 So our next, and it will be a short film, and I want to give a shout out to my partner, John Lackner, who has helped me make the couple of film clips that we have made. So a great sound man and film editor. And our next, our next testimony will be, and we have some pictures, some pictures that I think we're going to show as I'm giving the background on Mr. Miripole. And then wait, though, those pictures come up, ladies. Yeah. So Michael Miripole is the older son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. We are honored to have his testimony here today. Since 1974, he and his brother Robert have been actively involved in seeking to discover and expose the truth about their parents case. In 2016, they submitted over 50,000 signatures on a petition to President Obama asking for an official exoneration of their mother. In the course of their decades long struggle, they have perforce learned a great deal about the Cold War, both domestic and foreign. This presentation focuses on dissenters from the American unanimity which casts the U.S. as a defender of freedom from communist tyranny. This presentation is courtesy of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, which will be published online within the next year. And I just want to say Mr. Miripole gave us permission to put the images along with his words. So if there's any unprofessionalism in the images, it's not him, it's us. Thank you. Hi everyone. In the early 1950s, Cold War assumptions dominated American public life. Almost unnoticed, three books were published, one by a young unknown academic, one by a jailed communist, and one by a maverick reporter. These books began the effort to break through the closed-mindedness of American public opinion about the struggle for freedom with the Soviet Union. They marked the first appearance of Cold War revisionism, an argument against the virtually unanimous view that Soviet expansionism and worldwide subversion had necessitated a defensive military buildup by the United States and its allies, and even defensive wars in Greece, Korea, and French Indochina. William A. Williams authored American Russian Relations 1787 to 1947. He placed the beginning of the Cold War in the broad historical context of U.S. imperial concerns. The U.S. government had tried to reverse the revolution in Russia after 1917, and after World War II, aggressively opposed Soviet interests in Eastern Europe. The book was a strong scholarly rejoinder to the Kennan School of Containment. In the era of the Truman Doctrine and Korean War, even such a measured critique was too much for the establishment. The publisher submitted the chapter on Kennan to Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the foreign policy elite, but they returned to Williams, stating it was interesting and provocative, but too personal in its rebuttal of Kennan. The book made no apparent impact in academia, but was approvingly reviewed in the small left-wing press. Carl Marzani was serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress. He wrote, We Can Be Friends from published sources available in the prison library. This book showed that a careful reading of U.S. government documents, speeches of politicians, memoirs like those of Winston Churchill and The New York Times, could cast doubt on the consensus about Soviet blame for the Cold War. Meanwhile, journalist I.F. Stone, no supporter of Stalin, had discovered that the Korean War may very well have been caused by intra-Korean issues and not by the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he argued that the intervention of the Chinese was a result of legitimate Chinese security concerns. No one was willing to publish his book, so Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman of The Monthly Review, to manuscript the first monthly review press book, The Hidden History of the Korean War. In historiography, revisionism means just what it sounds like. It represents the revising of previously accepted interpretations, a challenge to receive doctrine. On the basis of new evidence, previously ignored evidence, new interpretations of agreed-upon evidence, or some combination thereof, newer material becomes available, the issues of succeeding eras shed new light on those of the past. Thus, our understanding of historical events changes drastically as time passes. In the case of judgments about the origins and course of the Cold War, this is important because one's beliefs about the history of the Cold War can lead to two alternative conclusions. One, the U.S. was dragged into its role as the defender of the free world due to the imperial ambitions of Stalin's Soviet Union, or the U.S. has always had imperial ambitions and the Soviet Union, as well as the nationalist movements in the post-World War II era, were challenges that stood in the way. Williams expanded his investigations to include U.S. foreign policy in general. In 1959, he published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In 1960, Professor D. Flemming published The Origins and History of the Cold War. These two books mark the upsurge of post-McCarthy Cold War revisionism, with different emphases, whereas Williams put the Cold War in the context of long-run U.S. economic and political expansionism, in a word, imperialism. Flemming felt that the Cold War was a serious departure from the more cooperative policy with the Soviets that had been followed by FDR during the wartime alliance. In the early 1960s, opposition to U.S. moves against the fledgling Cuban revolution, as opposed to the virtual silence in this country during the 50s, as the U.S. toppled governments in Iran and Guatemala, provided a context in which such revisionism could resonate. Williams brought out a second expanded edition of Tragedy in 1962 and published The United States Cuba and Castro with month review press in the same year. The intellectual anti-interventionism of the early 1960s grew with opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Writing in the revisionist tradition expanded. Williams' colleagues and students even constituted a school within Cold War revisionism, emphasizing the concept of an open-door empire that had been implanted into the ideology of American leaders at least as early as the late 19th century. By 1968, Cold War revisionism was so successful in challenging received doctrine that no less illuminary than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an article saying, it's time to call a halt to this subversive revisionist doctrine. Meanwhile, the Fleming and Williams strands of Cold War revisionism were joined by a third in 1969 when Gabriel Koko published The Politics of War, which opposed Fleming by tracing U.S. hostility to the Soviets and radical nationalist movements back into the years of the wartime alliance. Koko eschewed the Williams' open door in pre-realism interpretation. He gave no credence to the rhetoric of idealism sounded by individuals like Woodrow Wilson. To Koko, such verbalizations merely represented the most cynical of manipulations and not a genuine contradiction of ideals with practices as they were for Williams. In 1873, Princeton University Press published The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War, an attack on Williams' Koko Fleming and others. The book received a favorable front page review in The New York Times. Despite attacks, revisionism continued to develop into the 1990s. Graduate students and even undergraduates were at least aware that there was an alternative interpretation of the role of the United States as an alleged defender of the free world. Scholarship in the revisionist tradition informed the movements against intervention in Central America in the 1980s and the No War for Oil arguments against the First and Second Gulf Wars. Williams had argued that when the expansionist impulse contradicted our supposed national commitment to self-determination, the U.S. sacrificed that alleged commitment. As congressional hearings during the 1980s indicated, pursuit of certain imperial aims in Central America caused collaboration with drug-runners. Meanwhile, followers of Koko have argued that this shows that our nation's idealistic commitments are the rhetoric of imperial self-justification and nothing more. With the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Cold War ended. Cold War revisionism seemed to have lost its political immediacy and became mostly a dispute among historians. However, a significant effect of decades of revisionist scholarship was the infiltration into American intellectual life of the view that the United States is an empire rather than an anti-imperialist republic. Many influenced by Williams' Koko and others in that first generation of Cold War revisionists continued to analyze the persistence of American imperial ambitions even when the excuse of the danger of Soviet expansionism was no longer available. However, the history profession for the most part has been smitten by the victory of the United States and the West in the Cold War. Despite the disasters of American imperial overreach in the Middle East as a result of the First and Second Gulf Wars and the worldwide war on terror launched by the Bush administration, the history profession seems to have decided that it's safe to ignore the view of revisionists. See, for example, John Gattis' restatement, The Cold War a Short History, which doesn't have a reference to any work of Cold War revisionism in the bibliography and doesn't honor any of the revisionist arguments with even a cursory attempt at refutation. However, reality intrudes. Work by Andrew Basevich, Chalmers Johnson, and other analysts of American military overreach in the era since the fall of the Soviet Union continue to document the tragedy of American diplomacy and militarism. Basevich, a retired military officer, West Point graduate, has identified the Naval Academy graduate Williams as one of his major influences. See, American Empire, the realities and consequences of U.S. diplomacy. Johnson, who served with the CIA in Korea and calls himself a Cold Warrior, began writing in opposition to America's overreach in the post-911 world. He has argued, quote, a nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship. See his blowback, the costs and consequences of American Empire. In an ironic twist, the foreign policy of President Donald J. Trump was very popular because he at least talked about pulling the U.S. back from worldwide military commitments. With the post-Trump Biden administration promising that, quote, America is back and attempting to reassert American leadership in the world against various nationalist forces and a perceived Chinese threat to Western capitalist hegemony, there will be plenty for future historians to study about the persistent efforts of American leaders to preserve, protect and defend not the Constitution of the United States, but America's 21st century empire. Thank you. Thank you for Michael Maripole. We are going to have Frank introduce our next reading. I just want to say that the Rosenbergs have started the Rosenberg Fund for Children and they help out the children of activists who have been persecuted. So a very worthwhile organization and they call it constructive revenge. Frank?