"And then there was the period between August 23, 1939 and June 22, 1941... Which one of the Hollywood Ten was it who wrote _Johnny Got His Gun_ as part of a campaign organized from Moscow Center to try to keep the U.S. from aiding Britain against Hitler?"
That specific libel is refuted in this week's issue of The Nation, which reprinted Dalton Trumbo's private correspondence with Murray Kempton. In fact, Brad's contemptible use of "Moscow Center" is even more odious than the Cold War liberals' false accusation, pandering as it does to the anticommunist group libel that has run uninterruptedly from the A. Mitchell Palmer era through the likes of George Will.
Communists who opposed both the Third Period and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact from within, such as Georg Lukacs (author of the premature-PopFront "Blum Theses"), defended their affiliation by stating that only the Communists provided effective opposition to fascism at that time, and that those Marxists who sought to do so outside, such as Karl Korsch, were marginalized in that respect. Even Leon Trotsky, who opposed both of these maneuvers from the outside, warned his followers not to accuse Stalinists of capitulation (he even proposed that the SWP endorse CP candidate Earl Browder for president in 1940), viewing both as mistaken tactical maneuvers in the run-up to the inevitable collision with fascism, to which the Stalinists above all were committed, Trotsky said. I'm eager to learn which of Brad's anticommunist heroes distinguished her/himself as an effective antifascist fighter in the 1930s.
Ken Lawrence