 And, um, Frank, I just want to let people know. So, um, Frank, we have, uh, one more, uh, testimony, uh, Joel Andreas. Frank will be introducing, um, this piece and I'm going to introduce Nadia Williams, who will speak on Indonesia or she, just a five minute video clip. And then afterwards we will go back to the two we passed over great, great, uh, testimonies. Ed Rumpel will be speaking, um, on HUAC and, uh, the Hollywood 10 and, and, and all of that. And John Hankey has his kind of epic, but 10 minute, um, film and that will close us or, you know, get us to the end of our formal program. Take it away, Frank. All right, Rachel. Hey, that, that last reader is pretty good. Pretty darn good. It was how to smart mother. Yeah. Smart. She does. Smart mother. All right. And, uh, also thank you, Brian Wilson. Now I'm going to be, um, introducing, uh, tape, uh, tape, uh, recorded talk by my friend Joel Andreas, the author of Addictive War. Um, Joel has been active in the anti-war movement since he was a kid during the Vietnam War. He's written and illustrated two, uh, comic books exposing U.S. militarism. The first, when he was 17 in high school, he wrote and drew the incredible Rocky, uh, focused on the role of the Rockefeller family and, uh, brilliant, by the way. And the second is, of course, Addictive War while the U.S. can't get militarism, uh, which recounts history of U.S. foreign wars and is the book I published, the one book I published along with A.K. Press, and it's a really well known and popular in the anti-war movement. Um, in 2002, we printed 20,000 copies of Addictive War. And, uh, since then, we've distributed close to 240,000 copies in English. It's now 13 of their languages and it's being used, um, in high schools and colleges over the country. Many of the people that spoke, they endorsed that book and love the book. So, um, let's see, we're over here. Oh, and Joel is a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He's my friend and now roll the tape on what Joel recorded. Frank, Emily, and Medea for organizing this very important conference and for inviting me to speak. I'd like to start with a proposition. Someday, aerial bombardment will be seen by the world as a war cry and will be outlawed by international convention. I'm not just talking about nuclear weapons or chemical weapons or napalm or white phosphorus bombs. I'm talking about all bombardment of villages and cities from the air. The reason aerial bombardment should be a war crime is because it's inherently causes huge numbers of civilian casualties. It's the main reason that civilian casualties have skyrocketed in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is, of course, going to be very difficult to criminalize aerial bombardment. Over the past seven decades, it's become the main way that the US wages war mainstream politicians and the news media presented as normal, but we can never accept it as normal. Air bombardment was first widely employed in the first world war. From those early years, starting in those first early years, the targets were not only military, but also civilian. The goal was to destroy the enemy's infrastructure for industrial production and transportation. But the explicit purpose was also to terrorize the civilian population in order to undermine its morale. For this purpose, early on, military planes were deployed on carpet bombing missions of cities and villages. The military strategists who invented this kind of bombing called it, quote, morale bombing or quote, terror bombing. Eventually, they stopped using these terms and use a less provocative term for strategic bombing, but the purpose remained the same, to terrorize and undermine the morale of the civilian population. Between the world wars, aerial bombardment was employed by the great imperial powers to subdue insurrection in their colonies. But what we might call the global era of aerial bombardment began with the Second World War and it became institutionalized during the Cold War. During the Second World War, all the major contending powers built fleets of bombers, which were used to destroy entire cities. The US developed the most powerful fleets of bombers and bombs and used them to great effect. First, with the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, and then finally with horrendous nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This barbaric act can be seen as the beginning of the Cold War. The strategic purpose of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to assure that Japan surrendered to the US and not to the Soviet Union. During the ensuing Cold War decades, aerial bombardment became the decisive means of waging war, especially by the United States. Both the US and the Soviet Union built up huge nuclear arsenals. Fortunately, they never have used them. Not a single bomb actually landed on the soil of either of the two superpowers. Instead, the bombs landed on the territories that each of the superpowers were seeking to dominate. The people who suffered the most were those targeted by the United States. In the Korean War, the US Air Force virtually leveled the cities of North Korea. The same strategy was used in Vietnam. The so-called Air War caused horrendous destruction and loss of life. The US has continued to use the same strategy in first in the Gulf War, then in the Afghan War, and then in the Iraq War. And they continue to use it throughout the Middle East, as well as in many, many smaller wars over the past seven decades. Area bombardment has several key characteristics. First, as I've noted, it causes large numbers of civilian casualties. Second, it relies on technology only possessed by the wealthy imperialist countries. It creates a one-sided type of warfare. Third, it facilitates the projection of power to distant locations in a way that land-based armies and even naval forces cannot. Fourth, it minimizes military casualties on the attacker's side while maximizing the number of civilian casualties. Only the lives of a few pilots on the attacker's side are put at risk. In conventional land-based warfare, the attacker loses large numbers of soldiers. As US authorities learned during the Vietnam War, these deaths can turn the domestic population against the war. That's one of the great advantages of area warfare, is that it does not spur as much opposition at home. All of these characteristics have made it possible to wage endless wars. The recent development of drone warfare has taken aerial bombardment to a new extreme. It goes even farther in minimizing military casualties on the attacker's side, not even pilots are put at risk. It's even easier to deploy drones, and therefore, it facilitates endless war. Over the past seven decades, since the Cold War began, the US has made aerial bombardment of people in other countries an integral part of the contemporary world order. It's been bombing people in the Middle East with regularity for the past three decades. It started with the Gulf War in 1991 under George Bush. It continued under Clinton and under the Second Bush and under Obama, under Trump, and now under Biden. The most recent bombing mission took place only three weeks ago on the Sierra Deere Rock border. US planes and drones raining down bombs on people halfway across the world has become normalized. It's now presented by government officials and by the press as business as usual. The fact that aerial bombardment has become business as usual says something about the brutality of the current world order. It's a world order under US military and hegemony. The US sets the rules of war, the practical rules of war, and under its rules, aerial bombardment has become normal. As I noted, mainstream politicians and news media presented it this way, but we can never accept it as normal just because they do. We have to step outside the current conceptions of normalcy and legitimacy. We should remember that plantation slavery was also seen as normal in this country at one time. The abolitionists, opponents of slavery were seen as extremists that were advancing or who were advancing at a utopian agenda. I'm certain that there will come a time when people look back and see killing and maiming civilians by raining down munitions on cities and villages from thousands of feet in the air as a practice just as barbaric as plantation slavery. Although the US continues to dominate the globe militarily, the era of US economic and political hegemony is fading. As its economic and political power fades, it becomes more possible to imagine a future in which the US will no longer be able to set the rules of war. It's very possible that the legitimacy of aerial bombardment will end together with the end of US hegemony. We must do everything we can to make this happen. We must become the abolitionists of our era. And in this historic mission, those of us in the US are a particularly important responsibility. Thanks. Thank you Joel for that very important filmed testimony and for your amazing book used in so many schools and youth groups and adult groups around the country.