More Commie Proof

From the NYT comes more evidence from a NYC exhibition about the Spanish Civil War of the left's attempt to rehabilitate Communism into a respectable ideology.

For their moral vision, the exhibition also suggests, these heroic figures paid yet another price. They were persecuted as loyal members of the Communist Party. One object here is a collection can labeled “Save a Spanish Republic Child” that belonged to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — a piece of evidence introduced against them when they were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. A vague impression is left that both the accusations and the evidence of party involvement were frivolous compared to the couple’s virtuous intentions.

"In this attempt to re-establish the civil war as a morality tale, the show is not alone. In February, for example, in The Guardian of London, the historian Eric Hobsbawm celebrated the ultimate triumph of the war’s losers and suggested that the virtues of their cause transcended Stalin’s machinations. The recent film “Pan’s Labyrinth” portrays populist forest-dwelling partisans confronting a monstrously evil fascist leader. In June, W. W. Norton is going to release the latest edition of Paul Preston’s much-hailed history, “The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge,” which blames “an unholy alliance of anarchists, Trotskyites and cold warriors” for obscuring the nature of the war against Spanish fascism. Mr. Preston goes out of his way to justify and explain the Soviet position, dismissing “revisionists” who “resuscitate the basic theses of Francoist propaganda.”

I should begin to track these pieces of evidence more thoroughly. Right now you'll have to settle for the brief dribs and drabs that I run across.