John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, at Dissident Voice, recalls Langston Hughes' poem "Barcelona Air Raid" in relation to the increased use by the US administration of unmanned drones:
In targeting non-state individuals, questions of human rights and rightful protections readily present themselves. They center on uncovering the criteria that deem certain individuals...
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May Franco be called a "dictator" after all? Público reports on a new chapter in the ongoing saga around the controversial Diccionario Biográfico Español whose first 25 volumes were issued a year ago by the Spanish Royal Academy of History: The commission appointed to investigate the case has recommended that an appendix...
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"Witness," the BBC World Service radio show, commemorated the bombing of Guernica last week. Listen to the 9-minute program here. In Germany, Der Spiegel did the same.
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The Los Angeles Times is looking forward to HBO's upcoming film Hemingway & Gellhorn, by Philip Kauffman, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. The movie premiers on May 28. Trailer here.
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Writing in the Guardian, Fiona Maddocks reviews the Impossible Brilliance weekend dedicated to composer and Lincoln vet Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997):
A charismatic figure with a cult following, who fought in the Spanish civil war and then left anti-communist America to live in Mexico City, Nancarrow wrote most of his music for...
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In this video just uploaded by the Yiddish Book Center as part of the Wexler Oral History Project, Pauline Katz retells her grandfather's story about how Camp Kinderland taught about the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Each bunk was assigned "loyalist," except for her grandfather's, which had the misfortune of...
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This past April 26, our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust co-sponsored a wonderful event in London commemorating the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica. Gregg Macdonald's video of the event--which concludes a rousing musical homage to the Lincoln vets by David Rovics--can be viewed here, or below. The event...
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"Tens of thousands of people took to the streets here and around the United States Tuesday calling for an end to what they described as the mounting and corrosive influence of money in politics," CommonDreams reports. Len Tsou--Spanish Civil War expert, ALBA supporter, and photographer--joined the New York march with his camera. See...
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Port Huron Statement, which was the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The PH Statement advocated for participatory democracy and helped launch the student movement of the 1960s. On April 12 and 13, a timely conference entitled “The Port Huron Statement...
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Friends & Family of the Lincoln Brigade will be gathering in NYC on May 11, 2012
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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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