AP Historical Amnesia

Campus Report ^ | July 28, 2009 | Bethany Stotts

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AP Historical Amnesia

by: Bethany Stotts, July 28, 2009

Academics and students exhibit a pervasive amnesia toward the pro-Stalin actions of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALB), a group of American volunteers who fought against General Francisco Franco and his Nationalists during Spain’s civil war. Recent Boston University graduate-turned Associated Press reporter Kelsey Abbruzzese did little better than her college peers this July, publishing a story that lauded ALB veteran John Hovan’s career.

“In 1937, John Hovan volunteered to travel to Spain and fight on the side of democracy against Gen. Francisco Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War,” wrote Abbruzzese on July 9. “Now, at age 93, he has been honored with Spanish citizenship for his service as a transport driver...His Spanish passport should arrive in a few weeks.”

Hovan is a “self-described Communist” who worked for the “American League Against War and Fascism before departing for Spain,” she reported. However, Abbruzzese does not identify the ALAWF as a communist outfit in the story.

In 1933, four years before Hovan traveled to Spain, the first U.S. Congress Against War and Fascism issued its “Manifesto and Program,” which asserted that “The rapid rise of Fascism is closely related to the increasing war danger,” and, later, that “The war danger arises inevitably out of the very nature of monopolistic capitalism...”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Attorney General Francis Biddle condemned ALAWF and its other incarnation, the American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD), in his 1942 memo partially because ALAWF’s manifesto stated that “Serious struggle against war involves rallying all forces around this peace policy and opposing all attempts to weaken or destroy the Soviet Union.”...

[iowamark]

Not just the American Left, but the current Socialist Spanish government is re-writing history.

[Julia H.]

Ah, the Dissociative Press...