The myth of "premature antifascism".(Americans fighting in the Spanish Civil War)

In 1984, George Orwell gave the Ministry of Truth the task of rewriting history. Under the slogan "who controls the past controls the future," an army of scribes modified documents, changed textbooks, and rewrote old newspapers to ensure that history conformed to every shift of the ruling party's political line. Left-wing American historians have likewise been busily engaged in altering the past to buttress their conviction that Communists are the real heroes of modern history. Of all the historical myths promoted by the American left, few have been more fiercely protected than those about the Spanish Civil War, lionized as "the Good Fight," a heroic struggle between fascism and antifascism, and the Communist-led International Brigades, a band of selfless volunteers whose brave deeds were immortalized in stirring songs (they won the battles, but we had all the good songs, Tom Lehrer noted).

In this narrative, the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade confronted the fascist menace in 1937, years before the outbreak of World War II finally roused the American government and the public from the torpor of isolationism and appeasement. An often-cited part of the story is that the veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, rather than being hailed for the prescience of their antifascism, were given the pejorative label "premature antifascist" and punished by an American government even then blinded by hatred of communism. The Encyclopedia of the American Left, an Oxford University Press reference book found in many libraries, states that after the United States entered World War II, many of the Lincoln Brigade veterans volunteered for the American armed forces but "in a foreshadowing of the McCarthy period, the armed forces designated the Lincolns `premature antifascists' and confined them to their bases."

This assertion is a ubiquitous refrain in historical literature during the last thirty years. Ellen Schrecker, a historian at Yeshiva University, wrote that in World War II the Lincoln veterans "were, in the [U.S.] Army's bizarre terminology, `premature antifascists' subject to harassment by military intelligence officers and, in many cases, sent to special camps where they were treated almost like prisoners of war." Fraser Ottanelli of the University of South Florida insisted that the veterans "in the witch hunts of the 1950s were disparagingly referred to as `premature antifascists.'" Robin Kelly, a professor at New York University, wrote, "rather than applaud these men and women for risking their lives in a battle America would officially join in 1941, Lincoln Brigade veterans were hounded by the FBI, a variety of `un-American activities' committees, and labeled `premature antifascists.'" Robbie Lieberman of Southern Illinois University stated that the Americans who fought in Spain "faced problems later because of what the government labeled their `premature antifascist' stance." Professor Bernard Knox (Harvard and Yale) confidently stated, "Premature Antifascist" "was the label affixed to the dossiers of those Americans who had fought in the Brigades when, after Pearl Harbor (and some of them before) they enlisted in the U.S. Army. It was the signal to assign them to non-combat units or inactive fronts and to deny them the promotion they deserved."

Despite all these confident assertions, "premature antifascism" is a myth. Not only is there no evidence that the United States armed forces ever used the phrase "premature antifascists" to describe those Americans who fought in Spain, there are indications that it was Communists and the veterans themselves who first employed the term. Moreover, many of the veterans were also "interim profascists" who in obedience to Soviet instructions dropped their anti-Nazism in September 1939 and opposed resistance to Fascist aggression while Germany conquered most of Western and Central Europe. Only when the Nazis turned against the USSR in June 1941 did the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade rediscover their antifascism.

No one has to this day located any documentary evidence that any American government agency coined or used the phrase "premature antifascist" to apply to Americans who fought for the International Brigades. Not until the early 1990s when our research took us into FBI, OSS, and U.S. Army records, the "dossiers" about which Knox had spoken, did it occur to us that there was no documentary support for the charge that had been repeated routinely for years. We examined thousands of pages and realized that ...