There seems to be no end to the legal and historical ironies associated with Judge Baltasar Garzón, who is currently facing three sets charges in the Spanish Supreme Court. If he loses the first one--for opening an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime--he, the judge, would be the first person...
Read more »
"Judge Baltasar Garzón is soon to appear in the Supreme Court over wiretaps that he ordered to listen in on conversations between lawyers and the heads of the corrupt "Gürtel" business network," the English edition of El País reports:
The judge in charge of the case, Alberto Jorge Barreiro, announced Monday that the...
Read more »
Nest Tuesday, April 12th, at 6pm, the Center for Worker Education, City College, CUNY & The Frances S. Patai Fund is hosting a talk by Prof. Isabelle Rohr on American Medical Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The lectures is free and open to the public, at the Center for Worker Education, 7th Floor Auditorium...
Read more »
Nick Lyne offers an overview and analysis in today's Iberosphere of the case brought on behalf of Judge Garzón to the European Court of Human Rights (see also last week's ALBA editorial on the topic):
Garzón’s supporters claim there is nothing coincidental about the fact that the trial for malfeasance...
Read more »
More heart-wrenching clippings from New York’s Spanish-language press, this time from the Brooklyn-based paper, Frente Popular. The war is over, and the international network of Spanish Republican immigrants and exiles is abuzz with desperate attempts to locate loved ones. Spaniards fleeing from Franco have been corralled into horrific concentration camps in southern France, and...
Read more »
Can the lessons of the Spanish Civil War be applied to the situation in Libya? The debate has been ongoing. George Will contributed to the discussion yesterday in his Washington Post column:
Now the administration must decide how to characterize those on whose behalf we have gone to war. They are...
Read more »
Shooting continues apace for Philip Kaufman's new film on Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. Yesterday Caught on Set published a series of images taken in the hills of Livermore, California.
Read more »
The progressive policies of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero, who this week announced that he will not be running for a third term, have been alarming conservatives and Catholics beyond Spain. When the Pope visited earlier this past fall--an event which brought thousands of Spaniards to the streets in protest--he stunned...
Read more »
On Saturday, April 23, Columbia University and the International Center of Photography will present a day-long symposium titled “China and Spain, 1936-39: Robert Capa and the Global Popular Front.” Bringing together eleven scholars from the U.S. and China, the symposium will explore the interconnections between the Spanish Civil War and the concurrent Chinese...
Read more »
Jonathan Freedland writes in the Guardian on the Valle de los Caídos, Franco's monstrous monument, which continues to attract controversy:
Spain's socialist government understands the potency of Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen. Indeed, much energy has been devoted to taming it. Since 2009, the site has been closed to general...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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
Search the Database