In a long interview with ElDiario.es, Baltasar Garzón, winner of the 2011 ALBA/Puffin Award, talks about the many commitments he has taken on since his disbarment two years ago, while denouncing the policies of Spain's current government and the persecution of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, whom he represents. Read the whole interview
Dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was ousted through a referendum in 1988, contemplated what would in effect have been a second coup, the AP reports based on documents published by the National Security Archive, whose senior analyst Kate Doyle received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism last year:
The formerly...
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“George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia 75 years on”: Len Crome Memorial Lecture, organized by the International Brigade Memorial Trust. Saturday 2 March 2013 at the Manchester Conference Centre, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB, 11am-5pm. To mark this year’s 75th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT)...
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On Sunday, Feb. 17, despite chilly and windy weather, 50,000 people converged to Washington, DC demanding that President Obama block the Keystone XL pipeline and take action against climate change.
You can view photos here.
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Ralph S. Abascal (1934-1997), attorney and defender of farmworkers’ rights, argued the case that resulted in the ban on the use of DDT and other deadly pesticides in California’s fields and orchards. His father, who had wound up in California after emigrating from Cantabria, Spain, lost three brothers to the Republican cause in the...
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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 Lou Kenton and David Lomon, a new permanent IB display in Liverpool, anti-Francoist guerrillas in Andalusia, IBer AC Williams, and much more. Read it in pdf here.
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In an op-ed piece published today in El País, Professor Ángel Viñas vindicates the American historian Herbert Southworth and his seminal work on the bombardment of Guernica, while denouncing the continued attempts by right-wing historians to perpetuate some of the myths about the bombing spread by the Franco regime. Read the whole piece here;...
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The Barcelona Provincial Court has ordered the first judicial investigation into the aerial targeting of civilian populations during the Spanish Civil War.
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Laurie Levinger writes: It is a great pleasure and honor to have been invited by AABI to give a reading from my book about my uncle Sam Levinger, Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War (click here for the review in the Volunteer). Justin Byrne, Agustin Lozano (translator) and myself will...
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No one would have thought it possible. Prosecution in an international court would have been stunning enough. But now the amazing has happened: President Reagan's buddy, Guatemala's dictator in the early 80s, General Efrain Ríos Montt is on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala itself! He is...
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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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