Russia and Spain are making 2011 a year of mutual cultural-historical interest. Among other initiatives, ITAR-TASS reports, there will be a exhibit of masterpieces from the Prado at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and an show of the Russian collection of Spanish Civil War posters:
the Russians also want to...
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The University of Delaware reports the acquisition of the literary archive of American playwright Barrie Stavis (1906-2007):
Stavis knew at an early age that he would pursue a career as a writer. During the 1930s he struggled with his writing, but in 1937 sailed for Europe to volunteer his...
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The Spanish section of Amnesty International issued an annual report yesterday, at the presentation of which Claudio Cordone, interim director of AI Spain, called the trial against Garzón "scandalous." In the report, Amnesty criticizes the Spanish government for failing "to accept some of the recommendations made by States in the UN Working Group...
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Antonio Muñoz Molina, renowned Spanish novelist and public intellectual, as well as a member of ALBA's Board of Governors, has received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Brandeis University. His recent bestselling historical novel on the Spanish Civil War, La noche de los tiempos, is reviewed by Michael Kerrigan in this week's...
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The five-member United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which was set up in 1980, issued statement expressing its concern over the recent suspension of judge Baltasar Garzón, warning against the introduction of amnesty laws, and stressing the victims's right to truth, and the need for investigation as a precondition for reconciliation. More...
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Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, has an an op-ed in El País today:
Our mission is to end impunity for crimes that, as we have said time and again, would not reoccur, only to see them committed time and...
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Due to appear soon: Fighters against Fascism, Max Arthur's oral history of British volunteers in Spanish Civil War. From the publisher:
Acclaimed oral historian Max Arthur has tracked down the eight survivors of this conflict, and interviewed them for their unique perspective, their memories of their time fighting and the motives...
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At the Globalist, César Chelala and Alejandro Garro write:
Judge Garzón properly applied international conventional and customary law. Two supranational tribunals (the European and Inter American Courts of Human Rights), as well as two UN committees (the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee Against Torture) consistently condemned blanket amnesties,...
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Henry Chu reports from Madrid:
Gonzalo Martinez-Fresneda, an attorney for Garzon, said even the temporary suspension would have a "devastating symbolic effect." "If Garzon has to leave with all his boxes from his office, it's like the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy — there's no way back," Martinez-Fresneda said. "It would be a...
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The International Center of Photography in New York is gearing up for the much-anticipated exhibit of images from the "Mexican Suitcase," the archive of almost 4,000 images from the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David "Chim" Seymour that were recovered two years ago, and by now all been...
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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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