 A portion that talks about right wing religion in this country and Frank is going to introduce that. Okay, Peter McLaren is a professor of education and critical studies at Chapman University here in Southern California. He is the author of many books on the topic of critical pedagogy pedagogy and revolutionary politics, including the recent critical pedagogy and insurrection. Peter, are you there? I'm there. Yeah, can you hear me? All right. Okay. All right, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thanks to Frank and Rachel and to Code Pink and everyone who made this really amazing and important event possible. I'm going to be speaking primarily about liberation theology, its birth and the historical assault on liberation theology. Recognizing the historical alliances that the church had made with colonial powers and empires of pillage and plunder. Pope John Paul the 23rd through the 1962 actually to 65 Second Vatican Second Vatican Council attempted to reclaim the early roots of the church. The first 300 years before it was recognized by its critics as the persecuting church that had among other things infamously ignited the crusades in the Spanish inquisition and was complicit in helping Nazis escape to Latin America after World War two. In the conference of Latin American bishops that was held in 1968 in Medellin, Columbia, marked the beginning of a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, as it began to arc somewhat towards the left. It was here that bishops from all over Latin America agreed that the church should take a specific stand which which they call the preferential option for the poor, while developing a catechism of liberation undergirded by the gospel teachings of Jesus so that the poor could in effect liberate themselves from the institutionalized violence of poverty and capitalist exploitation. It must be that underlay liberation theology one that combined Christianity with a Marxist critique of political economy had been drawn up at a meeting of Latin American theologians initiated by Gustavo Gutierrez and Rio de Janeiro Brazil in 1964. After Bishop held their camera, who was famous for stating when I give food to the poor they call me a saint but when I ask why they are poor they call me a communist. He led 40 bishops late at night into the catacombs of Dolmatilia outside of Rome. And after celebrating the Eucharist they signed a document under the title, the pact of the catacombs, challenging others and others to live lives of poverty and to dedicate themselves to serving the two thirds of humanity who live in poverty. So liberation theology became a powerful movement for social justice within the Catholic church throughout the 1970s and 1980s and brushing against the grain of traditional Catholic catechesis. For decades the Catholic church had been extremely adverse to social justice movements involving members of its ecclesiastical ranks, often associating such movements with communism. And this was made clear as early as the anti-communist encyclical, Divini Redemptorus, written by Pope Pius XI in 1937, that formalized the Vatican's inevitable opposition against left wing social movements, such as Dorothy Day's famous Catholic worker movement. Now ironically, today, Dorothy Day has been named a servant of God by the Vatican and seems destined for sainthood. The persecution of priests who supported liberation theology became rampant in countries such as Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras and Nicaragua. A storied educator, Paolo Fredi, a Catholic was thrown into prison in June 1964 for his support of teaching campesino communities through the practice of what came to be known as a pedagogy of the oppressed. Father Ernesto Cardinal, the Nicaraguan priest and poet who became the Sandinista minister of culture, famously remarked, for me, the four Gospels are all equally communist. I'm a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom. It was interesting because I once sat beside Father Cardinal on Hugo Chavez's TV show, A Lo Presidente in Caracas, with what an amazing experience that was. But that's for another time. Liberation theology gained international attention after the government assassination of six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper and their daughter on the 16th of November 1989 on the campus of the Central American University in San Salvador, El Salvador. These Jesuit priests were shot dead by soldiers because they had pushed for negotiations between the government and left wing radicals. And prior to these horrific murders which, you know, made international headlines, the now canonized Archbishop Oscar Romero had been assassinated in 1980, while offering mass in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence after famously speaking out against poverty, social injustice and torture and urging President Jimmy Carter to stop sending helicopter gunships to assist the Salvadorian military. Pope John Paul II was very much opposed to communism obviously and he considered liberation theology a dangerous development within the church. In the late 1970s, shortly after he was elected pope, he began to oppose liberation theology directly, and the church hierarchy moved decidedly to the right. It's been written that he gave cameo public endorsements for military dictatorships during visits to Argentina in 1982 and Chile in 1987. Early in the history of liberation theology, one of its most virulent opponents in North America, of course, was Ronald Reagan, who was intent on its utter destruction. As Noam Chantsky explains, and I quote the United States not content to sit back and watch an openly Marxist theology take hold in Latin America. A theology which threatened the US's economic and military domination of the region quickly moved to wipe out this emerging movement through violence. It did this through its strategic and logistical support of military dictatorships and its training of their death squads in the School of the Americas and Fort Benning, Georgia. As early as 1969 the Rockefeller report identified liberation theology as a threat to the corporate interest in the security in the United States. The plan Destine operation condor was put in place operation condor was a major plan of inter service and regional cooperation, and a sharing of joint intelligence among the US, and the right wing dictatorships of the southern of South America including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil in order to maintain an intelligence sharing program of state terror and political repression. Well the program actually began in 1968, but was fully implemented by 1975 and was responsible for as many or more than 60,000 deaths up until 1989. In Argentina alone over 150 priests and nuns were killed, along with peasants workers intellectuals and anyone associated with being part of or sympathetic towards leftist guerrilla movements or liberation theology. A large can be traced to the infamous School of the Americas of course renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for security cooperation, because of its historical association with the training of Latin American death squads was created to advance joint counter insurgency operations designed to eradicate communist observes and ideas to suppress the influence of liberation theology and other oppositional political and or ideological positions. In the Central Intelligence 80 agency the military and the State Department, the US government helped to bring military dictatorships to power and secure their stability by imposing sanctions designed to destabilize the economies of socialist leaning regimes and by supporting and training quote black op and execution squads. While the USA was not an official member of the condor consortium documents that were later uncovered revealed that during this time the United States provided major organizational financial and technical assistance to repressive regimes involved. The secret papers of the 17th conference of the American armies and Mar del Plata in 1987 revealed that the US military initiated numerous discussions about how to wage socio psychological warfare against liberation theology. The ecclesial and base communities through low intensity conflict strategies using misinformation and ideological subversion. So I agree with Norm Chomsky, who says that the US is often been bitterly opposed to Christianity and describes the attacks on liberation theology by the US administration as quote the first religious war of the 21st century. And I want to conclude, after the election of Reagan the Christian right became a dominant force in the Republican Party of course, and in American politics in general is Jerry Falwell and Christian leaders supported the evangelistic, the evangelization of Latin America. Jerry Falwell said I want you guys to get involved in politics and do missionary work in Latin America to counter left wing Catholic teachers that was one of a number of their, their goals. And during the 1980s, we see an amplification of course of anti communism and the organizations, such as the more majority, the religious roundtable focus on the family free Congress foundation, the heritage foundation, and the Christian broadcasting network. They, thank you Peter for that very, very important testimony, it will be definitely put into the record. And I want to just say thank you, Peter for for calling out or sounding out Gustavo Gutierrez, I was a university student in Peru at La Catolica in the late 80s, and he was a professor there and it was, everyone knew it was very special. So, everyone knew him. So, thank you. I want to just alert everyone, I think, pretty soon in the chat, you're going to be getting the agenda again. But if you want to if you care if you're just sitting back and watching great. But I just want to let you know a couple of changes that will shorten the program on on this page. One, Reverend Steve Wilson, he's my minister from Unitarian Pacific Unitarian Church, wonderful minister he has foregone his testimony he's going to put it into the record. Lots of you use out there, all these years being persecuted. We're going to have Gail Walker up next but before I introduce her, we are also going to move. John and I told you in the chat, and we're his wonderful. So John Henke not only filmed a testimony he's made sort of a mini movie. So it's fabulous and you want to see it because he goes into the kind of deep, I want to say spiritual and ethical reasons for all of this it's quite good. So, I'm going to go to Dr. Condon, one of our vets for peace has is going to submit his testimony into the record, and then the youth voices will be up after Gail Walker.