Una violencia indómita

The new work by Julián Casanova, one of the most important and internationally projected Spanish historians, proposes a new approach to the recurrent and sometimes continuous manifestations of violence that, from anarchist terrorism to the wars of succession in Yugoslavia, marked by blood and fire the history of the European 20th century. In it, colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, genocide, war and sexual violence stand out, where executioners, murderers and rapists created their own rituals of torture and death, practiced individually or in groups, seen by many more, victims, witnesses and apprentices of criminals. There are multiple stories that overlap and intersect with each other, from Spain to Russia, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, to discover the logic of violence. And in the narration, the ideology of the race and the nation, the moments of crisis generated by wars and revolutions, and the projects of totalizing utopias stand out as conducting threads. A century of untamed violence, with visible or hidden scars of massacre and destruction. A past made present, remembered, forgotten, confronted, repressed.