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.
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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.
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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).
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In addition to the collections at UC San Diego and the Digital Library of Catalonia highlighted before, the U.S. Library of Congress has a collection of about 120 posters of the Spanish Civil War. Access it here.
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Mitchel Cohen talks with John Gerassi, son of Spanish Civil War veterans and author of The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1986) and, most recently, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates:
Gerassi was writing for the NY Times in 1962 and later Newsweek...
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Dora Birnbach was born on Septmber 20, 1911 to a Jewish orthodox family in the town of Sokolov, Poland. She entered Spain on a small fishing boat with a doctor from Bulgaria, nurses from Poland and Romania, a former Canadian priest who brought money donated by Canadian workers for the Republic and a young...
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Peter Glazer's Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America (Rochester, 2005) has been reissued in paperback, just in time for the holiday season:
Radical Nostalgia asks and answers important questions about the meaning of memory and the politics of history. Peter Glazer's warm, empathetic, and insightful study of ceremonies...
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Europeana, the central digital repository for Europe's cultural heritage, features some 150 items related to the Spanish Civil War, including videos, posters, and photographs from the collections of the Imperial War Museum (UK), Televisió Catalana, and the Scottish Life Archive.
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Franco died on November 20th, 1975, and for almost thirty-five years following his death, his followers and sympathizers--including Falangists and other neofascists--gathered at his tomb in the Valley of the Fallen to pay him tribute. This year the Spanish government ordered their access to the tomb blocked, Público reports, officially for security...
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Richard Schickel reviews Jonathan Miles' The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy for the Los Angeles Times:
He had at least 21 aliases. He insisted that he was briefly Marlene Dietrich's husband in 1920s Berlin, which was probably not so, though he was possibly...
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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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