Free Republic

Red Badge of Courage by: Bethany Stotts, January 29, 2009 Just as students sporting t-shirts of Che Guevara are often ignorant of his bloody revolutionary record, so too it seems that champions of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade suffer from a peculiar form of “historical amnesia” promoted by academics and activists alike. But in Professor Char Prieto’s case, the decision to continue lauding the Soviet-influenced Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) stems not from ignorance of the these values, but their acceptance. “After World War II the movement to stop Communism was rampant in the United States. Therefore, anything associated...

In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Communist troops murdered three Carmelite nuns at Guadalajara, Spain. They were: Sr. Maria of the Angels of St. Joseph (born Marciana Valtierra Tordesillas), thirty-one years oId; Sr. Maria Pilar of St. Francis Borgia (Jacoba Martinez Garcia), fifty-eight; Sr. Teresa of the Child Jesus (Eusebia Garcia y Garcia), twenty-seven. On July 22, with soldiers roaming the city, the eighteen nuns of the Monastery of St. Joseph scattered through the streets disguised in secular clothes. Some found shelter with Catholic families, and Srs. Maria of the Angels, Maria Pilar, and Teresa, along with two other...

ATROCITIES IN SPAIN CHARGED BY BISHOP Erie (Pa.) Prelate, Sailing to Investigate, Declares 16,000 Priests Slain ‘20,000 CHURCHES SACKED’ Xxx Rev. John M. Gannon Says Full Story Will Appall the Civilized World Bishop John Mark Gannon of Erie, Pa., chairman of the National Catholic Welfare Conference xxx department, sailed last night on the liner Queen Mary for Spain, where he said he expected to obtain first-hand information concerning the persecution of the Catholic clergy by the Barcelona government. He said that from information he had already received the ferocity of the ‘Loyalist’ government’s assault on the Catholic Church” was such...

Tolling the Red Bell by: Malcolm A. Kline, June 09, 2008 For many a decade, schoolchildren of all ages have been taught to revere the alleged heroism of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought the forces marshaled by Generalisimo Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Since Franco received aid from Hitler in the 1930s in his effort to dislodge the government supported by the Soviet Union, the story goes, taking arms against Il Claudio was the equivalent of firing the first salvo at the Nazis. One year ago, for instance, the University of Washington screened “Souls Without Borders,” a...

The men of the International Brigade failed in their mission, but they still bask in the memory of a just cause, writes our correspondent. TOURISTS on the London Eye this morning may wonder why the rousing strains of the Internationale, the anthem of world socialism, are drifting skywards from the South Bank far below. The date — the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War — will probably escape them. But in the pantheon of the political Left it remains one of the highest causes for which they went to fight — and lost. Around a memorial...