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