One of the two last reported living veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Delmer Berg, is turning 98 tomorrow, Friday December 20. We invited you to send your birthday greetings earlier this week and have been completely overwhelmed by the response. The package to Del has gone out; below is a small sampling of your good...
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Mike Elkin, writing for Newsweek, tackles Spain's lingering legacy of violence committed during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.
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Alasdair Fotheringham, writing for The Independent, explores a curiously uninformative official heritage trail--the first of its kind established by a governmental entity--commemorating a Spanish Civil War battlefield outside of Madrid.
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ALBA PROUDLY PRESENTS: A screening of the passionate musical Goodbye Barcelona In 1936, as fascism sweeps across Europe, one country reaches out in its hour of need…and tens of thousands of ordinary people make an extraordinary decision to help. More than 42,000 travel to Spain from all over the world, risking their lives for the freedom of...
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On November 6, the Spanish delegation to the United Nations said that it would not review the 1977 law which gave amnesty for political crimes committed during the civil war and General Francisco Franco's dictatorship. According to Baltasar Garzon, at least 152,000 civilians living in territory controlled by Franco's Nationalist forces disappeared between...
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This weekend! Impugning Impunity: A Human Rights Documentary Film Series with eight powerful and inspiring films exploring issues of governmental abuse, historical memory, civil rights an racial inequality.
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On Nov. 14, 2013, McNally Amphitheatre at Fordham Law School was jam packed with people. The title of the event was “They’re watching us: So what? Assessing the dangers of the new surveillance powers” featuring a distinguished panel: Glenn Greenwald (Journalist), James Bamford (Author and NSA expert), Ariel Dorfman (Novelist, Playwright and Human Rights...
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Our friend Manus O’Riordan sends along the following: PHILOMENA, SEAN ROSS ABBEY and ANNETTE v HILDEGARDE Michael A. Hess had been Deputy Chief Counsel of the US Republican National Committee under President Reagan and had risen to Chief Counsel under President Bush Senior by the time of his death in 1995. So, what...
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Our compañeros at the Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI) write with an announcement: On Saturday November 9 AABI will perform the annual celebration in honor of the International Brigades to mark the 77th anniversary of his arrival in Madrid to assist in its defense. The main event will be the unveiling of a plaque to...
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The Asian Review of Books just published a review article by Juan José Morales on the book Los Brigadistas Chinos en la Guerra Civil: La Llamada de España (1936-1939).
“Glimpses into the lives of some of these volunteers give us insights as to who they were. Chen Wenrao, from Taishan, Guangdong, known...
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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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