Paco de Onís of Skylight Pictures, who together with Pamela Yates and Peter Kinnoy made Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, writes: We filmed the entire genocide trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt, gavel to gavel, and have produced Dictator in the Dock, a series of 24 webisodes (3-5 minutes each) that will immerse you...
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Here is an impassioned speech about the imperiled IB monument in Madrid by Almudena Cros of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI). The video was taken this past July 6 at the annual commemoration in London:
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We have just received the sad news that Toshi Seeger, Pete Seeger’s wife, passed away on July 9. Mark Moss at singout.org writes: She was a mother, an organizer, an activist and filmmaker … and an essential part of all of her husband’s work. She was 91. As much as Pete is a consummate...
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This week the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas–which houses one of the largest humanities collections in the world–announced the acquisition of the papers of Barbara Probst Solomon (b. 1928), a long-time friend and ally of the Spanish Republic and the Lincoln Brigade. The collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, published books, first drafts, interviews, documentaries and...
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"Now we're far from that valley of sorrow/But its mem'ry we'll never forget/In the midst of the struggles around us/Let's remember our glorious dead." The lyrics of the International Brigade ballad "Jarama Valley" immortalized by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger continue to ring true 75 years after the survivors of the Abraham Lincoln...
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Our friends at the IBMT have posted Paul Preston's lecture on George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, read at the Len Crome Memorial event by IBMT secretary Jim Jump (Preston himself was unable to attend). See the video below or on YouTube. Marshall Mateer provides some useful context for a U.S. audience:
Morecambe...
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On July 8, a delegation organized by Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade met with Juan Ramón Martínez Salazar, the Consul General of Spain and Íñigo Ramírez de Haro Valdés, Attaché for Cultural Affairs, to follow up on the letter to the Ambassador protesting the removal of the IB monument in Madrid,...
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The annual commemoration in honor of the International Brigades was held in London on July 6. See a slideshow here, courtesy of photographer Guy Smallman and the IBMT. More pictures, courtesy of Almudena Cros of the Asociación de los Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI), on Facebook here.
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(Versión en castellano.) On July 3 the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) became the first organization from the United States to join the Plataforma por la Comisión de la Verdad sobre los Crímenes del Franquismo (Platform for a Truth Commission on the Crimes of Francoism). As ALBA is entrusted to sustain and preserve the legacy...
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Dublin IBMT member Luke O’Riordan has posted a 1971 Irish TV programme (watch here) on his late grandfather, Irish International Brigader Michael O’Riordan (12 November 1917- 18 May 2006), a veteran of the 1938 Battle of the Ebro, whose 75th anniversary is being marked this year. Luke has also posted a recording of his recently...
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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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