2010.54.10190

• international solidarity

Middle of poster has gold color, black, and red brush strokes. Top of poster has: "But What About the Guys in The Lincoln Brigade?" printed in black. Middle of poster has: "One of the major obstacles in the way of human / progress, of human understanding, is cynicism. The / cynicism that states that people only act in their own / self-interest or what they believe to be their self- / interest, that says within every seemingly altruistic / act there lurks a dark core of greed or hatred or fear. / To make people behave, the cynics say, to make / society work, you have to know how to exploit and / manipuLate that dark core. That's life, the cynics / say, that's just the way people are. And you can / listen to this for a while and maybe agree up to a / point, but then you say, "What about the guys in / the Lincoln Brigade?" / Then the cynics will go to work and talk about / raw youth and misplaced idealism and what this / faction did to that faction. But they won't go away, / those guys who shipped out for Spain to fight for / other people's freedom, they stand up in history like / the one tree on a battlefield not levelled by the / bombing, stand up and make you ask, "How did / that happen?" They won't go away. If you talk to / them or read their accounts what you hear again and / again is that they went to Spain because of a belief / in what people could be, in how people could live / together, and they put their lives on the line for that / belief and a lot of them died. / "But they lost," say the cynics, not knowing that / it is more important that they fought-fought when / they didn't have to fight, fought when it brought no / public glory in their home towns, fought to put a / lie to the cynicism that keeps people in darkness. / They won't go away...And in a world run by / cynics, in a time when caring about someone you've / never met is seen as weakness or treachery, how / much strength have we taken from the thought of / them, how much pride and comfort to be able to / say, "But what about the guys in the Lincoln Brigade?" / John Sayles" printed in black.