From Colombia Reports:
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon will travel to Colombia to work as an advisor to the Organization of American States (OAS) on human rights issues in the country and to monitor the paramilitary demobilization process, El Tiempo reported Thursday. No date has been set for his arrival though his...
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Images have begun to appear in the media of the set of Philip Kaufman's new film on Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. Rolling Stone published this photo taken earlier this week, showing Nicole Kidman (Gellhorn), Clive Owens (Hem), and Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica, as the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.
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The Associated Press covers the story:
In its suit filed with the European court, Interights reiterates the judge’s argument that these were crimes against humanity and that a case body of international law says such crimes have no statute of limitations and cannot be covered by amnesty, according to a spokeswoman for...
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Yesterday the Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón brought a case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg challenging the lawfulness of his criminal prosecution in Spain for having opened an investigation into serious crimes committed during the Franco era, following a request by families and representatives of victims of the regime,. The...
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Today I had the pleasure of introducing the Spanish journalist, Anna Grau, to the treasures of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Together, we went through the scrapbook of Bernard Danchik, a young gymnast from Brooklyn, who lobbied for, and participated in, the Olimpiada Popular, an alternative anti-fascist sports competition organized in Barcelona in 1936,...
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Marjorie Cohn, who gave ALBA's annual Susman lecture last month, calls for the US to stop bombing Libya:
There is no doubt that Muammar Qaddafi has been brutally repressing Libyans in order to maintain his power. But the purpose of the United Nations is to maintain international peace and security. The...
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Dear Friends: I wanted to let you know that there will be an Off Broadway production of "Triangle," an historical drama I've co-written with Sarasota based playwright Jack Gilhooley. 59 E. 59 Theaters will present the play as an Equity Showcase from April 14 through May 1. Amidst all the events surrounding the centennial...
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Irene Filip has just published a detailed essay on Dr. Hans Kaiser and his wife Dora, the two Austrian Jewish volunteers who helped run the International Brigade hospital at Benissa. Read the article, which has appeared in the yearbook of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, here (in German).
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Visiting Chile, President Obama stopped short of offering an apology for the US role in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973, leading to the bloody military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet--an episode about which then Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 2003 "it is not a part of American history that...
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Alan Entin, nephew of Bernard "Butch" Entin, has been working with his local radio station on a documentary about his uncle: "Uncle Bernard and The Abraham Lincoln Brigade" in the series "Hidden Histories" (27 min, available in mp3 here). Also in Hidden Histories, three 2-minute segments on the Spanish Civil War with Jack...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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