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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Scott Horton writes:
It may well turn out that Judge Garzón touched the third rail of Spanish politics by opening the door to investigation of the crimes of the Franco past. But his offense in the end can never be termed more than a political miscalculation.
More here. See also...Deirdre Montgomery at the International Criminal Law Bureau writes:
The crux of the case is whether the amnesty law can be limited or superseded by crimes against humanity. It will be interesting to see how much weight international case law (notably the Special Court of Sierra Leone decision to...
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The AP reports:
Spain's most prominent judge, already charged with abuse of power in a potentially career-ending indictment, denied any wrongdoing as he testified Thursday as a suspect in a separate bribery investigation that has compounded his legal woes.
More here. See also the London Times.
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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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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