As the Jubilee Gardens, home of one of the many British memorials to the International brigades, is getting ready for a major renovation, the Dutch firm West8, which is in charge of the project, is pondering where to relocate the IB monument, LondonSE1 reports.
At last Wednesday's meeting Maarten...
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The Fall Newsletter of our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) has just come out. In this issue: news on the successful tour of the exhibit Antifascistas; the George Brown Commemorative Lecture; a new IB monument at Perth; reports the memorial ceremony at Jubilee Gardens and a lecture by Richard...
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The Spanish government has announced plans, La Jornada reports, to turn the Mexico-City house in which renowned surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900-1982) spent most of his post-Civil War exile into a culture-historical center that focuses on Buñuel's work but also allows for Spanish-Mexican artistic collaboration more generally. Buñuel's move from the US to...
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Kirkcaldy, Scotland. (Map.) Erected by Kirkcaldy District Council and Friends of the IBA, May 1980 and September 1986 (IBMT). More on NamesOfTheFallen. Recent Photos by Jack Deighton here.
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The first in a new series of posts highlighting monuments to the International Brigades worldwide. Canberra, Australia; S 35° 18.012 E 149° 07.201 (map). Inaugurated in 1993. From Waymarking.com:
The memorial is a wall of sandstone blocks with red brick courses. ... The bronze map was made by Dr Ross...
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Patrick Skene Catling, writing in the Irish Times, critically reviews a new biography of the man who worked with Willi Münzenberg and Arthur Koestler to organize the International Brigades, and who is said to have inspired the movie Casablanca:
Otto Katz (1895-1952) was a Stalinist agent of first-magnitude international stardom. He...
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In a strongly worded op-ed piece in today's Público, Carlos Jiménez Villarejo, former Chief Prosecutor for corruption cases, chides the Spanish Supreme Court for the cavalier way in which it recently dismissed Judge Baltasar Garzón's appeal. (More background here.) According to Jiménez, the Supreme Court should have given much more serious consideration to...
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Alex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang speak to Little White Lies about the Balada triste de trompeta, which just won several prizes in Venice and is now showing at the San Sebastián festival:
Everybody in Spain has a father or grandfather who was involved in the war. Everybody...
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The Telegraph published an obit of the SCW vet classicist yesterday:
Though left for dead in a pool of blood, he somehow managed to make it to a dressing station, his will to live miraculously restored by the appearance of the journalist Claud Cockburn with a bottle of scotch.
MoreThe Times' Edward Rothstein writes about Nueva York, 1613-1945, in which ALBA collaborated and for which James D. Fernández has curated an accompanying exhibit which opens today:
Instead of viewing the city and its past along an East-West axis and seeing its conflicts and culture through interactions with...
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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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