Letter from ALBA: ¡No Pasarán!
Dear Friends:
I was honored to be elected as chair of ALBA’s Board of Governors in May of this year. ALBA has had a series of dedicated chairs who have advanced the organization’s mission through both good and bad times. I follow Sebastiaan Faber, who served as chair for more than ten years and who oversaw the evolution of ALBA from one that worked to protect the veterans’ history and legacy to one that now also uses the legacy of the veterans to inspire activism and promote human rights and social justice.
I followed a circuitous route to ALBA. Like many of those on the Left, I was inspired as a youth by the courage of the Lincoln Brigade in their fight against Fascism in Spain. However, it was only when I arrived at Wayne State University in Detroit as an historian of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union that I was able to turn my interest into action. In the 1980s, Detroit-area veterans and their comrades raised money for a scholarship to honor the legacy of Wayne State students who fought fascism in Spain, even recruiting Pete Seeger to hold a fundraising concert. I became involved in the scholarship committee and then asked to join ALBA. Since then, I have had the pleasure to serve as ALBA’s secretary, treasurer, and chair of the Watt Essay Prize committee because I love the commitment to social justice and the idea of being inspired by the past.
Both those themes run through the stories in this issue: from Jawaharlal Nehru’s anticolonialist commitment to the Spanish Republic (read that story here) to the “homecoming” of Sephardic Jews in the International Brigade (here), or the way the Spanish fight against fascism shaped the lives and careers of the journalist Martha Gellhorn (here) and Janet Riesenfeld, a dancer, actress, and writer (here).
As a scholar of interwar Europe, I see the Spanish Civil War as a watershed moment when only a few stood up to fight fascism and authoritarianism. We are once again at a pivotal moment. I hope that you will join ALBA and the legacy of the Lincoln Brigade in standing against unhinged fat cat capitalist racist demagogues who seem singularly committed to undermining basic human rights and democratic institutions. Over the next few months, we must all be activists to defend the gates of democracy and freedom. ¡No Pasarán!
Aaron Retish, Chair of the Board of Governors
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