Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. He was one of the key individuals involved in founding the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
“The aim of an exhumation is not only to recover the victims in physical terms, to recover their bodies, but also to recover their lives, their biographies, to reconstruct who they were.”
No one is better qualified than Peter Neil Carroll to write a book of memorial poems about the valiant men and women who volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.
Miguel Ferguson, !Brigadistas! An American Anti-Fascist in the Spanish Civil War, ed. Paul Buhle and Fraser Ottanelli, art by Anne Timmons (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022).
Fascism is, arguably, the application of colonial violence to the imperial core. Franco implemented what he had learnt during the colonial conflict in the civil war.
In the wake of neo-fascist coup attempts — and the ongoing threat they pose in the U.S. and Brazil — it’s worth revisiting historical analogies on how to challenge the fascist plague before it metastasizes, endangering people the world over.
40,000 mostly young leftists from 50 countries joined in the military effort to defend democracy. Some 3,000 Americans traveled to Spain to fight fascism. They became known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Carroll is drawn to the eccentric and the oddball. In sinuous free verse, he limns a series of arresting anecdotes, few longer than a page, as he searches for Homo Americanus.
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