Coming to terms with the truth about the Spanish Civil War seems more than ever to pose insurmountable difficulties for those intellectuals–perhaps the majority–who were brought up to believe that Spain in the Thirties was the one great cause in that “low dishonest decade,” as Auden called it, which need never be either reconsidered or repented. Yet the publication of two new anthologies on the fiftieth anniversary of the war–Valentine Cunningham’s Spanish Front and John Miller’s Voices Against Tyranny–together with the discussion they have generated come as a sober reminder that this is a subject that remains part of the unfinished business of recent intellectual history.¹Â “No episode in the 1930s,” Paul Johnson has aptly observed, “has been more lied about than this one, and only in recent years have historians begun to dig it out from the mountain of mendacity beneath which it was buried for a generation.”²Â Judging from some recent commentaries on Spain in the Thirties, there are still many intellectuals who would prefer–even today–to let the terrible truth remain buried rather than have their fantasies of a noble past destroyed.

For most Left intellectuals, in fact, Spain in the Thirties is a cause to be reaffirmed rather than investigated. Reviewing Spanish Front and Voices Against Tyranny in The New York Times, for example, Herbert Mitgang wrote that for all the doubts caused by the actions of Soviet commissars in Spain, George Orwell and other intellectuals “never regretted that they had