This past Tuesday, Jorge Rafael Videla, the ex Argentine dictator who ruled from 1976 to 1983, gave his final words in his court case regarding the theft of babies from pregnant women during the country's Dirty War. According to elpais.com, the 86 year-old Videla used this platform as a means for insulting the...
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This coming fall, many renowned Spanish liberals and intellectuals will be promoting and celebrating a so-called Conference of Writers, Intellectuals, and Artists for the Compromise. The conference is set to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the "legendary Second International Writers' Conference for the Defense of Culture, which in the summer of 1937 met...
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With Mexico’s presidential election less than a week away, none of the candidates have firmly established their policies regarding Mexico’s Drug War, and have avoided divulging how they plan to combat the narco traffickers and cartels that have turned large areas of the country into violent warzones. The escalation of drug-related violence in the...
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The United States' federal judiciary is turning its back on constitutionality. With the emergence of several legal cases involving the complicity of the United States in tortures and disappearances that have occurred over the past decade, it is becoming increasingly evident that our justice system is corrupt. According to writer Scott Horton of...
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As the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion slips from popular memory, one professor attempts to bring to light their tragic history in Spain.
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Like the Spanish Civil War, argues Pat Buchanan, the American governemnt should not send weapons or aide to Syria.
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An article in 'The National Interest' debates the merit of a new Lincoln Brigade for Syria.
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The Royal Spanish Academy of Language has announced it will revise the official definition of the word "marriage" in the DRAE (Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary). This change will mark the first time the DRAE recognizes marriage as more than the union of two opposite-sex partners, reports elpais.com. The new definition will include the...
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I had the pleasure of visiting the ALBA archives a couple of weeks ago with Alan Levine, a New York-based civil rights attorney with a longstanding interest in the Lincolns. In the early 1960s, fresh out of Yale Law School, Alan took a job on Wall Street, a decision which he soon regretted. In...
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Last Friday, June 15th, President Obama announced that his administration would stop deporting young undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children, if they meet certain criteria. While the President acknowledged that this was not a "permanent fix" to the deportation issues that have only been exacerbated under his presidency, his action, "effective...
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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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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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