José Ricardo de Prada: (Translated from El País, May 16, 2010:) "I’ve gone from anger on Friday, to desolation. I am deeply demoralized, not just in terms of myself, but in terms of my profession, which has been pretty much my whole life over these last 25 years. This goes way...
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The Spanish and international media are filled with editorials, op-eds, and interviews criticizing the suspension of investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón. An editorial in Le Monde, for instance, states that case reveals the institutions of democratic Spain to be "dysfunctional" and "sick", and that the "strategy of forgetting has not worked": "The Garzón...
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Graham Keeley reports:
It is remarkable for the way in which Cartier-Bresson managed to get away from the censors and document the daily life of volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who fought for the Republican Government against General Franco’s Nationalist forces.
More here.Spain's Consejo General del Poder Judicial, or General Council of the Judiciary, has postponed its decision on Baltasar Garzón's request for a seven-month leave of absence to work for the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC while it awaits several additional reports, after suspending him this morning--a decision that threw the country
As the Consejo General del Poder Judicial meets to decide on Garzón's request for a seven-month leave of absence to work at the ICC, indignation about the Council's decision, this morning, to suspend the groundbreaking investigative magistrate, is spreading rapidly, with prominent jurists and intellectuals from Spain and elsewhere speaking out, and grassroot...
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From Ken Morgan at SocialistWorker.org: On this May Day, one of the several toasts that I drank to was to the memory of Clarence Kailin and the heroes of the International Brigades. ¡No Pasarán! More here.
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Today's El País features an article on With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the short silent documentary by Henri Cartier-Bresson that was recently found by Juan Salas in the ALBA collection at New York University's Tamiment Library, restored by Alice Moscoso and her team at the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation...
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After an intense, two-hour meeting this morning, Spain's Consejo Superior del Poder Judicial (CSPJ) has announced that investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón has been suspended for the duration of the trial against him, which was formally opened two days ago. Meanwhile, his request to be granted a leave of absence in order to take...
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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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