Yesterday the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, together with other organizations such as the left Spanish labor unions, kicked off what is going to be a week of mass international protests against the persecution of Judge Baltasar Garzón for his attempt to investigate possible crimes against humanity committed during the...
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El País reports: The organizations for the recovery of historical memory on whose behalf Judge Baltasar Garzón initiated an investigation of Francoist crimes--an case that resulted in Garzón's being accused of overstepping his judicial boundaries, and facing a possible 20-year suspension--are now charging the Supreme Court Justice in question with overstepping his judicial...
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An interesting post at DailyKos linking Spain's memory of the Civil War with the situation in the United States:
After the transition to democracy, there was a Pact of Forgetting that was felt to be the only way to move forward. It allowed past Nationalists to participate in the nascent...
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From the AP:
The appeal claims the indictment is "contrary to law and implies a serious challenge to judicial independence."
More here.
While looking through the photographs of the Mexican Suitcase to write a text for the catalogue of the exhibition that will open next September at the ICP in NYC I identified some images that match some of the sections of the HCB documentary. In one instance there is a photograph showing both the camera...
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A fascinating initiative from the University of California at San Diego, together with a group of Spanish organizations, to create an online audiovisual archive of victims' testimonies:
It aspires to constitute itself both as an archive of the repression and as an archive of the multiple political cultures (communism,...
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Compiled by Peter Davison, reviewed by Juliet Gardiner for the Telegraph:
It is the portable Orwell, the condensed autobiography that Orwell never wrote, but maybe had his health rallied, he would have.
More here.
The new Henri Cartier-Bresson box set reviewed in the New York Times:
Two films made as fund-raisers for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, “Victory of Life” (1937) and “Spain Will Live” (1938), make a provocative contrast with two documentaries made for CBS News on American life in 1969...
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In an interview with Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, the Chilean judge who tried Augusto Pinochet defends Baltasar Garzón's attempt to investigate crimes against humanity committed under Francoism.
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An NYT editorial today:
The real crimes in this case are the disappearances, not Mr. Garzón’s investigation. If, as seems likely, these were crimes against humanity under international law, Spain’s 1977 amnesty could not legally absolve them. The suspected perpetrators are all dead, and Mr. Garzón long ago halted his...
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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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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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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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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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