Gail Dolgin, the associate producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Forever Activists: Stories of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, directed by ALBA board member Judy Montell, has died, the Oakland Tribune reports:
Dolgin was a longtime board member of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, a proposal reviewer for...
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The BBC reports:
A plaque with the names of those from Merseyside who lost their lives fighting in the Spanish Civil War has found a permanent home in Liverpool. The memorial, with the names of 27 local people, has been unveiled at the Unite building in Islington. The city's office block has...
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Alberto Bullrich, in the Comment Factory, writes that Spanish fascism is alive and well:
Falange Española de las J.O.N.S. ... is the euphemism used before, during and after the Spanish Civil war for the blueshirt Fascist party of Spain. It still exists as a group, organization or political ‘party’, whichever...
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James D. Fernández was interviewed on Spanish national radio about his exhibit on Spanish immigrants in New York, which has already attracted a lot of media attention. (October 13; listen here.) Sebastiaan Faber was interviewed on Radio Círculo Bellas Artes (Madrid) about Spanish historians' role in the debates about historical memory. (October 18;...
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After a six-month delay, the Spanish Supreme Court has finally removed Falange Española--Spain's fascist party--from the case in which Garzón is being charged with overstepping his judicial boundaries when he initiated an investigation of crimes against humanity committed during the Civil War and under the Franco regime. The fascists were one of the two...
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In an editorial today, El País calls attention to the "strange paralysis" that seems to have befallen the third of the cases brought against Judge Baltasar Garzón: a charge of illegal wiretapping in his investigation of corruption in the Valencian branch of the opposition party, the Partido Popular. El País questions...
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Ten years after founding the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), Emilio Silva estimates that there are still more than 1,800 mass graves to exhume in Spain, El País reports. The Spanish government will soon publish an online map detailing their exact locations. Since 2006, a year before the approval of...
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On Saturday, October 16th, Pete Seeger, Patti Smith, and Guy Davis performed at an unforgettable fundraising event for ALBA, "Songs for the Cause: Music, Education, and Activism," sponsored by the Puffin Foundation and hosted at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). (See photos by Alan Entin here.)...
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In a press release coinciding with the twelfth anniversary of Judge Garzón's request for detention of Augusto Pinochet (1998) and the second anniversary of his brief (auto) opening an investigation into Francoist crimes against humanity, the Spanish section of Amnesty International has decried Spain's increasingly lackluster record in the fight against impunity,...
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The Brazilian Bar Association (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil) has launched a solidarity campaign on behalf of the embattled Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who has been suspended from his duties at Spain's National Criminal Court in the wake of his attempt to open an investigations of crimes against humanity committed during the Civil...
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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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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Seegers family did not hesitate to join the resistance. They had experience fighting fascism: their son Piet had fought for the Spanish Republic. When Tom King started digging into his family history seventy years later, he fell from one surprise into the other.
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Tina Modotti’s short life took her from Italy to North Beach and from there to Mexico, Berlin, Moscow, and civil-war Spain. Rightly known as a pathbreaking modernist photographer, she was also a radical activist. “Modotti spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.”
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Kirsten Weld has spent years studying Latin American dictatorships and the citizens who fight to hold them accountable. That experience has proven valuable in her current role as president of the AAUP chapter at Harvard, which, in March, sued the federal government for targeting students and faculty—and won.
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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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