The 3 best books by Elvira Roca Barea

The turning point towards the success of Elvira Rock as an author took place in 2016 with her work "Imperiophobia and the black legend: Rome, Russia, the United States and the Spanish Empire". But to get there, with that clairvoyance developed from his incisive and simple prose, there was a lot of previous research work.

Many other books and the necessary training to be convinced by the truth. A truth so constantly crushed today as, therefore, necessarily a good to be rescued.

Philology has a lot of essential wisdom. To reveal the evolution of the language is to know those inaccessible truths, easily buried by those who trust in imposing scenarios that are quite different from what happened.

I remember another illustrious current philologist who also dazzles in the literary field, a Irene Vallejo that, focused on other areas of knowledge, also serves us on a platter those truths about our world, adding a lyrical touch of the classics of the ancient world.

Returning to what we were, the point is that with the unprecedented success of his test, Elvira continued to release new books with greater dissemination projection once rediscovered for the popular cause as a great author, maker of that little miracle that is everyone's approach to the truth.

Top 3 recommended books by María Elvira Roca Barea

Imperiophobia and black legend: Rome, Russia, the United States and the Spanish Empire

The most uncomfortable truths are those that serve to knock down interested constructs. This book is that overwhelming truth, so evident in the light of the resulting reality that it reddens with blush and shame so many strenuous efforts to overshadow the truth.

It is not that the conquest and the consequent Spanish empire was a naive transit of Spanish soldiers distributing flowers. In no case was this the case. But it is not true that the Spanish arrival in America was a devastating event. There is vast documentation for those who want to know the truth. Evidence as I say the same, the miscegenation was total in America and the cultural transmission and the interest to preserve it was always manifest until today.

Atone for sins is a bit of looking for blame or regret in others. Many are those who try to find the scapegoat in imperial Spain. And yet the opposite happened, the most rude, beast and inconsiderate conquerors or explorers were other countries even more indoctrinated by their kings in theft and imposition.

María Elvira Roca Barea rigorously addresses in this volume the question of delimiting the ideas of empire, black legend and imperiophobia. In this way we can understand what empires and the black legends that are inevitably linked to them have in common, how they arise created by intellectuals linked to local powers and how the empires themselves assume it.

Pride, hubris, envy are not alien to the imperial dynamics. The author deals with imperiophobia in the cases of Rome, the United States and Russia to analyze the Spanish Empire in greater depth and with a better perspective. The reader will discover how the current account of the history of Spain and Europe is based on ideas based more on feelings born of propaganda than on real events.

The first manifestation of Hispanophobia in Italy emerged linked to the development of humanism, which gave the black legend an intellectual luster that it still enjoys. Later, Hispanophobia became the central axis of Lutheran nationalism and other centrifugal tendencies that manifested themselves in the Netherlands and England.

Roca Barea investigates the causes of the persistence of Hispanophobia, which, as its conscious and deliberate use in the debt crisis has proven, continues to be profitable for more than one country. It is a common place by all assumed that the knowledge of history is the best way to understand the present and consider the future.

Imperiophobia and black legend

"Fracasology"

Nor do I think you have to beat yourself up. Failure can be the study of an evil endemic to any society. Only that some societies recreate themselves more than others, some individuals boast more than others of the failure of others. The worst is when the Herculean moral lasher on duty, engages in even the most useless masochism.

An important part of our most prestigious intellectual and political elites consider that Spain not only has a disastrous history to be ashamed of, but a deep core
(traditional) that is morally inferior to that of other neighboring countries.

Si en Imperiophobia and black legend María Elvira Roca Barea explained what type of historical phenomenon was the black legend and how and why it had arisen, the main objective of Fracasología is to expose the reasons why the topics of Hispanophobia were assumed in our country and consolidated over time .

Since the XVIIIth century, concepts such as decadence, failure, anomaly, exceptionality have been associated with the idea of ​​Spain, and a conflictual relationship between a good part of the Spanish elites with their own country begins, which culminates in the Napoleonic wars and still lasts. These Hispanophobic ideas also spread throughout Latin America and will have a lot to do with the weakness of the States that arise from the dissolution of the Spanish Empire, and the chain of resentment that it generated and generates.

Nothing could do the liberal patriotism of the nineteenth century to banish negative ideas about Spain, and the generation of 98 accentuated the feeling of failure and led to paroxysm.

The Spanish ruling classes generally have little sense of responsibility towards Spain and a devastating lack of confidence. The centrifugal tendencies that exist in the country are fed by this negativity, which weakens the State and generates a loop of systoles and diastoles that is resurrected again and again.

6 exemplary stories 6

Even fiction has a transcendent touch in Elvira. Both in the choice of its characters and in the moments between the anecdotal and the essential to understand the birth of an ideology, a new fear to infuse or a virus of thought to inoculate even from language. 6 stories 6, and without any waste.

With the coming of the Lutheran schism, the Mediterranean-Catholic world unconsciously assumes the discourse of moral supremacy imposed by the Protestant north. In this way words like "freedom", "tolerance", "science" and "Reform" remain on one side and on the other, as a negative mirror image "oppression", "intolerance", "fanaticism" and, go for God, "Counter Reformation." From the beginning the most important battle was lost, that of language, and among its weapons was propaganda, a new crucial device for understanding Western civilization in the last half millennium.

The six stories gathered here have as their background the Protestant world in various times and places in Europe. The author has chosen six moments out of hundreds of possibilities that serve as a counterpoint to that monolithic vision imposed since the schism and in which the Mediterranean world has been described - until today - as the Demon of the South. In them we will see anonymous characters and names like Luther, Ana de Sajonia, Calvin, Felipe Guillermo de Orange-Nassau, the first-born of Guillermo de Orange, or William Shakespeare himself.

6 exemplary stories 6

Other recommended books by Elvira Roca Barea

The witches and the inquisitor

At the time I wrote an extensive account of the Logroño Auto de Fe of 1610. I called it «Souls of fire«. And one humbly always tries to bring a different vision to the chronicle. Because that's what historical fiction is all about. In this case, Elvira Roca Barea also addresses those days prior to the general burning in the capital of La Rioja. And evidently with a master's degree light years from my story. The point is that having immersed myself at the time in some of the characters of those days, landing on this story ends up being a fascinating reunion.

In 1609 several people are accused of witchcraft in the Navarrese village of Zugarramurdi. What seemed like a one-off, unimportant episode is acquiring unusual virulence. Under these circumstances, the Inquisitor General Bernardo de Sandoval sent Alonso de Salazar y Frías to Logroño, headquarters of the Holy Office.

It's not just witchcraft, the evil eye, night flights or carnal dealings with Lucifer: there are those who confess to heinous murders and the systematic use of children as acolytes of the Big Bastard. But why this epidemic now with its epicenter in a village near the French border? Is witchcraft a mirror reflecting conflicts and varied interests, many of which have nothing to do with the devil?

In Las brujas y el inquisidor, Elvira Roca reveals the historical figure of Alonso de Salazar, as forgotten as it is relevant, and leads us on an exciting journey through the ins and outs of witchcraft in the XNUMXth century, when religious wars, political conflicts and other circumstances provoked a massive witch hunt in Europe. In the case of Zugarramurdi, in addition, we must not forget the rivalry between France and Spain for control of Navarra. The inquisitor Alonso de Salazar will face all this with the most powerful of human weapons: reason.

The witches and the inquisitor
5/5 - (13 votes)

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