 And, Frank, you're going to introduce our next testifier. Okay, thanks Eric. And I want to introduce my friend, Carl Boggs. He's written 25 books, 10 on the topic of US imperialism and militarism. That includes most most recently origin origins of the warfare state, and the Hollywood War machine. He has been involved with anti-war movement activities since the 1960s, and was purged from his job as professor at Washington University in St. Louis, because of his anti-war work. Carl has been a regular contributor to counterpunch since 1995. I've been reading his latest book, Facing her task, it's really very heavy book, and I want to introduce Carl Boggs. Thank you so much Frank. Thanks. Thanks so much. Can everybody hear me? Yeah, yes. Good. I'm so honored to be a part of this wonderful event. And I want to thank Frank and Rachel and Code Pink and everybody else involved. I think it would be a very good idea, in fact, to have something like this on a regular basis. I was just thinking, just sitting here, I was just thinking about the fact that it's been 55 years or 50, 55, something like that. Years since I first got involved in anti-war activity, fighting US militarism and imperialism, fighting the war in Vietnam. I was one of the student organizers for the Vietnam Day Committee in the spring of 1965 at UC Berkeley. And I believe it was one of, if not the first, one of the first major protests against the war in Vietnam. And I was very much involved in organizing that. It was right after the free speech movement in Berkeley. And then after that I wound up going to Washington University in St. Louis where there was a very, very intense anti-war movement. Our turnouts were thousands and thousands of people every single day for weeks and months and a couple of years. We burned down two ROTC buildings. The FBI infiltrated extensively. And after a couple of years working at Washington University, I realized that one of my research assistants was an FBI informant. And then one thing led to another and I was eventually just purged from the place. I was blacklisted. Basically my job was finished, my career was finished, and I was blacklisted by the mid to late 70s. And the corporate interests that ran the university included McDonald Douglas, Monsanto, and a couple of others. So you can imagine the obstacles to doing anti-war movement there were considerable. I set up a very historic project called McDonald Douglas Anti-Corporate Project. And it was an attempt, one of the few I think in the country to merge a working class struggles with anti-war struggles. And that lasted for a few years and then again, the university eventually put a crush on that. I wanted to just mention a number of people have mentioned the issue of racism in US foreign policy. And I thought about the fact that in the last over a century, the United States has done pretty much everything in its power to destroy six Asian countries. It hasn't completely succeeded, but not for not for trying the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. You know, the element of racism in this was very, very intense. John Dower, an historian, wrote a book War Without Mercy talked about how the war in the Pacific was considerably more racist than the war in Europe. And in fact, at one point, this is before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, under the direction of Curtis from a the United States Air Force obliterated 66 German Japanese cities using incendiary weapons, napalm, and all sorts of other devices that were basically anti personnel weapons. So that was the lead up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, basically, every major city in Japan was annihilated. And that same modus operandi was carried forward into Korea. We're at one point in time. In fact, President Truman was actually considering the use of thermonuclear weapons there. What's interesting there and I was going to talk a little bit about the nuclear complex. And of course, that being part of the way in which the American power structure is able to establish its hegemony and maintain its hegemony and use its leverage worldwide because the whole issue of, you know, the war economy, the permanent war economy and the empire of bases and so forth is solidified and magnified by the fact that there's the presence of such weapons of mass destruction. But what I've argued and I've written about this before is that there are actually five different types of weapons of mass destruction. And the United States, of course, is the only country to have used them all, obviously nuclear weapons in Japan, chemical weapons, chemical weapons, very extensively in the case of Vietnam and Indochina. And then in addition to that, what's not very widely known is that biological warfare was introduced in Korea, and it was not very successful but it was used by the United States in Korea. And two other weapons of mass destruction, one of which I just mentioned, was what I would call aerial terrorism, that is to say saturation bombing of large cities with the intent of basically leveling them and destroying, you know, the civilian population there. That would have to be considered a weapon of mass destruction. And then the fifth, which the United States is used very liberally and very extensively over the last basically nearly a century is economic sanctions, the worst of course being what the Clinton administration did against Iraq, killing upwards of a half a million people, mostly children in the 1990s. So the United States, not only has conducted very extensively, you know, forms of racist warfare in the Pacific and elsewhere but has conducted these forms of weapons of mass destruction throughout. And again, I think it's worth, because a lot of times people just think, when they think of WMD they think in terms of, they think in terms of nuclear weapons and that maybe about it, but there are only five different types in the United States is relied upon those, many of them fairly extensively, especially aerial terrorism, and economic sanctions. I wanted to basically talk a little bit about the degree to which the nuclear complex fits so centrally into the American power structure. Today, the American power structure is not only the most powerful, the most globalized, but also the most threatening power that I believe in the history of the world, and the, the development of nuclear, the nuclear complex and nuclear power fits very centrally with within that. So what the United States has done against the statutes of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT is to continue the modernization of nuclear weaponry labs, facilities, deployments, subs, planes, bomb types, tactical nuclear weapons, networks in the field, there's an extensive US nuclear deployment in Europe, some commentators have mentioned, and that is continuing and is expanding right now. So that is the process of modernization, which is earmarked really to cost about a trillion dollars over the next three decades is ongoing with the United States, that's an opposite that's in violation of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, because the treaty basically injunction has an injunction that states that, you know, all nuclear states should move towards disarmament. And of course, the United States is moving in just the opposite direction. What I wanted to just point out here is that I think at this point in time. We are at a point where I think the threat of global nuclear catastrophe is probably as great as not greater than any point in recent history and I think that's the case for at least four reasons. One, is this process of modernization. The process of modernization here, of course, inspires the process of modernization and Russia and China and elsewhere, which feeds into the nuclear arms races which we continue to have. Even though the number of nuclear warheads is far less than what it was at the peak of the Cold War, where we had 10s and 10s of thousands. Now there's globally maybe 1516,000 warheads. And it is that the warheads that exist are much more powerful, much more accurate, and much more efficient than the earlier warheads so it's misleading to think that there's been some sort of reduction and overall nuclear power available in the world. The threat of the accidental war is also much greater at this point in time, owing to the possibilities of computer malfunction, faulty intelligence, power failures, human error, cyber warfare, all these things have I think exacerbated the threat of accidental nuclear war. We know and I think I think that it's pointed out in Dan Ellsberg's book that I think we've had six episodes just since the early 1980s of near, near nuclear war coming from this kind of accidental situation. Third, we see a mounting conflict between the United States and Russia with the US NATO push, you know, eastward with deployments near Russian borders and military exercises there, economic sanctions, ongoing threats. This has been a process at particularly intense since the 90s with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the attack on Serbia, then subsequent attacks on, you know, on involvement in Georgia and Ukraine, bringing the United States much closer to intense geopolitical conflict with Russia. That is continuing and of course what's exacerbated that is Russia Gates, which has produced a new Cold War between the United States and Russia. And now we have a situation where the two nuclear powers are facing off against each other under the most tense of conditions. We know also, and Eric man mentioned this and some others have mentioned it as well. We know that one of the neocon objectives is to target Russia, hoping to isolate and weaken the country, if not very basically carry out some form of regime change. The only regime change is basically on the agenda here as far as neo cons are concerned. I would say a fifth problem contributing to the possible intensification of, or the possible increasing threat of thermonuclear war is the problem of nuclear proliferation. And that is not anything that the United States or any country really presently has done much to correct. So I would argue that the political alternative here is a given the present threat that we face. The only, the only solution is some sort of radical move towards full scale nuclear disarmament consistent with the dictates of the national the NPT. That should be a prevailing goal of humanity. Unfortunately, it is the American power structure described above that remains the biggest impediment to such historic moves. And insane and immoral US foreign policy must be changed, and very soon. And I think the fact that we see these recent moves towards the demonization, or we should say the further demonization of Russia and Putin, and not exactly contributing to this process. And I just make one final comment. I think it's really a sad commentary to think to agree to which many, many progressives and many leftists sort of bought into the demonization process. It's not really helping the cause of peace, it's only helping the cause of war. So, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Carl. Very important testimony. We're going to have more on Cold War and the environment at the end of the program in the chat and a little bit live.