Today's El País features a five-minute video about the work of Emilio Silva and others, who over the past decade have been working on the "recovery of historical memory." Tomorrow El País will be publishing a larger piece to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of Silva's Association (ARMH). Click here for a
As the unforced confessions of former President George W. Bush about the use of torture by the U.S. government have given new urgency to calls for a judicial investigation and prosecution for war crimes (see for instance David Cole in this week's issue of the Nation, and the press release from Amnesty...
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For those interested in archival footage of the Spanish Civil War: newsreel footage is increasingly made available not only on DVD but also as streaming video online, for instance at Getty Images, the Internet Archive or Google Video. A particularly rich source is the site of British Pathé. See for...
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The autonomous government of Catalonia has launched an interactive, online map, in four languages, of all the known mass graves of victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism. For the English version, click here.
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The exhibit Tierra y Libertad, 100 años de anarquismo en España, (Land and Freedom, 100 Years of Anarchism in Spain), covers the history of the anarchist movement in Spain on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its founding. On view in Zaragoza until December 8th, the exhibit is an attempt to do...
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Waiting for Lefty reviews The Trotsky, a Canadian "teen comedy filled with references to the Spanish Civil War";
Leon Bronstein is not your average Montreal West high school student. For one thing, none of his peers can claim to be the reincarnation of early 20th century Soviet iconoclast and Red...
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This December, rock star Sting will perform a free concert at the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, Momento 24 reports, accompanied by other luminaries including Judge Baltasar Garzón, to celebrate the International Day of Human Rights. More here.
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RAPAR, a Manchester Human Rights organization, celebrated the life and activism of Paul Robeson yesterday.
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A vote held on November 8th rejected an local initiative to remove a monument inaugurated by Franco in 1966, in honor of those who died in the Ebro Battle, fighting on the Nationalist side. The motion was proposed by residents of Tortosa and other towns near the Ebro River in Tarragona, in accordance with...
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Clarence Kailin has returned to Spain. At a ceremony in Marça, near Tarragona, his son John scattered the Vet's ashes near the monument to the International Brigades. Amy Goodman, anchor of Democracy Now! and recipient of ALBA's activist award, covered the news in her show yesterday (listen here). See also an article by Jordi...
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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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