 Frank will be introducing our next speaker, giving testimony today. Hey, and I'll say hi to Michael Feinstein. I know my too. Our next speaker is Jeremy Kuzmerov. He's the managing editor of Covert Acts Magazine. He's written four books on US foreign policy, including the Russians are coming. Again, the first Cold War as tragedy, the second as far as with John Marciano. And I do wanna say also say hi to John, who was having some health issues, but John is a great guy, a friend of mine. And Jeremy, are you on? Yes, can you hear me? Yes. Oh, great. And yeah, this book may interest people. And yeah, unfortunately, John is in ill health as he was supposed to be here as well. But yeah, our book, the Russians are coming again. He has definitely written in the revisionist tradition that was being discussed before, and I think makes a very strong case and links the horrors of the first Cold War with the new Cold War. And I think we're living through the same paranoia. Actually, we start the book with the Academy Award when Phil 1966, which somebody may be aware of, the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, directed by Norman Jewison. Parodies this Cold War paranoia, then pervading the United States, depicting the chaos that seizes a small coastal New England town after a Soviet submarine runs aground. Half a century later, Americans are again, we thought were past that era, but for the last five years at least, we've been again, worn daily of the Russian menace with persistent accusations of Russian aggression, laws, violations of international law and cyber attacks on US elections as reported in leading supposedly liberal outlets like New York Times and Washington Post and CNN, among others. The charges are many relentless and include alleged poisoning assassinations, downties on US soldiers. Like all propaganda, there may be some grain of truth to some of the charges, but most of the allegations are unfounded and appear to be untrue. The consequences though have been severe. A new Gallup poll finds that just 22% of US citizens view Russia favorably, while 72% hold unfavorable views towards it, which is a huge difference from about 15 years ago when most Americans had a positive view of Russia at the end of the Cold War. Democrats troublingly hold particular hostility towards Russia with fewer than one in six telling Gallup they maintain positive opinions about the country as opposed to 25% of Republicans and 24% of independents. These totals indicate the high level of social conditioning whose end result could be war. And there's a parallel I think with World War I in the Woodrow Wilson orchestrated propaganda campaign against Germany, as well as in the first Cold War where social conditioning led to the fear about the Soviet Union that was greatly unfounded after World War II, especially in considering that the Soviet Russia had been devastated leading the charge against Nazi Germany and suffered 27 million casualties. Yet many Americans believe that Russia was gonna start a new war, which was totally fanciful given the context. But to understand I think the danger what we're facing, we are living through a very dangerous period in history right now with very reckless leadership and both parties, Evan and these recent statements of Joe Biden to understand the danger of the new Cold War is necessary to reexamine the original conflict between the United States and the USSR. The present Russia panic falls an entire century of fear mongering and threat inflation gained to the Russian Revolution that has long served the interests of the US military industrial complex and security state. It has little to do with either Russian or American realities which have been consistently distorted. Mikhail Gorbachev said that the Cold War, this was perhaps the best synopsis of the Cold War was given by Gorbachev, the Soviet Premier who said the Cold War made losers of us all. The losers included the people in Korea and Vietnam who died in the millions, third world countries which were destabilized. The losers included Americans with the militarization of the US political economy, the threat of nuclear war, environmental catastrophes bred by nuclear weapon development and abuses of civil liberties. As Carl Marzani in office of strategic services and state deployment employee described in his book, We Could Be Friend, it was a victim of McCarthyism. He said the Cold War threw the United States into semi hysteria and a manufactured war psychosis with dog tags on children, airplane spotters on 24-hour duty roads marked for quick evacuations, buildings designated as air raid shelters, air raid drills everywhere in street stores and schools. The Cold War also devasted, as we know, the whole communities of leftist organizers and union members from the McCarthyite witch hunts through the mass persecution of political radicals by US client states in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Few Americans today realized that it was the United States that first ignited these hostilities by invading Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The Woodrow Wilson administration sent 10,000 US troops from the European theater of the First World War alongside the British, French, Canadians and Japanese to aid the white general, counter-revolutionary generals, tied with the morally bankrupt Zara system who were implicated in wide-scale atrocities in this war, including perpetuating pogroms against Jews, which the Zara regime had perpetuated for decades before. Many Americans who fought were horrified by what they were doing just like in the Vietnam War. One Lieutenant Colonel Robert Eichlberger said, the atrocities of US allies would have been shameful in the Middle Ages. The memoirs you have US soldiers in this ill-fated mission were similar to memoirs of US soldiers in the Vietnam War. And yeah, I have one poem I could read in Russia's field modeled after the famous First World War poem, Flanders Field. In Russia's field, no poppies grow. There are no crosses row on row to mark the places where we lie. No larks so grayly singing fly as in the fields of Flanders. We are the dead. Not long ago, we fought beside you in the snow. And they were fighting in Siberia and gave our lives. And here we lie, though scarcely knowing reason why, like those who died in Flanders. And this war was carried out illegally without the consent of Congress and was opposed by the US Army commander of the troops in Siberia, General William S. Graves of Texan, who expressed doubt if history will record in the past century a more flagrant case of flouting the well-known and approved practice in states and their international relations and using instead of the accepted principles of international law, the principle of might makes right. Unfortunately, these events are hardly recorded in our history textbook. There was a book lie my teachers told me found that was rarely mentioned in any history textbook given to high school students. And if it was mentioned, it was mentioned in distorted way. The story D.F. Fleming, who wrote a good history of the Cold War, wrote that for the American people, the cosmic tragedy of the intervention in Russia does not exist or was an unimportant incident long forgotten. But for the Soviet people and their leaders, the period was a time of endless killing, looting and raping, a plague and famine, a measureless suffering for scores of millions and experience burns the very soul of the nation, not to be forgotten for many generations, if ever. Also for many years, the harsh Soviet regimentation could all be justified by fear that the capitalist power would be back to finish the job. It is not strange that an address in New York, September 17th, 1959, Premier Khrushchev should remind us of the intervention, the time you sent the troops to quell the revolution, as he put it. The Bolshevik drive, the main basis for this intervention was economic. The Bolshevik drive to nationalize industry and seize foreign assets was ideological and economic anathema to the US capitalist ruling elite. The US in 1917 held investments of over $658 million in Russia or at stake with the Russian revolution. The economic basis for opposing communism gets lost in much commentary about the history of the Cold War and most academic scholarship ignores it. But it's really central and I appreciate what Dan Ellsberg was discussing, the central role of lobbyists and special economic interests in driving forward these war scares and wars. After World War II, one of the key architects of the Cold War was W. Avril Harriman, who happened to be the mentor of Joe Biden when Joe Biden was first elected to the US Senate. Harriman was the son of E. H. Harriman when he had the original Robert Barons who made his fortune in the railroads and was a founder of the legendary Wall Street investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, which had German Nazi financiers as some of its clients. Also, most significantly for our purpose, Brown Brothers Harriman had considerable investments in zinc mines in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which were nationalized when the communists took over. This was the basis for Harriman's vendetta. He took the Bolshevik government to court. He got some settlement, but he lost millions of dollars when his mines were taken over by the Russian government and this fueled a lifelong hatred for communism by him and others in his class. Harriman served as US ambassador to Moscow at the end of World War II. According to FDR's son James Roosevelt, FDR was a strong leader as Peter's talk underscored. FDR was very smart visionary leader who stood up to anti-Russia hawks like Harriman in the State Department and promoted a peaceful policy towards Russia, evidence of the Alta Conference, which Henry Wallace was intent on continuing. However, due to those shenanigans, Peter described Wallace was removed from office and Harry Truman took over. Truman, as we know, was a provincial who was easily malleable and allowed Harriman and his associates and the aerospace industry to have free reign and the result was the Cold War. Harriman came to direct the Marshall Plan, one of whose main intentions was to isolate Russia and undermine communism in Europe. And Harriman later supported the Vietnam War as undersecretary of state under the Lyndon Johnson administration. The Cold War, as we know, orchestrated by Harriman and others in the big business in Wall Street were the primary drivers of this policy. This policy bred horrible human costs for humanity. Equivalent as pointed out to the genocide of the native Indians and African slave trade. The Korean war alone led to the deaths of one tenth of the North Korean population and biblical devastation in North Korea resulting from the U.S. bombing campaign. There was a Truth Commission in South Korea revealed that U.S. allies committed six times more atrocities than the North Koreans. It's pointed to horrible atrocities from torture to the strafing of refugees. Copious amounts of napalm were deployed. It was truly a horrific war. A germ warfare may have also been deployed and this foreshadowed the horrors of the Vietnam War. In fact, there's a new article in the New York Times magazine today about Laos and the residue of aging orange and the deformities of children. So, the human costs are just unconscionable in these wars and are felt generations later. And the Covert Action magazine was founded by Phil Agee who was CIA whistleblower who was aghast at the torture being promoted by U.S. clients and neo-Nazis in Latin America. And it exposed the crimes of the CIA from assassinations to sponsoring torture and death squad regimes around the world as well as things like drug testing on unwitting suspects as well as appears the murder of U.S. whistleblowers such as Dr. Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist who threatened to expose germ warfare program to the Korean War was thrown from the 10th floor of a hotel in Midtown Manhattan after being beaten to death by two CIA thugs. This story only came to light a few years ago. So, these crimes were all justified in the name of anti-communism and the Cold War and containing Russia. And we have to be wary about these kinds of excesses that will emerge today from the new Cold War. And let me end with two indicative quotes. One is by Linus Pauling. I was a brilliant scientist and Nobel Laureate who says in this underscores the tragedy of Henry Wallace and his removal from office. Paul said, who can say that this, that what the world would have been like if Henry Wallace had remained vice president in 1944. There's a possibility that he could have been successful in averting the Cold War. There might have been no American involvement in the war in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos. The military dictatorship sponsored by the U.S. in many countries might have not come into existence. Tens of thousands of people are now political prisoners. Israel in 1970 might have remained free. International treaties might have been made that would have saved the United States and Soviet Union hundreds of billions of dollars. We might have a better world today. And let me also read a quote from Bernard Gordon who was a reader for Paramount Pictures underscores the point of Gorbachev that the Cold War made loses of us all. Bernard Gordon, a reader for Paramount Pictures fired for his left-leaning views and author of Living Interesting Times or How I Learned to Love the Black List, told an interview in 1997 that, quote, most people think about the terrible personal effects of McCarthyism, the ruined careers and lifetimes, even the deaths of people who were affected, all true enough and not to be slighted. Others think of the fear, not only in gender and the entertainment industry in schools and universities and the press and the media, all true too. But my own sense goes beyond even that. I feel that the black period laid the groundwork much that followed the Nixon and Reagan regimes, which glorified the Cold War as a holy enterprise, which used the slogans of anti-communism to construct monstrous military machines that virtually bankrupted the country and placed the industrial military complex in such a powerful position that even today with the evil empire gone, there seems to be no way to stop the expenditures for arms and the export of arms. Eisenhower warned of this in his farewell address. But even beyond that, there's a sense that the convenient anti-communism has become anti-government with respect to all social programs that came out of the FDR era. The rich and powerful who grow more rich and powerful each day is blacklisting and McCarthyism to dismantle everything liberal to make liberalism a dirty word so that today both parties vie to be more reactionary. And these comments were made in 1997, but they're certainly prescient having lived through the Trump years and perhaps the tide is starting to turn a bit given disasters we've experienced. But I think those two comments should be heeded today as we're very clearly repeating the follies of the past and embarking on a new Cold War. And events like the webinar we're part of today are extremely important as we need to remember the first Cold War and its horrors and commemorate that history. Then we need to mobilize together inspired by the legacy of Henry Wallace and other Cold War dissenters to resist this new Cold War so that we might as Pauling suggested have a better world in the future. Thank you. Thank you, Jeremy.