Lee Kutnick, former secretary of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away two weeks ago. From an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Lee worked tirelessly as a community and union organizer, devoting her life to making the world a better place for working people. She was Secretary...
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Robert Llopis reports on the inauguration of the "Parc Dels Internacionals," dedicated to the International Brigades, at Benissa this past October 30th as part of the Homage to the IB, in the presence of a representative of the City of Benissa, Irene Filip from the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (Archive of the Austrian Resistance,...
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Gert Hoffman writes with sad news:
This is to announce that Josef "Joschi" Eisenbauer, one of the three surviving Austrian brigadistas died on December 10. He was one of the more than 1400 Austrians who had gone to defend the Spanish Republic. He went to Spain in 1937, was a member of the XIIIth and XIth International Brigades, was wounded and taken to...
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Andy Worthington at The Public Record provides an extensive overview of the revelations of US pressure on Spain to curb torture investigations:
The cable reveals how US officials immediately began sounding out Spanish officials, and how, on April 15, an apparently unlikely figure for the Obama administration to embrace — Sen. Mel...
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In the English-language edition of El País this past Sunday, an overview by Carlos E. Cué of the WikiLeaks revelations in relation to Baltasar Garzón and the US attempts to influence the Spanish judiciary:
The American Embassy in Madrid has been keeping a close eye on the High Court, and...
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El País--with The Guardian one of the main recipients of the latest WikiLeaks dump--has dedicated an editorial to defending its role in making the thousands of diplomatic cables public:
The revelations show a seamy side of the political world, about which we all had well-grounded suspicions, but no clear certainty....
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Iskra announces:
The Belfast memorial to the courageous Irish volunteers who travelled to fight against Fascism and the forces of reaction in the Spanish Civil War will be rededicated in a ceremony on saturday, the 11th of December, at 12.30pm in Writers Square. The guest speaker will be Joe Bowers of the CPI who...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett reports:
A country palace given to Spain's former fascist dictator, General Francisco Franco, to use as his summer house is to be expropriated from his family and donated to the people of the country town of Sada, north-west Spain. Franco used it for his summer holidays, when he...
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The Guardian has continued to post Spain-related memos from the WikiLeaks cache; here a piece by Giles Tremlett; here a memo on Garzón's investigation of torture at Guantánamo; here one in which Garzón is dubbed "anti-American":
He clearly has an anti-American streak (as evidenced by occasional scathing editorials in...
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Scott Horton writes:
Diplomats routinely monitor and report on legal cases that affect national interests. These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded this mandate, however, and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors. Their...
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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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