Why Fascism Got So Far : UNDER THE SHADOW OF WAR <i> Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Marxists, 1918-1939 by Larry Ceplair (Columbia University Press: $30; 261 pp.) </i>

“Under the Shadow of War: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Marxists, 1918-1939” surveys the history in Europe and America of the attempts to counter fascist movements and regimes, paying particular attention to the role of the Communist and Marxist left.

Larry Ceplair writes about several countries and a bewildering complex of movements and splinter groups and ideologies, with an eye to finding out how anti-fascist groups perceived the nature and threat of fascism, and what they did to organize and oppose it. He emphasizes that, while fascism was a galvanizing movement, its potential opponents were split among themselves and rent by conflicting claims.

Ceplair judges movements of the left especially by how clearly they saw and how effectively they countered the menace of fascism. And in this he finds them wanting. He is especially hard on the Soviet Union and its notoriously brutal and uneven stewardship of an international revolutionary movement.

Fascism was the reactionary shadow movement of the legitimate aims of the left. But this Coney Island mirror image of progressive social change succeeded in imposing itself, while the social democratic and moderate elements did not.

Ceplair has written a sound critical account of the anti-fascist movement. He traces the various errors and the twists and turns of a very unhappy history, of shortsighted bungling and moral confusion, political failure and wrong-headed conflict, although his tone is restrained and, on the whole, non-judgmental. It was generally acknowledged that fascism was a common enemy and must be collectively opposed. The questions were only: when, by whom, and on whose terms. The answers, Ceplair reminds us, were: too late, by everyone, and on the fascist terms of war. He is alert to the roots of this fateful failure in personality, nationalism, factionalism and ideology.

“Under the Shadow of War” conveys the deepening confusion into which fascism’s opportunism and unscrupulousness threw its ideologically overdetermined opponents. Ceplair writes clearly, and he has done an impressive job of keeping a confusing story within bounds. The more you know about the period, the more it may help to follow this story. Ceplair’s story is indeed worth following, and the background it requires verges on the background required for responsible citizenship.

Ceplair concludes that the “moral shallowness” of the democratic governments, the divisions of the left and the Russian, Stalinist grip on communism together contributed to the disappointing showing of anti-fascism. Even after Spain, a really united front could not be achieved. The West left Europe’s Jews (and gays, Gypsies and other groups, Ceplair neglects to add) to their horrific fate, while the Marxists “failed to find a way to use anti-Fascism effectively, to create from it a force to counteract the course of events and decisions leading towards war.” Ceplair assumes that fascism was the test of the times and quotes his anti-fascists as knowing that. Their failures, of course, are clearer than the alternatives. Fascism, not incidentally, was a false messiah in an activist, revolution-minded, troubled time. The social democrat and the Marxist may not, in fact, have been able to make common cause, short of war, for reasons that Hannah Arendt teaches in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Fascism seems to us--and Ceplair shows it did to its contemporaries--so fundamentally menacing that it seems astounding and shameful that more people would not put aside other differences in the face of it. But it is hard to put everything else aside to fight one evil, until that evil makes itself inescapably plain even to the unpoliticized majority. The attraction of fascism for its followers underscores its ironic lesson for its opponents. It is easier to resemble the evil in fighting against it than to resist it in oneself while opposing it in the enemy.

Many readers will find in this book a guide to how not to repeat the failures of the anti-fascist movement. The question is whether that history, told as Ceplair tells it, can help one recognize those times when the complexity and variety of motives and interests must be sacrificed to a common purpose. The menace fascism represents probably will not appear again in the same guise. It will be hard to recognize short of its horrible invitation to war, which it craves and which it needs.

One clue may be what fascism must do to bring about its desired war: It must distress and subvert pluralism, democracy, civil liberties, and tolerance and demand that public life instantly redeem “timeless” values.

The first thing anti-fascism failed to protect was individual freedom, in each of its countries, in all of its forms. “Under the Shadow of War” suggests that fascism cannot tolerate peace and civil liberty and that the fascist-like threats in any period can be recognized by their wish to obliterate the diversity and occasional disorder that flourish in free regimes. Challenges to free institutions and the movement for social change have already surfaced and will again.