponents of ethnic
cleansing and genocide. He then references Muslim invaders and thus
the crusades or ‘reconquest’ of Spain. Effectively, his argument is that
refugees and migrants are attempting to invade the West and will even-
tually ethnically cleanse the West—what far-right conspiracy theorists
call ‘white genocide’. For Starnes, history is a weapon to be wielded to
legitimate his far-right ideology, and worse, the acts taken by the El
Paso shooter. 27
To better understand how history is appropriated, revised and re-
purposed for nationalist purposes we can look at the long history of
the Christian ‘Reconquista’ of the Iberian Peninsula. The Reconquista,
or reconquest, recounts a myth that after 700 years of occupation, be-
ginning in 711, ‘invading’ Muslims were expelled in 1492 by Isabel
of Castilla and Fernando of Aragón, ‘the Catholic Kings’, after the
fall of the Tarifa of Granada. While yes, Fernando and Isabel’s troops
did indeed conquer Granada, the myth of the reconquest imposes an
historical fiction onto Spain. Prior to 711, Iberia was a religiously di-
verse territory—even its Christian population was not monolithic. A
‘reconquest’ of Spain imposes a narrative that a Kingdom of Spain had
once been a fact prior to the arrival of Muslims. In reality, Spain as
a nation-state is a modern and contested construction. Integral to the
creation of this history is the expulsion of Jewish people in Iberia—the
Sephardi—whom had been in the peninsula since the beginning of
the common era until their expulsion. In addition to expanding their
conquest of the peninsula the Catholic Kings also demonstrated their
religious extremism in the Americas, attempting to first enslave and
then convert natives across the Atlantic to Catholicism. Obsessed with
‘limpieza de sangre’ [cleanliness of blood], a form of ethnic cleansing,
the newly founded Kingdom of Spain became a model for colonisation
and racialised and religious persecution.
This history of Reconquest, ‘taking back’ Muslim Spain is the
foundational myth of the Spanish nation. At the centre of this Recon-
quest myth is Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043–1099), a mercenary and
warrior nicknamed ‘El Cid’—a word derived from the Arabic ‘sayyid’,
or ‘lord’ or ‘master’. 28 El Cid was born to lower nobility, and centuries
later became a symbol of Spanishness. However, as Richard Fletcher
describes:
 Far-Right Revisionism 17

Figure 1.5 Statue of El Cid in Burgos, Spain. Botond Horvath/Shutterstock.com.

There is a disjunction… between eleventh-century reality and later

mythology. In Rodrigo’s day there was little if any sense of nation-
hood, crusade or reconquest in the Christian kingdoms of Spain.
Rodrigo himself… was as ready to fight alongside Muslims against
Christians as vice versa. He was his own man and fought for his
own profit. 29

The reality of Rodrigo’s life and motivations, in fact, was quite different
than the myths, histories and legends that followed his life. He was a
mercenary for hire, as were many warriors of the period, with an Arabic
derived nickname. El Cid fought battles with and against Muslims; how-
ever, popularly, El Cid’s image became a bellicose one associated with
fighting against Muslim ‘invaders’.
Under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, images of Span-
ish greatness often referenced images of the ‘Reconquista’ and the
‘Conquest’ of the Americas.30 Of course, any scholarly understand-
ing of those moments requires a reckoning with the deaths of millions
and the expulsions of large parts of the Iberian population. The image
of both the Christian Reconquest and the Conquest of the Americas
18 Louie Dean Valencia-García
was dependent upon an imagining of the past that simply never was but
became accepted as truth by most Spaniards. The alt-history effectively
replaced history itself—and still holds a strong grip on the country’s
popular imagination.
In 1955, with the support of Franco, a statue by the artist Juan Cris-
tóbal was erected to commemorate El Cid in Burgos, the largest town
near where the warrior was born. Curiously, one article in A.B.C., the
Falangist mouthpiece and Spanish newspaper of record, even hinted at
one way in which the image of El Cid was invented, claiming: ‘The ico-
nography of El Cid is completely imagined’—with the detail of El Cid’s
beard coming only in the epic poem written about him, after the fact. 31
Another contemporary article referenced the statue by Cristóbal as the
‘essence and spiritual example of Castilian lands’ and a ‘grand figure of
the History of Spain’.32
Those invested in a narrative of a unified Spain, from the Catholic
Kings to Francisco Franco, anchored their vision of the country to
El Cid—a figure of the distant past who was decontextualised, appro-
priated and imbued with nationalist historical significance and meaning.
Strictly speaking, to call El Cid a Spanish national hero demonstrates a
clear example of an alt-history. There was no Spain in El Cid’s time. In
the 1950s, the director of the Spanish Royal Academy, Ramón Menén-
dez Pidal, attempted to rescue El Cid’s narrative as one that was not
specifically nationalist, but somehow rooted in a sort of nobility and
patriotism. The hagiographic historian twists El Cid’s story yet again
and calls it ‘democratic’ because it showed how lower ranking nobility
could become legendary, he argues:

[E]l poema del Cid is not national because of the patriotism that it
manifests, but better to say it is a sketch of the people where it was
written. The most noble qualities of the people who made him their
hero are reflected: love of family…; unbreakable fidelity; magnani-
mous generosity and haughtiness toward the King; the intensity of
sentiment and the loyal sobriety of expression. The deeply national
democratic spirit is incarnate in that ‘good servant who doesn’t have
a good lord’, in that simple hidalgo [low-ranking aristocracy], who,
unappreciated by high nobility and abandoned by his King, com-
pletes great deeds, and takes on all the power of Morocco and sees
his daughters become queens… This genre of nationalism, less ener-
getic, but more ample than the militaristic patriotism of Roland, can
be felt more generally and permanently…33

Writing under Franco’s dictatorship, Menéndez Pidal simultaneously re-

defined ‘patriotism’ and ‘democracy’ so that to allow for Franco’s vision
of Spain to survive in the post-Hitler era. In this way a nationalist war
hero could be reimagined as a patriotic, democratic hero—an argument
 Far-Right Revisionism 19
that could legitimate Franco to democratic Europe. El Cid, essentially,
became a military leader, like Franco, who rose to power amongst
an elite—thus somehow making him, and Franco, both patriotic and
democratic—not a nationalistic leader who overthrew democracy and
was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. In 1961, Holly-
wood, too, fell for El Cid—with a blockbuster film by the same name
starring Charlton Heston and financially supported by the Franco ré-
gime. El Cid’s narrative not only came to represent Spain internally, but
became an international symbol of Spanishness.
The placement of Juan Cristóbal’s statue in Burgos was no coinci-
dence, as the city was a stronghold for the Falange and Franco’s army
during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist period. In the Fran-
coist narrative, Spain’s Civil War, the so called ‘War of Liberation’, was
framed as a sort of ‘Reconquest’. Franco’s ‘War of Liberation’ did not
expel Muslims and Jews, but was one that expelled, ostracised, impris-
oned, murdered and exiled those from the political left, queer people and
others who had taken Spain away from God and country. Despite the
end of Franco’s regime and the establishment of the current democracy,
by the early 2000s, the image of El Cid, and Burgos itself, had become
a place where far-right skinhead ideology festered. One group in partic-
ular, Skinheads Burgos, even held a yearly ceremony at the statue of El
Cid to celebrate the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain—and
recorded songs dedicated to El Cid. In fact, popularly, many, if not most,
Spaniards believe this myth.
Today, thousands of tourists visit a weeklong festival dedicated to El
Cid in Burgos. In this case, the alt-history created out of the fragments
of El Cid’s life is celebrated both popularly and by the radical right. With
this simple example, we see just how a historical person has become
twisted into something clearly unrecognisable to history. Such is the fate
of other such figures, like Joan of Arc, King Arthur, Richard the Lion-
heart, Roland and William Wallace. Even Abraham Lincoln, who waged
a civil war to emancipate enslaved black Americans, has become a shield
for a party that bears his standard only to deflect criticism of clearly
racist ideologies. Lincoln once served as plausible deniability for a racist
party; now, the dissonance is raw and out in the open.

Fighting Zombie Fascism: Queering and

Decolonising the West34
Historians, activists and scholars of all disciplines must find new ways to
turn these alt-histories, these distorted narratives, in on themselves. To
make history less Eurocentric and heteronormative it is not only neces-
sary to present a more accurate version of history but also necessary to
prevent the far right from using it as a recruitment tool. Historians have
talked about decolonising and queering national histories for decades
20 Louie Dean Valencia-García
now—especially those of former colonies. It is time to decolonise and
queer European and American history and scholarship more broadly.
We have to present pluralist histories of nations and peoples—stories
forgotten or never highlighted—that clearly contradict far-right nar-
ratives. European history has always been pluralistic. By more fully
demonstrating pluralism already present in the history of Europe, based
on historical fact and analysis, we can show that the alt-histories the far
right utilise to legitimate their own power are fictions—whether a belief
in a homogenous European past or an attempt to make America Great
Again.
Recently, Javier Ortega Smith, the leader of the Spanish far-right
party, Vox, came under scrutiny for language that Spanish Attorney
General Luis Navajas called ‘abominable’ and ‘repulsive’ although not a
hate crime.35 Ortega Smith claimed:

Our common enemy, the enemy of Europe, the enemy of liberty, the
enemy of progress, the enemy of democracy, the enemy of family,
the enemy of life, the enemy of the future is an invasion, an Islamic
invasion… What we know and understand as civilization is at risk.

Ortega Smith called upon old concepts of ‘western civilisation’ and the
so-called Spanish Reconquest that have long been used to mask hate and
excuse violence.
Historically, being ‘western’ or ‘civilised’ was a powerful weapon used
to legitimate the domination of others who were not of the elite or were
outside Europe. Despite the fact that the first recorded civilisations or
settled groups of people began in ancient Mesopotamia, modern-day
Iraq, the promise of ‘civilisation’ somehow became the provenance of
Europe alone. The promise of ‘Western civilisation’ became an excuse
to dominate—to ‘civilise’ others. In the Spanish case, this was readily
made apparent in the encomienda system that systematically enslaved
native populations in the Americas. Other European colonial powers
adopted similar rationales for their empires; it became ‘the white man’s
burden’ to spread Western civilisation. Of course, native populations in
the Americas and elsewhere already had civilisations long before Euro-
peans arrived, and were rarely admitted as part of the Western club.
In the aftermath of the First World War, the German academic
Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West, a work that demon-
strated racist and proto-fascist tropes as it decried the fall of Western
civilisation and underlined the importance of strengthening blood ties in
order to save the West. This fear of the fall of the West later popped up
again during the Cold War and even in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks
in the United States.36 Powerful countries seem to need to summon up a
millenarianism, sounding the death of the West in moments of anxiety
 Far-Right Revisionism 21

Figure 1.6 The secretary general of the Vox extreme right party, Javier Ortega
Smith, in Pamplona, Spain places a Spanish flag on the lectern in
November 2018. MiguelOses/Shutterstock.com.

about the loss of power, while also using a desire to renew the nation to
legitimate their power—reifying their position in the world.
More recently, in 2016, Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of VICE Media,
began a men’s exclusive group called the Proud Boys.37 On the Proud
Boys’ website, they declare that they accept people of ‘all races’, ‘all
religions’, ‘gay or straight’. However, to join the Proud Boys one must
‘be a man’ and ‘must love the West’. One video featured on their website
claims that all the Proud Boys care about is that one believes ‘the West is
the best’.38 The group is composed of self-proclaimed ‘Western chauvin-
ists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world’. McInnes has
described a chauvinist as simply being ‘a nationalist, a patriot’. McInnes
conflates nationalism and patriotism—pride in one’s country as opposed
to the belief in the superiority of that nation in a way not dissimilar to
Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s usage 70 years earlier to legitimate Franco’s
dictatorship. McInnes’s broad category of ‘western chauvinism’ trans-
lates to a type of Western nationalism akin to ‘European nationalism’—a
concept that might read as ‘white nationalism’—without being entirely
obvious. Indeed, these chauvinistic ideals are a direct product of Western
ideologies. They represent the West’s most horrendous legacies: fascism,
patriarchy and colonialism.
22 Louie Dean Valencia-García
The Proud Boys’ website also claims the group confuses ‘the media
because the group is anti-SJW without being alt-right’. This claim to
be ‘anti-Social Justice Warrior’ is curious, as it most often refers to
those who are interested in promoting civil rights and pointing out in-
justices, regardless of one’s race, gender, class, nationality or embodi-
ment. When the so-called social justice warriors (SJWs) point to social
inequality because of discrimination, it is an attempt to have human
rights recognised—an ideal embedded in Enlightenment thought. Even
the Proud Boys’ desire to dubiously claim to not discriminate because of
race, sexuality or religion is a product of the Enlightenment. Of course,
for the group, there seems to be a complete lack of understanding about
what the Enlightenment was, including the importance of seeking re-
dress for injustice from a democratic government, as well as a complete
lack of interest in what equality means today. The so-called SJWs, in
reality, represent what might be the most important ideals of Western
thought that stretch from Rousseau to Angela Davis.
Meanwhile, the ‘men-only’ exclusivity of the Proud Boys is a clear
demonstration of chauvinism against women. The Proud Boys’ reaction-
ary website is against women and denies the existence of transgender
people, stating: ‘Our group is and will always be MEN ONLY (born
with a penis if that wasn’t clear enough for you leftists)!’ Women can,
however, join the group as ‘Proud Boys’ Girls’. But even in the women’s
group name they are subordinate, belonging not to their own group, but
to the boys themselves.
Both Ortega Smith and the Proud Boys’ versions of Western civili-
sation reject the Western ideals that are worth defending—a belief in
equality, the value of individual and the responsibility of the government
to its people. Their visions of the West simply cannot co-exist along
with the best hopes for the Enlightenment project. Of course, the best
parts of Enlightenment ideals have rarely been a reality, but they are
still admirable goals for which to strive. In fact, what we see with both
examples is an alt-history of the history of Europe, which has long been
competing against the more critical analysis of what the West means.
This alt-history has been attempting to replace the actual history of the
Europe—replacing history with an alt-history which would legitimate
the atrocities committed in the name of Western civilisation.
For decades, historians have argued fascism was a thing relegated
to the dustbin of history. With threats from far-right parties such as
Golden Dawn, Alternative für Deutschland, Sweden Democrats, Vox,
Lega Nord, Casa Pound and far-right leaders such as Donald Trump,
Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Matteo
Salvini and Boris Johnson, it is clear that far-right fascistic parties and
ideologies have returned to the mainstream. With mass shootings perpe-
trated by the likes of Anders Behring Breivik, Dylann Roof, Brenton Tar-
rant and Patrick Crusius—the list goes on and on—, we are witnessing
 Far-Right Revisionism 23
what can be described as an attack on the pluralistic, democratic public
sphere.39 On the internet, one need not go further than 4chan, YouTube
and comment sections of major newspapers to find malicious attacks
against women, immigrants, refugees and queer people—even plotting
their murder. As this book will show, far-right ideologies and actions are
fundamentally legitimated by their misinterpretations of historical facts
and those deformations into alt-history—a bait-and-switch claiming to
be legitimate history.
Today, refugees—many children—are living in cages in the United
States in ‘detainment’ centres. Based on a belief that cleansing the United
States of immigrants will somehow ‘Make America Great Again’, im-
migrants are being demonised as criminals and rounded up and sent to
these camps before deportation. A form of fascism has clawed its way
back to the mainstream. This zombie fascism is one that we are hesitant
to recognise as fascism; in some ways it is more gnarly and in others it is
more aesthetic—covering something ugly with flashy branding. Fascism
was supposed to be dead—with the exception of some fringe elements. It
was never dead but was undead. It just crawled underground and waited.
To admit that fascism has indeed taken hold of democratic governments
and democratically minded people is to acknowledge that the West has
failed at stopping fascism—despite those democracies’ promise to ‘never
forget’. Only once we accept that this has happened, once we confront
our histories, can we be in a better place to better uproot fascism entirely
by depriving it of the alt-histories and nostalgia for a past that never was
that give it oxygen.

Notes
24 Louie Dean Valencia-García
labelled ‘migrants’—added fuel to this on-going ‘Great Replacement’ of
peoples in European lands. Amid the degradation of its identity, the ab-
juration of its ancient Indo-European and Hellenic roots, feeling guilty
about its own history, and awash in relativism, self-doubt, and self-
loathing, Europe is on the verge of being conquered by Islam, a young,
rooted, and spiritually strong civilization that is superior to an aging and
frail Europe whose treacherous elites are behaving in a manner that is the
greatest expression of a civilization in free fall.

See: José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians: The Movement against Glo-
balism and Islam in Europe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2018), 2.
Far-Right Revisionism 25
 26 Louie Dean Valencia-García

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