The Spanish writer Julia Navarrowho presents his novel in America The boy who lost the warstated in an interview that he felt “hopelessness watching this.” We don’t learn from the past“.
The book is a reflection “on totalitarian regimes and their uprooting” through a common thread, Pablo, a child who goes into exile from fascist Spain in 1938 during the civil war in the communist Soviet Union (USSR).
“No one leaves their home unless it is for a truly important purpose.” Navarro explained a world in which “thousands of people emigrate to other places, fleeing wars, misery and violence.”
Almost During the Spanish Civil War, 32,000 Spanish minors were evacuated sent by the Government of the Republic to countries such as France, Belgium, Great Britain, Switzerland, Mexico, Denmark and the former USSR, where around 3,000 children were exiled.
When Navarro was still working as a journalist, he “had the opportunity to get to know each other two old men who had been ‘children of war'”from which he learned that “children always lose their parents’ wars.”
Although the decisions are made by many parents caused “shock”, “suffering” and “dizziness” in the souls of children“The worst thing was when they told them, ‘You can’t go back because your parents lost their lives,'” he said.
Today the Spanish interprets the totalitarianisms of the 21st century with “the hopelessness of seeing that we do not learn from the past.”
“If we take a map and see how many democratic countries there are, we will be shocked to find that there are very few,” he said.
A few days ago it was the 50th anniversary of Franco’s complete death Debate on the rise of the far right in Spainparticularly among the younger generations, who Navarro believes “did not learn in school what the 40 years of the Franco regime or the transition meant.”
This ignorance of history is “devastating”Because “we need to know the past to understand the present and, above all, we need to know where we want to go in the future,” he said.
“It’s not the fault of the new generations, Blame it on how bad previous generations did.” he insisted.
“Education is an issue on which all political parties in Spain have failed”he emphasized. “They don’t agree on anything because they agreed to remove the humanities content from our education system.”
Through Clotilde, Pablo’s mother, and Anya, his mother figure during his exile, Navarro wanted to show that “as in all totalitarian regimes, culture is always the most persecuted.”
“Dictators are afraid of anyone who is capable of producing cultural manifestations that they cannot control,” he said.
The writer He sees no parallels between his novel and the current contextbecause “every time is different, circumstances are different” and “new technologies have changed all paradigms of society.”
“We live in a society in which… Everything is amplified by the internet and social networksTherefore, Navarro believes it is essential that “future citizens have all the tools to be critical citizens” and “be able to recognize whether they are telling a lie or the fantasy of a madman, or whether it has something to do with reality.”
“Me For me it doesn’t matter whether a totalitarian discourse comes from the right or the left. “Anything that restricts freedom, anything that involves a totalitarian ideology, seems equally dangerous to me,” he explained.
Navarro, who brought this forward He is working on his next novelalso presented his work when they leavein which she wrote about the death of the German Shepherd who accompanied her for 13 years and which speaks of a pain “that I didn’t know how to deal with,” she confessed.
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