Calling for a no-fly zone over Libya, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva that "we should never forget Guernica," The Australian reports. "Guernica is known throughout the world for the bombing of the civilian population. We have seen evidence of that in Libya....
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This week's New York Times Magazine features an 8.300-word piece by Jennifer Egan on Lori Berenson, the US woman who served 15 years in a Peruvian prison for abetting a left-wing terrorist plot in Perú:
In 1980, when Lori was 11, three American nuns were murdered in El Salvador. “That stayed...
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An hour-long BBC radio program broadcast this past Sunday--with several new and many archival interviews, and the participation of Richard Baxell and Paul Preston-- can now be listened to online, here.
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Next week, March 8-10, the Universidad Complutense in Madrid will feature a three-day event (program here in pdf) on the International Brigades, organized by the AABI (Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales) and the Facultad de Bellas Artes, with the goal of exploring the idea of an IB memorial on the university...
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Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, former military leaders of Argentina, are being accused of overseeing the systematic theft of babies from political prisoners. Their trial has opened, the BBC reports:
More than 100 children are known to have been given for adoption to military or police couples. The long-awaited trial,...
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Benicassim remembers the IB Hospital, Friday, March 4. Guillermo Casañ, who has carried out extensive research on the IB Hospital in Benicassim, will lead a guided tour of IB related sites in the coastal town. Program: II JORNADES MEMÒRIA HISTÒRICA BENICÀSSIM Viernes 4 de marzo, 2011 17:00 Antiguo apeadero del tren de Las Villas...
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Suze Rotolo, 1943 – 2011 The press is reporting the sad news of the death of Suze Rotolo, the American artist, teacher and political activist who was Bob Dylan’s companion and muse in the early 1960s. Rotolo is frequently credited with Dylan’s awakening to politics. According to one obituary she took the “then fairly...
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Marci Rubin, daughter of the late Lincoln veteran Hank Rubin, suggests that donations in Hank's memory be made to ALBA.
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In 1940, Francisco Franco, using the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, authored a treatment for a screenplay, titled “Raza : Story lines for a film script.” The following year, the script was made into a feature-length film, produced by the government. The original text and the 1941 film are invaluable documents, as they offer us...
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The Spanish government will be financing Judge Garzón's work as part of a working group put together by the Organization of American States (OAS) to assist in Colombia's peace process, ABC reports. In an interview last week on Spanish national radio, Garzón expressed the hope that he would still be able to return...
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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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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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