The romanticizing of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the role of the Abraham Lincoln “Brigade,” the American contingent of the Comintern army sent to fight on the side of the Spanish Republic against Franco, is hardly a new phenomenon. Now, a year after the Brigade’s 70th anniversary, a new book, “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War” edited by Peter Carroll and James Fernandez (New York University Press, 203 pages, $27.95), has been published as a glossy paperback. The book also serves as the catalog for the exhibition that will open Friday at the Museum of the City of New York. At the unit’s 50th anniversary in 1986, a gala celebration was held at Lincoln Center. Two years before, a hagiographical film about the vets, “The Good Fight,” received wide distribution and attention. The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s annual reunions regularly enjoy the participation and support of celebrities. Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon, Harry Belafonte, and Michael Moore have all appeared at their events or given them support.

By continually referring to the volunteers as a “brigade,” the authors show that from the start they have decided to echo the Comintern’s phony propaganda. Cecil Eby’s new book, “Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War” (Pennsylvania State University Press, 440 pages, $39.95), provides all the information one needs to know the truth about what the soldiers did, whose interests they served, and how important they were. “So entrenched is the folk belief that once upon a time an Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought in Spain,” Mr. Eby writes, “that it borders on political sacrilege to report the sad truth that no such military unit ever existed — in Spain or anywhere else.” A brigade is composed of four to six battalions. The Lincolns were part of the XV Brigade — comprised of several international battalions that were part of the Comintern army sent to fight in the Civil War. “The reason why the Lincoln Battalion was magnified into a whole brigade owed nothing to the men themselves,” Mr. Eby writes, “but to publicists in the CPUSA back in New York, who decided … that the American commitment to the ‘War Against Fascism’ would be magically quadrupled in size by altering a single word.”

Given the amount of attention already paid to the Lincoln Battalion, one wonders why New York City’s own museum would agree to be a co-sponsor, along with the left-wing Puffin Foundation and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, an exhibit whose evident purpose is further glamorizing and distorting the record with a biased account of the issues that sent a few thousand left-wing New Yorkers to volunteer to fight on the side of the Republic.

The exhibit is anything but balanced. Perry Rosenstein, president of the Puffin Foundation, makes the bias clear in his short introduction. Incorrectly calling the Battalion’s activities “a long buried chapter of history” (evidently Mr. Rosenstein is unfamiliar with the scores of books and articles written about them) he calls them “an inspiration to all” who “represented the best of our country and the best of our conscience.” The exhibit is thus presented as a “tribute to their courage and sacrifice.” Susan Henshaw Jones, president of the museum, shows that she uncritically accepts the old pro-communist analysis of the war, that the men and women who went to fight did so “to defend the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic against a rebellion led by General Francisco Franco and militarily backed by Hitler and Mussolini.” She prefers to see the events of the 1930s as a simple morality play of good guys versus bad guys, in which “ordinary people” showed a great “level of commitment, idealism, and sacrifice.”

What do we actually know about the International Brigades, of which the Lincolns were but one small contingent? The volunteers did become heavily involved in combat; most of their fighting taking place between November 1936 and the summer of 1937. But they did not function as a part of the Republic’s official army. Instead, they were a Comintern-directed army, led by their communist advisers or “commissars.” Soviet officers called the shots behind the scenes, but their presence was carefully hidden. Nor did the Lincoln Batallion’s sacrifices have any significant effect on the few battles its side won.

The kind of republic the volunteers sought was a prototype of what the Soviet Union created at the end of World War II, when it built “people’s democracies” in Central and Eastern Europe — governments with a democratic façade. In reality, they were pro-Soviet regimes in which the local communist parties, beholden to Stalin, carried out the dictator’s policies and goals. If the Spanish Civil War was, as the left’s defenders claim, a rehearsal for the coming world war, to the Comintern it was a rehearsal and a test of how to impose Soviet control on nations that would fall into the Soviet orbit. Had the Republic not fallen, the communists would have succeeded in creating the first such “People’s Democracy” in Spain.

The contributors to “Facing Fascism” might have read what historian Tony Judt has to say about the Brigades. “They went to fight fascism, which in some measure they did,” Mr. Judt writes. “But they were duped. They were the fodder for the projects of the communist ‘advisers.'” The Batallion’s volunteers, moreover, “were sublimely ignorant of the uses to which their communist leaders were going to put them.” That purpose was “the struggle within the left, against the anarchists, and especially … the POUM [the Spanish Workers Party of Marxist Unification].” The goal was the Sovietization of the country, an experiment that would be perfected in postwar Eastern Europe. It was, for Stalin, the “first, tentative experiment in the seizure of power abroad.”

The great scholar of the Spanish Civil War, the late Burnett Bolloten, showed in his many writings that the Spanish government controlled by the Soviets in 1937 was ready to obliterate “all vestiges of democracy, all freedom of speech and assembly, all local freedoms and self-government, and all manifestations of the popular revolution.” What it planned was nothing less than the derailing of “that popular revolution and [turning it] into a totalitarian police state.” Enrique Castro, a member of the Party’s central committee and commander of the 5th regiment, told the troops to “become another Soviet Republic in an area of great importance to communism.”

For historical balance, the museum might have included Sam Tanenhaus’s 2001 Vanity Fair essay “Innocents Abroad” in their catalog. Mr. Tanenhaus carefully lays out the “shadow story” hidden from the new generation. He tells of how Moscow regularly sent lists of “unreliables” to be taken care of by the commissars, how batallion members secretly working for the Soviet-installed secret police in the Republic removed “troublesome recruits, some of whom are never heard from again,” and how the volunteers were “a rigidly controlled Soviet operation … incompetently led, ill-trained, minimally equipped.” He knows that recently uncovered Soviet documents reveal great “internal dissension and distrust” among the soldiers, and how “ideology distorted battlefield operations.”

The contributors to this exhibit see the Republican cause as a simple one of putting into practice anti-fascism, at a moment in history when Hitler was taking total control in Germany and Mussolini was imposing his Fascist regime in Italy. Mike Wallace writes in the catalog “of multinational opposition to fascism” as Italian, Jewish, and black New Yorkers created a “cross-cultural solidarity campaigns in support of the Spanish Republic.” The curator and editor of the collection, Peter Carroll, further explains that in today’s world, where generations were raised on Cold War “rhetoric,” the time has come to grasp for “complexities and nuances of the years leading up to World War II.”

Nuance is precisely what “Facing Fascism” lacks. Take, for example, the nature of their purported “anti-fascism.” The Brigades are repeatedly described as volunteers from all political points of view on the left: communists, socialists, anarchists, and “unaffiliated volunteers,” all united in fighting against the fascist threat. One looks in vain for the impact of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which was in effect between August 1939 and June 1941, before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Did the “anti-fascist” vets keep up their calls for intervention to stop Hitler’s pending aggression in Europe, after Stalin declared that only imperialist Britain and America sought war and that one could have good relations with Nazi Germany? (As Vyacheslav Molotov put it, “Fascism is a matter of taste.”) In other words, how solid was the Republicans’ guise of primarily being anti-fascists, not communists who followed the party line?

You won’t find answers to these questions in “Facing Fascism.” Indeed, you will have to look hard to even find references to the pact. You would expect that those brave soldiers who fought against fascism in Spain would continually keep up the pressure until America moved against Hitler. You would expect the authors to say something, since as Justin Byrne writes in his essay, “Marxism [gave] to those in and close to the [Communist] Party … a profound sense of internationalism … the connections between the local and the global.” That is why they felt sustained, upon returning home, by the “broad anti-fascist movement” they helped create.

Alan Wald writes at some length about a well-known brigade veteran, Milton Wolff, who later became its unofficial historian. Mr. Wald tells us Wolff, the last commander of the Lincoln troops, was a man who “discovered a talent for speaking.” But Mr. Wald, who knows the truth better than he acknowledges in his essay, neglects to mention the speech Wolff gave to the Lincoln vets’ convention in 1941, two years after the pact was signed, but before it expired. It is worth excerpting to get the flavor of his remarks:

Under the dishonest slogan of anti-fascism, [President Roosevelt] prepares the red-baiting, unionbusting, alien-hunting, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic Jingoistic road to fascism in America … he drags the American people … closer and closer to open participation in the imperialist slaughter in which the youth of our country will, if he has his way, join the … bloody and bloated corpses on the battlefields the world over; for the greater glory of foreign trade and the brutal oppression of free people at home and abroad; we accuse him, Franklin Demagogue Roosevelt. … We fight against the involvement of our country in an imperialist war. … We stubbornly oppose every move of Roosevelt and the war-mongers.

There were a very small number of Brigade vets who refused to give their support to the Pact.

One veteran who did not toe the line was my friend, the late William Herrick. Previously written out of other Lincoln anthologies, he received some attention this time from the contributors, but they only us that Herrick, after being seriously wounded in battle, “became sympathetic to the ideas of the POUM and the anarchists,” and that “he believed that he was fired in 1939 [from a CP-controlled union] because of his opposition to the Hitler-Stalin Pact.” The catalog further informs us that Herrick was one of the “dissenters who cooperated with government authorities in 1939–40 to name Communists within the Lincoln Brigade” and that he went on to “testify against their former comrades.” This bit of information, of course, is meant to discredit anything he had to say.

In his beautifully crafted memoir, “Jumping the Line” (1998), Herrick put what they did in Spain in simple but strong words: “Yes, we went to Spain to fight fascism, but democracy was not our aim.” Herrick learned the truth the hard way. Injured in battle, he was forced by the Party commissars to participate in the execution of young revolutionary anarchists, a scene he revisited in his brilliant novel, “Hermanos!” (1969). He saw some of the most brave of his comrades, such as Marvin Stern, taken away by commissars and never seen again. Herrick made the mistake of refusing to fight in a battle he knew was a call to slaughter. He began to have doubts when he heard the batallion’s hero, the Stalinist apparatchik known as La Pasionaria, aka Dolores Ibárruri, proclaim that it was better to sacrifice a thousand innocent people than allow one Trotskyist to live. The commissars forced Herrick to witness the brutal execution of POUMist youth, including a young girl, who went to her death with a bullet in the back of her head, screaming, “Viva la revolución!” When he spoke to one of my classes at Adelphi University in the 1990s, Herrick seemed to relive the events in front of us. “They were your age,” he said in tears. “I watched them being murdered.”

So many, in past years, have had the courage to re-evaluate and tell the real story of the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War. At the time of the war, the anarchist militant Abad de Santillán put it this way, “Whether Negrin won with his communist cohorts, or Franco won with his Italians and Germans, the results would be the same for us.” Red Spain and White Franco Spain were mirror images of each other — leaders of both labeled the opposition as traitors to the cause, and used ruthless means to eliminate them. Louis Araquistain, a left-wing Marxist in the Popular Front government of Largo Caballero, agreed. Writing to his daughter in January 1939, Araquistain said, “Whether we win or lose the war, the independent socialists will have to emigrate, because we shall be assassinated by Franco or the Communists.”

In this catalog and exhibition, the fairy tales of the old left once again take hold as the tenured radicals of academia advance their campaign to resurrect myths with a public exhibit. Perhaps in the heat and fire of the 1930s, holding to myths was excusable. In the 21st century, however, when they have long since been exposed, those who perpetuate them are either charlatans or fools.

Mr. Radosh, a professor emeritus of history at CUNY and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, is co-author of “Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War” (2000).