Our friends in the UK at the International Brigade Memorial Trust have just sent us their latest newsletter, with articles on the new plaque at the IB memorial in London, the Pyrenees crossing, Republican refugees in Sussex, Christopher Caudwell, and much more. Read it in pdf here.
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Along with David Graeber, Richard Sennet--social and cultural theorist and proud son and nephew of veterans of the Lincoln Brigade--has an article in this week's issue of The Nation dedicated to the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:
It’s been a year since the Occupy movements of 2011, and like other participants,...
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David Graeber--anthropologist, anarchist, one of the originators of Occupy Wall Street, and son of Lincoln vet Kenneth Graeber--writes in this week's issue of The Nation:
The idea of the “99 percent” managed to do something that no one has done in the United States since the Great Depression: revive the concept of social...
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A small but moving episode marked the regular annual meeting of the German organization Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939 (Kämpfer und Freunde der Spanischen Republik 1936-1939). It was the first such meeting without a single veteran; the last volunteer in Germany, Fritz Teppich, died last winter, and none of the tiny,...
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Check in with Democracy Now! for the latest coverage of the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:
Occupy Wall Street protesters are converging in the Financial District in Manhattan to mark the first anniversary of the movement's beginning. Similar protests are taking place in dozens of cities today. On Sept. 17, 2011,...
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ALBA is now accepting nominations for the 2013 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. About the Award The ALBA-Puffin International Award for Human Rights Activism is granted on an annual basis to individuals or organizations whose work has had an exceptionally positive impact on the advancement and/or defense of human rights. The Award was established in 2011 to...
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A British archive has released a new virtual exhibition on Basque refugees in Carshalton, England during the Spanish civil war.
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Three more bodies have been recently exhumed with the help of a Canadian university student working with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory to find the remains of Franco's victims.
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Trade Unionists in Scotland honor.
the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades; remember lost comrades.
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In addition to marking the 11th anniversary of the more recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, today is also the 39th anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet's military coup in Chile, in which he forced a brutal, militaristic government upon the country. As the Associated Press reports, riots began earlier today, as...
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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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