The last stand of the British Battalion in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 will be remembered on Tuesday 24 September 2013 with the unveiling of a memorial in the village close to where the final day’s action took place exactly 75 years ago. The ceremony will be held at 12 noon in Corbera d’Ebre in...
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In the first days of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, Chilean Army officer Pedro Pablo Barrientos tortured and killed popular folk singer Víctor Jara. Jara, a respected artist who had joined the Communist Party, was arrested the day after the coup with hundreds of other students and professors at Santiago Technical University. Although Jara’s widow and...
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As reporters draw parallels between the Spanish Civil War and the Syrian Civil War, two recent events in Spain serve as a reminder that the war has yet to be fully resolved. A Russian tourist recently found an unexploded howitzer shell dating from the Spanish Civil War off the coast of Mallorca....
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Eugenio Moreno's recent statue of Francisco Franco, meant to draw attention to Franco's continuing legacy in Spain decades after his death has drawn criticism from the Spanish far right, which claims that the 37-year-old Madrid artist 'insulted Franco's honor.'
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On August 24, a sea of people packed around the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
The “Dream” has not been realized, but not been forgotten. More than 200,000 people came...
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A 25-minute video by Marshall Mateer of the IBMT Annual Commemoration at the International Brigade memorial in Jubilee Gardens, London, on 6 July is now on the IBMTnews channel on YouTube. This year is the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Ebro, which was fought mainly in Catalonia, and a strong Catalan theme runs...
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From Spain we have received the sad news of the passing of Gervasio Puerta, vice-president of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI), who dedicated his entire life to the struggle for justice and against fascism. As a fifteen-year old boy, Gervasio lied about his age in order to join the Republican...
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Samuel Basterra writes with a a request for help: Fausto Villar was a Spanish 19-year-old conscripted into the Spanish Civil war in 1937, assigned to the international Fifteenth Brigade. He felt a profound admiration for both Robert Merriman and Edgar James Cody. Fausto Villar chose to remain with Merriman when he died on the morning of April 2,...
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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 imperiled IB monument in Madrid, a new monument in Scotland, the Crome Memorial debates about Orwell, book reviews, and much more. Read it in pdf here.
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Karl Lewkowicz writes: Goodbye Barcelona, a major new British musical celebrating the International Brigades and marking the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Ebro in the Spanish Civil War (promo here), which had a sellout run in London in 2011, will be celebrating its Spanish premiere on September 26, running through till at least...
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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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