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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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....
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
In its broadcast today, Democracy Now! talked with Scott Horton (Harper's) about the revelation from the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables that the U.S. has actively tried to thwart Spanish investigations, by judge Garzón and others, involving the American government. Watch the segments here and here.
Read more »
Geoff Lawes' indefatigable quest to compile a complete catalogue of songs inspired by the Spanish Civil War continues unabated. A recent post to Mudcat Café deals with a Woody Guthrie song about Lincoln Brigader Steve Nelson. See more discussion threads here.
Read more »
The U.S. government urged its Spanish counterpart in the spring of 2009 to stymie the investigation into torture and war crimes at Guantánamo initiated by judge Baltasar Garzón under the principle of universal jurisdiction, El País reports (see also The Guardian).
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
Read more »
In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
Read more »
A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
Read more »
The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
Read more »
On May 3, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Community received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Executive Director Audrey Sasson delivered the following acceptance speech.
Read more »
Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
Read more »
Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
Read more »
“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
Read more »
The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
Read more »
The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
Read more »
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
Search the Database