Images have begun to appear in the media of the set of Philip Kaufman's new film on Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. Rolling Stone published this photo taken earlier this week, showing Nicole Kidman (Gellhorn), Clive Owens (Hem), and Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica, as the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.
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The Associated Press covers the story:
In its suit filed with the European court, Interights reiterates the judge’s argument that these were crimes against humanity and that a case body of international law says such crimes have no statute of limitations and cannot be covered by amnesty, according to a spokeswoman for...
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Yesterday the Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón brought a case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg challenging the lawfulness of his criminal prosecution in Spain for having opened an investigation into serious crimes committed during the Franco era, following a request by families and representatives of victims of the regime,. The...
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Today I had the pleasure of introducing the Spanish journalist, Anna Grau, to the treasures of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Together, we went through the scrapbook of Bernard Danchik, a young gymnast from Brooklyn, who lobbied for, and participated in, the Olimpiada Popular, an alternative anti-fascist sports competition organized in Barcelona in 1936,...
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Marjorie Cohn, who gave ALBA's annual Susman lecture last month, calls for the US to stop bombing Libya:
There is no doubt that Muammar Qaddafi has been brutally repressing Libyans in order to maintain his power. But the purpose of the United Nations is to maintain international peace and security. The...
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Dear Friends: I wanted to let you know that there will be an Off Broadway production of "Triangle," an historical drama I've co-written with Sarasota based playwright Jack Gilhooley. 59 E. 59 Theaters will present the play as an Equity Showcase from April 14 through May 1. Amidst all the events surrounding the centennial...
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Irene Filip has just published a detailed essay on Dr. Hans Kaiser and his wife Dora, the two Austrian Jewish volunteers who helped run the International Brigade hospital at Benissa. Read the article, which has appeared in the yearbook of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, here (in German).
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Visiting Chile, President Obama stopped short of offering an apology for the US role in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973, leading to the bloody military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet--an episode about which then Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 2003 "it is not a part of American history that...
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Alan Entin, nephew of Bernard "Butch" Entin, has been working with his local radio station on a documentary about his uncle: "Uncle Bernard and The Abraham Lincoln Brigade" in the series "Hidden Histories" (27 min, available in mp3 here). Also in Hidden Histories, three 2-minute segments on the Spanish Civil War with Jack...
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Ten days ago, at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva, Switzerland, the screening of Impunity, the new documentary by Juan José Lozano and Hollman Morris on the peace process in Colombia (website; trailer), Baltasar Garzón joined in a panel discussion on the question of impunity in relation to...
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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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