In an interview with the Portuguese newspaper Público, Judge Baltasar Garzón, who last week spoke at the Estoril Film Festival, lamented the gradual abandonment of the principle of universal justice on the part of national governments (including Spain and the UK), and defended his 2008 decision to go ahead with the investigation of Francoist...
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Europa Laica (Secular Europe) and over 20 other Spanish associations held a well-attended demonstration to protest against the Pope's trip to Barcelona, under the banner of "We're not coming to greet you!" in Plaza Sant Jaume in front of City Hall on the evening of Nov. 4th in advance of...
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ALBA Board Member Chris Brooks, whose work made possible the online database of Spanish Civil War volunteers who left from the U.S., continues to expand, correct, and fine-tune his massive amounts of information. Follow him on his blog.
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Just posted to YouTube: A poem by the young IBer John Lepper; music by John Webster with Brindaband featuring flamenco guitarist Steve Homes. Watch and listen here.
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Judge Baltasar Garzón spoke at the Estoril Film Festival this week on of images and collective memory. In his honor, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán will be screening his documentaries El Caso Pinochet (The Pinochet Case) and his legendary, three-part epic La batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile).
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Tune in to WNYC tomorrow, Monday November 8, at 12 noon (93.9FM and AM 820), for interviews with ICP curators Cynthia Young and Brian Wallis about the Spanish Civil War photography exhibit. More here. See also Mark Feeney's coverage of the show in the Boston Globe.
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On a visit to Spain, Pope Benedict XVI issues surprisingly harsh criticism of the country's political direction, the AP reports:
On his way to Santiago, Benedict told reporters that the anticlericalism seen now in Spain was reminiscent of the 1930s, when the church suffered a wave of violence and persecution...
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Today is the first All Saints Day, the traditional day to visit the graves of loved ones who have passed away, that relatives of the 3,543 Republicans assassinated by Francoists either during or after the Civil War in the cementery near Torrero prison can visit a plaque with their name on it in the...
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In an interview with Matthew Garrahan in the Financial TImes, acclaimed film director Michael Mann tells about the projects he has underway, including the Hollywood version of the Spanish Civil War romance between the legendary war photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro:
He has bought the rights to the story...
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Giles Tremlett reports for the Guardian:
In a stark reversal of roles, an Argentine judge has taken a step towards opening the first comprehensive investigation into the human rights abuses of General Franco's dictatorship in Spain. Judge María Servini has asked Spain to declare whether its...
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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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