This coming May 20-23, the Fundación Internacional Baltasar Garzón is sponsoring an international conference on the challenges facing the principle of Universal Jurisdiction, whose application was recently curbed by the Spanish government (see Adam Hochschild's piece in the New York Times). Participants include Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, Wolfgang Kaleck, general...
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“In most countries, there is no statute of limitations for murder. Should there be one for torture?” Adam Hochschild asks in a New York Times op-ed today; In Spain, neither charge can be brought against anyone who worked for the harsh, long-lasting regime of Francisco Franco, because of an amnesty law that eased the country’s...
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Anna Martí, who has been following in the Lincolns' footsteps for The Volunteer, sends this video (with English subtitles) of her recent journey re-tracing the night time retreat between Batea and Corbera over the 1st and 2nd of April 1938.
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Marshall Mateer has produced a video report (running for just under 10 minutes) of the IBMT’s conference, Taking Sides: Artists and Writers on the Spanish Civil War, which was held in Manchester on March 1st. Separate videos of all four lectures will be posted on the IBMTnews YouTube site in due course.
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On February 1, 2014 I had the honor of bringing fraternal greetings from ALBA to the International Brigades Commemoration Committee, where an overflow crowd met to honor these men from Belfast who joined common cause in the earliest battlefields in the war against fascism in Spain. The International Brigades Commemoration Committee exists to...
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Our friends in the UK at the International Brigade Memorial Trust have just sent us their latest newsletter: 28 pages with articles on the new Ebro memorial, news on the Madrid monument, and the British seafarers who defied fascist bombs and U-boats to trade with Republican Spain, in addition to book reviews and much more. Read it in...
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“If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006,” George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian yesterday, If convicted of fighting abroad with a “political, ideological, religious or racial motive” – a charge they would find hard to contest –...
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Pope Francis has attacked unfettered capitalism as "a new tyranny." But the silence maintained by the former Argentinian bishop Bergoglio (now Pope Francis), during the brutal Argentinian dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, puzzles many people.
Vicente Navarro got a clue from the recent Tarragona service (honoring the members of the Church who...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, which is dedicated to educating future generations about the Spanish Civil War, is engaged in a renewed effort to reach out the members of the second and third generations to help recuperate and preserve the collective history of the Spaniards and Internationals who fought fascism. Our aim is to...
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Along with thousands others, Carlos Blanco left Spain defeated but managed to preserve what is most admirable of the Spanish Republican values at the core of his identity, and to return them to the world through his actions.
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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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