Yesterday, thousands of protesters expressed their indignation and dissatisfaction with the current government–and the political class as a whole–by peacefully surrounding the Spanish parliament in Madrid. Protests continue unabated today; follow events live on MásPúblico. Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! have the details on the events of yesterday: Thousands of people surrounded the Spanish...
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The work of Conlon Nancarrow, experimentalist composer and Lincoln Brigade veteran, will be featured in an extensive program at UC Berkeley to mark the fact that he was born 100 years ago. Details here, tickets here, highlights below: Join us for Nancarrow at 100, a three-day centennial celebration honoring the life and work of...
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This past Friday, the United States' Justice Department disclosed the names of 55 individuals who are currently being detained at Guantánamo Bay, approving them to be transfered to other countries. According to the New York Times, "the government’s move has no immediate, practical effect on the inmates’ detention," and "inclusion on the list...
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Hershl Hartman writes: IB fighters remembered in Secular Yom Kippur program Since 1973, progressive Secular/cultural Jews — including many intercultural families — in Los Angeles have marked yonkiper/Yom Kippur (day of purgation/atonement) in an alternative observance in which personal reflections are combined with social concerns, and poetry replaces prayer. Reflecting our general anti-fascist heritage...
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"A former Guatemalan soldier accused of being involved in a 1982 massacre during that country's civil war was extradited Friday to California where he faces immigration fraud charges," the Associate Press reports:
José Sosa Orantes was brought to the U.S. from Canada, where he fled after American officials began investigating allegations that...
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Our friends at the IBMT write with the sad news of the passing of IB veteran Lou Kenton. Born on 1 September 1908 in the East End of London, Lou was a print worker and prominent anti-fascist before the start of the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Spain in July 1937 on...
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Esperanza Aguirre, arguably one of the most important Spanish politicians in recent history, announced her resignation on Monday, due by and large to having been diagnosed with breast cancer. Aguirre, 60, served in the Spanish government for over thirty years, including a run as the head of the Spanish Senate. According to the...
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This past weekend marked the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Nancy and Len Tsou, intrepid photographers, were there to document. See their images here.
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According to Público, Spain's Ministry of Justice has created an archive in which one may access information about the 4,400 Spaniards who died in concentration camps in Austria and Germany during the Second World War. The database will provide names, dates of birth and death, and any relevant historical documents related to the...
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Santiago Carrillo, the historic leader of the Spanish Communist Party, has died. He was 97. An English-language obit from El País can be found here. See also coverage from MásPúblico and Público.
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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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