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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Yesterday Mexican leftist politician and presidential runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced his decision to leave the country's Democratic Revolution Party. As the New York Times reports, López Obrador "was one of many political figures who abandoned the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1988 and was a popular Mexico City mayor before seeking...
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The words and deeds of the Lincoln Vets still Speak to a generation of present-day Spaniards. I received an email during the last week of August from Nacho Garcia, a young Spaniard from Burgos who maintains a blog, The Jaily News, named after the underground newspaper written by the International Brigade prisoners who...
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Helen Graham’s The War and Its Shadow, just out from Sussex Academic Press, is “a book concerned with what must now be considered the most important revisionist project in the study of world history, and that is the significance and truth of the Spanish Civil War”, writes Gary Raymond in the Wales Arts Review;...
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A judge in the Spanish city of Valencia has recently stripped former dictator Fransisco Franco of his title of ‘Honorary Mayor,’ awarded to him in May 1939. Compromis, a’s left-wing coalition, said that “To maintain this distinction for the top figure in the military uprising and subsequent dictatorship is a clear attack on the...
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A new 154-page report issued by Human Rights Watch details new cases of torture committed by US government representatives. From the press release:
The United States government during the Bush administration tortured opponents of Muammar Gaddafi, then transferred them to mistreatment in Libya, according to accounts by former detainees and recently uncovered...
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From our friends at NACLA: Today, members of the Mexican Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by journalist Javier Sicilia, arrived in New York City. The Caravan for Peace has spent the past month traveling across the United States in protest of failed drug war policies. During its visit, the Caravan and its...
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From September 21-29, British director Matt Richard's new film, entitled "To Say Goodbye," will premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival, in San Sebastian, Spain. According to El Público, the animated film tells the story of "4,000 Basque children who set sail on the Habana ship en route to the United Kingdom" during...
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An audio reportage courtesy of Free Speech Radio (listen here): Over the last few years, Europe has experienced a severe financial crisis, with countries like Greece and Spain facing skyrocketing debt and unemployment. More than a decade ago, a similar situation was unfolding in Argentina. In 2001, the country suffered a debilitating economic crisis...
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“Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague,” The Guardian reports, “and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war”: “The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain,” Tutu argues, “fabricated...
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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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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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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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