Postscript to the Reader of this Book¶
Core Argument¶
This postscript directly addresses the anticipated reception of the work, pre-empting the hostility it expects to provoke. The author’s core argument is a defence of historical truth against the weight of repeated falsehood. The narrative thrust is not a continuation of the preceding historical analysis but a meta-commentary on the act of writing that history itself. The author asserts that the purpose of a work of history is not to please but to tell the truth, and that this truth will inevitably be unpalatable to those who have benefited from a dominant, false narrative.
The key claim is that a particular version of events—presumably the official or bourgeois account of the historical period under examination—has been repeated “a thousand times over” for forty years. This repetition, however, does not constitute truth. The author’s evidence is his own lived experience: “what I saw, what I lived through, and what I know.” This is a direct appeal to eyewitness authority and personal knowledge, a polemical stance that pits the authenticity of direct experience against the manufactured consensus of official historiography. The author is not arguing against a specific named opponent but against a generalised, entrenched orthodoxy that has monopolised the telling of history for four decades.
The historical context is implicit: a period of intense political struggle, likely the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, where the victors wrote the history. The forty-year timeframe points to the duration of the Francoist dictatorship in Spain (1939-1975), during which a single, state-sanctioned version of the civil war was relentlessly propagated. The author’s work is therefore an act of recovery, a counter-narrative written against the grain of that official memory. The polemic is directed against the entire apparatus of that hegemonic historical account—its authors, its institutions, and its uncritical consumers. The tone is defiant and unapologetic, rejecting the role of the conciliator or the appeaser. The author frames the anticipated anger of his critics not as a sign of his error but as confirmation of his work’s value. The postscript functions as a declaration of intellectual independence, asserting the right of the participant-witness to challenge the established record, regardless of the social or political cost. It is a brief but potent statement on the politics of memory and the duty of the Marxist historian.