"Every Thursday evening, in the middle of the Puerta del Sol, a small crowd gathers around an equestrian statue of King Carlos III to stage a modest protest. There are rarely more than 25 people, most of them in their 70s. The first thing several of them do is unfurl a banner that reads:...
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A mural to Irish International Brigade veteran Bob Doyle was dedicated last weekend in northern Dublin.
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Severiano Montero from the Association of Friends of the International Brigades writes: This year’s homage to the International Brigades will be part of the commemoration of the 76th anniversary of the defense of Madrid. This is the program: November 7th. Meeting at the Ateneo de Madrid, at 19:30, to commemorate the De fence of...
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The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court in Chile approved an extradition request on Wednesday against a former American Navy officer indicted in the killings of two United States citizens in the aftermath of the 1973 coup. Retired Capt. Ray E. Davis was commander of the United States Military Group at the embassy...
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Len Tsou writes from Spain: Tens of thousands of Spaniards poured into the streets of Madrid to join the Global Noise Against Debt on October 13. Men, women and children banged pots, pans and instruments marching from the EU headquarters, en route congress, to Puerta del Sol. They are furious about bailing out banks...
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Len Tsou writes: October 12 is El Día de la Hispanidad (Hispanicity Day) in Spain to mark the date when Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas in 1492. However, Toma la Plaza-Madrid group declares “Nothing to celebrate. Recognize everything!” Yesterday afternoon, in Madrid several hundreds marched from Plaza de Isabel to Puerta...
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Anarchist Movies of the Spanish Civil War Introduced by Edouard Waintrop Sunday, October 14, 2012, 1:00 p.m. Theater 2 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2), T2 Includes the following films: Report on the Revolutionary Movement 1936. Spain. Directed by Mateo Santos. An activist in Confederacion National del Trabajo (CNT), the anarcho-syndicalist confederation of...
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Next Wednesday, October 17th, at the Boston Public Library, Dan Lynn Watt and Molly Lynn Watt will perform George and Ruth Watt's Songs & Letters of the Spanish Civil War. Details below:
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Screening at El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Madrid Spain 10/15, 7 p.m. Film Series: The cinema of the 1930s. Blue Flowers in a Catastrophic Landscape Selection: The Spanish Civil War through the Eyes of Others Film: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, Henri Cartier-Bresson & Herbert Kline. 1938, 16 mm, 21’....
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Journalist Martín de Pozuelo has recently proved, document by document, direct links between the Franco regime and the Holocaust, in which, "the few times that the Franco government facilitated help towards the jews was for foreign causes in their own interest or for propagandistic purposes," reports El Plural. According to El Plural, these...
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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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