“The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances will visit Spain from 23 to 30 September 2013,” according to a press release from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: During the official visit, the UN experts will examine the measures taken by Spain on issues related to the prevention and eradication...
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The Spanish Truth Commission Platform, a broad coalition of organizations that include the International Garzón Foundation and ALBA, has released a compelling new video to increase awareness about the lack of judicial support for the victims of Francoism.
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Now available for pre-order: Letters from the Spanish Civil War by Ohio volunteer Carl Geiser, introduced and edited by Peter N. Carroll and Fraser Ottanelli. From the publisher, Kent State University Press:
Letters from the Spanish Civil War provides a unique perspective into the motivations that led...
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Corbera d’Ebre, a village in north-eastern Spain, will be honoring members of the British Battalion of the International Brigade. A plaque will be unveiled on September 24th with the names of 23 soldiers who died on the last day of the Battle of Ebro. The 16th Battalion of the International Brigade was formally named...
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Now online: highlights from a Concert for the International Brigades held in Logroño, Spain, on 30 April 2013. Co-sponsored by the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the concert featured the Spanish and British musicians who played at the IBMT's annual commemoration in London’s Jubilee Gardens in July 2012.
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We have just received news that Carlos Blanco Aguinaga passed away on September 11. Born in the Basque city of Irún in 1926, Carlos Blanco fled with his family across the French border in September 1936, when he was ten years old, and was later exiled to Mexico, along with twenty thousand other Spanish...
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Harold Smith Hoff was born in Kansas in 1906 and moved with dust-bowl refugees to El Centro California with his father, a Church of the Brethren Elder. In 1920, the family gave up farming and moved to Glendora CA. Harold attended Citrus Union High School and had one year of college at LaVerne College...
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In the summer of 2012, I set out on the trip of my lifetime: To discover the father I never knew. I had to go to Spain to see many of the places and events he described in the journal he wrote as an ambulance driver in Spanish Civil War from 1937-1938.
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Jules Paivio, the last Canadian veteran of the Spanish Civil War, died last week at the age of 97. He volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic at the age of 17. His family had taught him to "believe in justice, liberty and fair play for all." Yet, when asked why he volunteered...
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Today marks the 40th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's CIA-backed coup, overthrowing the democratically elected presidency of Salvador Allende. In the weeks that followed, thousands of leftists were arrested, beaten, and murdered, including the famous folk singer Víctor Jara. After tracking down Jara's murderer to the United States, Jara's widow Joan filed a lawsuit against...
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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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