When I come across an article whose author is David Remnick of The New Yorker, I immediately hasten to read it, because I'm sure of finding intellectually stimulating fare (even when he writes about sports!). One may not always agree, but one is enriched by the contact.

For me another such author is Edward Rothstein of the New York Times.

In today's Times, Rothstein dissects an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York on Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War. According to Rothstein the exhibit uncritically celebrates the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and "deviates little from what would have once been called the party line."

Here is more of his reflection:

By 1937, after the show trials in Moscow, it was apparent to manydevoted idealists that the partys high moral proclamations were notwhat they seemed. This is what George Orwell fitfully recognizes in hisHomage to Catalonia. First he fights in an independent Marxistdivision that was apparently kept deliberately undersupplied. Later hefears for his life in Barcelona Republican-held territory as theparty begins a planned purge, including killings and torture. Somerecent research has suggested that even members of the Lincoln Brigade some of whom disappeared were not immune.

As for thenewspaper talk about this being a war for democracy, Orwell wrote,it was plain eyewash. No one in his senses supposed that there was anyhope of democracy.

None of this can be learned from the show,and to all of it, our heroes of the Lincoln Brigade were blind orworse. The Hitler-Stalin pact, which followed Francos victory by a fewmonths, also hardly seemed to have affected their allegiances. Lastweek, in The New York Sun, Ronald Radosh, author of Spain Betrayed:The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, quoted a speech by MiltonWolff, one of the exhibitions Lincoln fighters, made in 1941 while thepact was still in effect. For Wolff, Franklin D. Roosevelthad become the nascent fascist menace; no Lincoln Brigades would beneeded against Hitler. We fight, he proclaimed, against theinvolvement of our country in an imperialist war.

Orwell said that no one could spend more than a few weeks in Spain without being in some degree disillusioned.

But even the fair-minded and judicious Rothstein makes no allusion to the thousands of priests and religious savagely murdered by elements of the left. For that I recommend turning to Michael Burleigh's recent Sacred Causes.