The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War(1984)
Over twenty five years ago the documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade ws aired for public consumption. This is the she story of young coming of age men and women, black and white fighting together, not in the U. S. but in Spain to hold back the advancement of the Italian and German Nazi armies that threatened the freedom and survival of millions.
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the response of world people(s) who recognized the evil of Fascism as it threatened to consume Europe and beyond. In this period before the official WWII decree President Roosevelt seemed hell bent on maintaining an isolationist posture while the American companies of Texaco, GM and Ford sent ammunition and fuel to support the invading Nazi effort.
One wonders if it was the economic depression in America or the sound of outraged Americans who demanded American participation in The War that informed President Roosevelt to change his isolationists posture.
But the focus of this documentary is not Roosevelt or the saluting of a commander of a Brigade. It is a story of people who understood the meaning of life, who embraced the idea that to die for a cause one believes in is to live a good, the only life worth living.
The technological detail of the documentary might need a little twitting but the wealth, the richness of the characters who spoke in the film, their furor, their essence came through so strongly that no change need be made to make this twenty five year old documentary as important, as potent today as it was when it was first aired.
It is the crime of our educational system that it focuses more on test taking than on the history of our country. So few Americans know of this group of thousands of courageous Americans. It is an on-going crime of deliberate omission because today with the onslought of technologically driven Fascism right here in this country we need to know those who came before us, their thoughts, their strengths, and the fight that they didn't win at the outset but won in our hearts and our memory once they returned home.
The United States Government did all it could to silence these courageous people. They haunted them as Communists, that then bad word but in reality they knew and we know the F.B.I. labeled "Communists" of the past are the heroes of our world today.
To see this documentary, The Good Fight, is to believe that a good fight against the everyday infringement on our rights; our quality of life, our possible survival in an era of decline in our financial, political, environment life is The fight, the only fight worth fighting.
Available on DVD from FirstRunFeatures.com
Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective
AGORA: Dragged from her chariot by a mob of fanatical vigilante Christian monks, the revered astronomer was stripped naked, skinned to her bones with sharp oyster shells, stoned and burned alive as possibly the first executed witch in history. A kind of purge that was apparently big business back then.
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