Andrew Sullivan points to, and comments on, one of the more detailed and complex accounts of the precise relationship between the freshly appointed Pope Francis I and the Argentine military junta, provided by Democracy Now´s Amy Goodman in an interview with journalist Horacio Verbitsky. This is Sullivan; the quotes are from Goodman’s interview with...
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From the BBC (see video here):
A court in Buenos Aires has sentenced the former military ruler Reynaldo Bignone to life in jail for crimes against humanity committed when he was in power in the 1980s. The 85-year-old former general is already serving three other jail sentences for similar crimes. Mr...
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A couple of weeks ago, Luis Argeo and I inaugurated a Facebook page that we hope will serve as a kind of dynamic storefront for a more staid and long-term scholarly and documentary project aimed at chronicling the history of Spanish immigration to the United States. This past Sunday, I posted on that FB...
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Alan Warren writes from Spain: This week marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Great Retreats. To remember the men who were killed in this Retreat I have posted to a piece of research on the unpublished autobiography of Fausto Vilar Esteban. His memoirs, as yet unpublished, are a wonderful source of...
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Nearly 200 people attended “George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia, 75 Years On,” a conference held this past March 2 by the International Brigade Memorial Trust in Manchester, UK. Among the audience were George Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair and Quentin Kopp, son of Georges Kopp, Orwell’s commanding officer in Spain. The speakers included Richard...
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“Across the Pyrenees” is a presentation of the Walk Across the Pyrenees organized by British friends of the International Brigades. It follows the path of the volunteers as they stole into Republican Spain in the dead of night. Their goal was to defeat fascism in Spain before it spread into Europe. Three people from...
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Historian and ALBA emeritus chair Peter N. Carroll will be delivering the 2013 Bill Susman Lecture, “From Guernica to Human Rights,” next March 28 in New York City, at 6:00pm, at the Instituto Cervantes (211 E 49th Street, New York, NY 10017). Admission is free. In his lecture, Peter N. Carroll will explore changing...
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Democracy Now covers the historic trial targeting the infamous Operación Cóndor, through which right-wing Latin American dictatorships coordinate the repression of dissent.
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This past February I received a call from the Ateneo in Madrid—a long-standing cultural institution—asking for a brief presentation about some aspect of the Second Republic for the weekly Monday gathering of a group of Republicans, many of whom lived the years of the Civil War and postwar personally. The five years of the...
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Emilio Silva Faba was born in the town of Pereje (León) in 1892. In 1915 he emigrated to Argentina, where he lived in Ezpeleta, in the province of Buenos Aires. There he worked in a soda factory. Five years later he re-emigrated to the United States. He came through Ellis Island on August 28...
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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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