His views on the Garzón case at Radio Netherlands Worldwide:
Have conservative forces in Spain influenced this decision?
Yes, this also happened in Chile. The most conservative forces had an interest in repression, as they were on the ideological side of Pinochet in Chile and on that of Franco...
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Carlos Jiménez Villarejo, a former District Attorney who specialized in anti-corruption cases, writes in El Público on the allegations of bribe against Garzón:
It is reasonable and, above all, just, to demand an immediate dropping of these charges, which, like all of the charges still pending , are completely unfounded....
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El País reports that the Comisión Colombiana de Juristas has issued a press release in which it expresses great worry about the decision of the Spanish Supreme Court to move ahead with the case against the investigative magistrate.
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The Financial Times writes that the case against Garzón
has the hallmarks of a politically motivated attempt to smear and disbar a courageous public official who has fought terrorists and state-sanctioned death squads, corruption and tyranny. It is without merit and reflects poorly on Spain’s increasingly politicised judicial system. ...
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Julián Casanova in El País on Spain's political corruption and the recent attempts to thwart investigations into Francoist crimes:
Paradoxically, just when our democracy seemed firmly established, after leaving behind the worst aspects of the authoritarian legacy of Francoism, new pressures and threats make us doubt our political model....
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El Sindicalismo socialista español: a book presentation, Madrid, 26 April. ‘El Sindicalismo socialista español. Aproximación oral a la Historia de UGT (1931-1975)’ Dirigido por Alicia Alted, Manuela Aroca y Juan Carlos Collado. En la Escuela Julián Besterio (C/ Azcona, 53 de Madrid) El acto contará con la intervención de: Jesús Pérez (Presidente de la...
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Esther Brown, longtime executive officer of the Bay Area Post of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died on Friday, April 16. She was the widow of Archie Brown, a Lincoln vet and well-known radical labor activist, who died November 23, 1990. Esther’s parents were Jewish immigrants, escaping the harsh conditions of czarist...
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Yes, it does exist--in fact, a new version has come out.
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The Hitch on Orwell in the Guardian:
There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. Similarly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four we find only a Big Brother Stalin and an Emmanuel Goldstein Trotsky. Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody...
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Congratulations to Josh Brown, long-time member of ALBA's Board and Executive Committee and illustrator of Robeson in Spain, who has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for his project The Divided Eye: Studies in the Visual Culture of the American Civil War.
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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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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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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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