Editing Miguel de Unamuno (section)

=== The Severiano Delgado version ===
In 2018, the details of Unamuno's speech were disputed by the historian Severiano Delgado, who argued that the account in a 1941 article by [[Luis Gabriel Portillo]] (who was not present at Salamanca) in the British magazine ''[[Horizon (British magazine)|Horizon]]'' may not have been an accurate representation of events.

Severiano Delgado, a historian and librarian at the [[University of Salamanca]], asserts that Unamuno's words were put in his mouth by Luis Portillo, in 1941, possibly with some help from [[George Orwell]], in a piece in the literary magazine ''Horizon'', entitled Unamuno's Last Lecture. Portillo had not witnessed the event.{{sfn|Delgado Cruz|2019|p=}}

Severiano Delgado's book, titled ''Archeology of a Myth: The act of October 12, 1936 in the auditorium of the University of Salamanca'', shows how the propaganda myth arose regarding the confrontation that took place that day between Miguel de Unamuno and the general Millán Astray.

Delgado agrees that a "very fierce and violent verbal confrontation" between Unamuno and Millán Astray definitely occurred, which led to Unamuno being removed from his rectorship, but he thinks that the famous speech attributed to Unamuno was invented and written by Luis Portillo."<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/famous-spanish-civil-war-speech-may-be-invented-says-historian | work=The Guardian | title=Spanish civil war speech invented by father of Michael Portillo, says historian | date=11 May 2018 | first=Sam | last=Jones}}</ref>{{sfn|Delgado Cruz|2019|p=}}

Delgado says that:
{{Blockquote|What Portillo did was to come up with a kind of liturgical drama, where you have an angel and a devil confronting one another. What he wanted to do above all was symbolise evil—fascism, militarism, brutality—through Millán Astray, and set it against the democratic values of the republicans—liberalism and goodness—represented by Unamuno. Portillo had no intention of misleading anyone; it was simply a literary evocation.}}

Unamuno took the floor, not to confront Millán Astray, but to answer a previous speech by Professor of Literature Francisco Maldonado who had identified Catalonia and the Basque Country with the "''antiespaña''" (Antispain). Unamuno himself was Basque and was revolted with Francisco Maldonado's speech, but when addressing the audience, Unamuno used the example of what had happened with [[José Rizal]] (a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines, executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after the Philippine Revolution). Millán Astray had fought in the Philippines and it was the reference to José Rizal that annoyed Millán Astray, who shouted "The traitoring intellectuals die".

As proof that the incident was nothing more than a crossroads of hard words, the photograph reproduced on the cover of his book shows Millán Astray and Miguel de Unamuno calmly saying goodbye in the presence of Bishop Plà, with no tension between them. The photo was discovered in 2018 in the National Library and was part of the chronicle of the act that the newspaper "The Advancement of Salamanca" published the following day, 13 October 1936.{{sfn|Delgado Cruz|2019|p=}}

According to Delgado, Portillo's account of the speech became famous when a then very young British historian [[Hugh Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton|Hugh Thomas]], aged 30, came across it in a Horizon anthology while researching his seminal book, ''The Spanish Civil War'', and mistakenly took it as a primary source.{{sfn|Delgado Cruz|2019|p=}}