An-tee-fa? MY Dad in 1945:

[struggle4progress]

21. The term seems to have a persistent connection to the Spanish civil war volunteers:

ALB volunteer Milt Wolff started (but may not have finished) "The Premature Antifascist"

ALB volunteer George Cullinen wrote "Wild Grapes and Rattlesnakes: The Memoirs of a Premature Anti-Fascist"

Several university libraries have in their rare ephemera collections indications of a VALB "40th Anniversary Banquet, Honoring the Premature Anti-Fascist Women" in 1979

The article "Premature Anti-Fascist" by Bernard Knox, another Spanish civil war volunteer, is widely available on the web:

'I first heard the .. phrase .. in 1946 ... The Professor ... was very interested ... I explained that, in July 1944, I had parachuted, in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces ... I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XIth International Brigade. "Oh," he said, "You were a premature anti-Fascist"'

Knox asserts:

'"Premature Anti-Fascist" was an FBI code-word for "Communist." It was the label affixed to the dossiers of those Americans who had fought in the Brigades when, after Pearl Harbor (and some of them before) they enlisted in the US Army. It was the signal to assign them to non-combat units or inactive fronts'

But perhaps the professor's comment merely reflects a familiarity with the vagaries of party-line politics rather than actual wide-spread use of such a term in the US. And Knox's interpretation seems inconsistent with his naturalization as a US citizen in 1943, his subsequent military assignment, and his long career in the US afterwards

Manfred Stern, the original commander of the XIth International Brigade, on the other hand, seems meanwhile to have been recalled to Moscow and imprisoned in 1939, dying in a labor camp in Sosnovka a few months before the end of his fifteen year sentence. During the time between the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Stern would have been nothing but an inconvenience to Stalin and so disappeared permanently

As the Trotskyites of Young People's Socialist League (4th International) sang in their 1940 lampoon: "Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling party line! Oh, I never will desert you cause I love this life of mine." The Stalinists, of course, succeeded in assassinating Trotsky not long afterwards