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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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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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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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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