In a report released yesterday, Human Rights Watch calls out France, Germany, and Britain for using intelligence obtained in other countries through torture:
"Berlin, Paris, and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch....
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Joseph Waltz writes in the Monthly Review on the conversations that John Gerassi--son of a Spanish Republican general and author of The Premature Antifascists, on the Lincoln Brigade--had in the early 1970s with Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Wow,” Sartre replies, “you really want to put me on the spot today…OK...
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La mula, a new internationally-produced Spanish-language comedy set during the Spanish Civil War--co-written and directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino)--may never see the light of day, Variety reports:
Three of Europe's highest-ranking film executives -- U.K.'s John Woodward, Spain's Ignasi Guardans and Ireland's Simon Perry -- are battling to save...
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The official map of mass graves dating from the Civil War in Andalusia, released after a five years of research, offers an inventory of almost six hundred different unmarked burial sites. The mass grave at the San Rafael cemetery in Málaga is assumed to contain more than four thousand bodies, making it the...
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Geoff Dyer, writing in The Guardian, reflects on recent war accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger, David Finkel) and, more generally, on the strengths of fiction vs. non-fiction when it comes to transmitting the reality of warfare:
If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within...
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More coverage, this time in the Guardian, on the exhibit of Spanish Civil War friends Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington (see earlier post). Includes video.
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The AP reports: In a written defence put forward by his lawyer, he requested that he be acquitted citing a legal precedent that prevents a trial taking place if it is opposed by the public prosecutor’s office. The precedent mentioned is the so-called “doctrina Botín,” named after Emilio Botín, the current CEO of the...
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Earlier this year Magnum, the photo agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and "Chim" Seymour, sold its photojournalism archive (more than 185,000 prints) to a private investment company owned by Michael Dell, which in turn has handed it over to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The HRC...
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Spain's dictator Francisco Franco, who won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 with significant help from Hitler Germany, repaid the favor two years later by handing the Nazi regime "a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them," today's Ha'aretz reports, based on...
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From today's New York Times:
With a drug war raging around them and an unreliable judicial system in place, Mexico's human rights activists have their hands full as they grapple with a growing new class of victims: themselves. (...) The new reality is...
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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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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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Targeted by the far right, Rutgers historian Mark Bray and his family went into exile in October. Speaking with The Volunteer from Madrid, he reflects on the current political situation. “Fascism shamelessly takes over institutions that, under liberal norms, are supposed to remain neutral.”
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I. In the Beginning Second child, Bernard, born March 1, 1915 Older brother, my father, Jacob (Jack), born June 3, 1912 Younger sister, Roslyn, born (June 1, 1922) disabled, hospitalized, died February 10, 1942 Their father, Abraham, died March 21,1930 Their mother, Nettie, died April 29, 1953 Bernie Brilliant student, graduated High...
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The title of this new occasional feature of The Volunteer is the Esperanto word for “archive.” In it, we will present, translate, and contextualize iconic non-English language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.
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In recent years, citizen groups in Leipzig and Madrid have fought to preserve the buildings that were backdrops in two of Robert Capa’s best-known photographs. Their steadfast dedication has created two sites of historical memory whose significance extends far beyond Capa’s original images.
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On November 8, 1937, Salaria Kea, a 26-year-old African American nurse from Ohio, had been in Spain for seven months and one day. The country was in disarray. Half its territory was controlled by fascist rebels. Cities were being bombed, and civilians were killed by the thousands. Thousands more were forcibly displaced. But Kea...
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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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