Baltasar Garzón, in New York to receive the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism this Saturday, was interviewed this morning on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. View the interview at the Democracy Now website; listen to the half-hour interview here (mp3). (Translation by ALBA's Tony Geist.) Interested in meeting Judge Garzón? Some
In an interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Baltasar Garzón has condemned the assassination of Osama bin Laden. "Not even the worst terrorist on earth deserves to be killed, especially when other options are still open," declared the Spanish judge, who is a staunch opponent of the death penalty. "If I do not...
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UC Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies has put a video online of the speech Baltasar Garzón gave there on April 27th, entitled "Universal Jurisdiction and International Justice." View the 1.5-hour clip here:
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Scott Horton's investigative piece on the suicides at the Guantánamo detention facility has just won the National Magazine Award. Horton, who writes for Harper's, has also been one of the most perceptive U.S. followers of Baltasar Garzón's work (see previous Volunteer coverage here). Guantánamo will be one of the topics covered by Prof. Jonathan...
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"Judge Garzón is a personal hero," Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School writes on his blog today:
For civil libertarians, there are few heroes who can match Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge who ordered the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 and later worked to identify human...
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High-school and college teachers interested in bringing their classes to ALBA's annual celebration this coming Saturday May 14 in New York City may contact Marina Garde at mgarde@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398 for special group discounts.
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Preparations for ALBA's annual celebration in New York City this Saturday May 14 are entering the final stretch. Some tickets are still available for the lunch with ALBA-Puffin Human Rights awardee Baltasar Garzón and Prof. Jonathan Turley (12-2pm) and for the award ceremony--with music, speeches, and commemorations of the Lincoln vets we lost...
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Simon Leys reviews new editions of George Orwell's diaries and letters in the latest issue of the New York Review:
Blair’s personal life and Orwell’s public activity both reflected one powerfully single-minded personality. Blair-Orwell was made of one piece: a recurrent theme in the testimonies of all those who knew him at...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett explains the significance of the new national map identifying thousands of mass grave sites in Spain, which was published last week:
Presenting the results of almost four years of work, the interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, said: "No human being should be buried in a ditch." Not...
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The new film by Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) tells the story of Josémaría Escrivá, the founder of the militant secular order Opus Dei, whose members formed the institutional backbone of the Franco regime, is attracting a lot of media attention. This past week it has been reviewed--not very enthusiastically--in the
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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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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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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