 I'm going to now introduce my friend, Michael Novik. He's going to, it's a taped presentation he'll be making. He's a, Mike is a long time anti-racist activist. He edits and publishes Turn in the Tide. He's on the production crew of ChangeLink, which is the LA community calendar. And he's a second generation union shop steward and is currently chair of the KPFK local station board. And Mike does, Michael does so many things. And here's a tape that he recorded himself. Michael Novik. This is Michael Novik speaking on behalf of anti-racist action and for the Cold War conference. I can't attend in person. Unfortunately, I have multiple other responsibilities on the same day as the conference. So I'm recording this in advance. I want to speak briefly about even the term Cold War, which in my understanding is part of U.S. terminology. It goes along with the phrase iron curtain from the period of the late 40s, 50s into the 60s. And that terminology, of course, was about stereotyping the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, Russia, later China, Vietnam as forces of evil. Later term, the axis of evil was used. But the Asovians used the term peaceful coexistence for that same period of time. They were trying to live in peace with the West despite the ideological material contradictions between socialism and capitalism. So I think it's instructive that really to this day we use that terminology, because the terminology of Cold War comes out of the U.S., which is a warmongering country. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about the roots of that Cold War in the long history of war in the United States. The United States invaded Cuba, for example, before the Soviet Union existed. And before Fidel Castro was born, you can see his picture up there on my wall. The United States invaded Nicaragua long before the Sandinistas came to power. They wanted to defeat Sandino himself in the 1920s. So the U.S. has been at war with many, many peoples over a long period of time, starting with settler colonialism. And I think the term Cold War comes out of that history of warfare. The other aspect I wanted to talk about is that the Red Scare and the Red Baiting, which was an intense part of the Cold War, is an attempt to identify forces of resistance and forces opposed to imperialism, colonialism, capitalism inside the United States as well as internationally. And so there were purges of so-called communists. But I think an important part of the so-called Red Scare was actually a black scare. And again, you see the picture of Malcolm up on my wall and Lumia here on my shirt. And I think that the black freedom struggle has been a key part always of the attempt to transform this society in a positive direction. Going back to the days of slavery and settler colonialism and that the key charge against the communists is that they were lovers of black people. They didn't use the term black people in that term. And so some of the main victims of the Red Scare were actually black people. And so Paul Roberson or WB Du Bois and so on were the people being targeted. And even some of the communists who were jailed were African-American. So I think those are important things to keep in mind. The roots of what we call the Cold War in US colonialism, US imperialism, US war-making, US racism. And you know, Noam Chansky, I think, has talked about the power of the danger of a positive example. I think that the construct of the Cold War was a way for the US to justify its intervention in the former colonial world that was seeking independence from its prior colonial masters, the British, French, sometimes the German Empire, the Italians who invaded Ethiopia, the Japanese. And in those struggles against colonialism and imperialism, struggled against the French and against the Japanese, the Chinese themselves, struggled against Japanese incursions. The US stepped in in what Malcolm X referred to as a lateral pass from the European imperial powers in particular and used the excuse of the Cold War, the excuse of a global struggle with godless communism and with the Soviet Union as the pretext for intervention and invasion, for assassination, for example, of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and many other subsequent independence leaders in Africa and elsewhere, for military intervention, because it was pretty hot, obviously, during a lot of the Cold War in Korea, in Vietnam, and in many other places in the world. And all that is still around. It's still happening. The parties might change in power. We've seen the Democratic Party oust Trump and take command of the executive branch and slim control of both houses of Congress. And yet they pass enormous military budgets. They authorize the use of military force or they use military force without authorization if they have to. And so I think that's the context of the so-called New Cold War. The New Cold War is targeting, in particular, China, which is much more disruptive of the international capitalist hegemonic order than Donald Trump could ever pretend or imagine to be, because they have elements still of socialism in their society and they are a billion-plus people who are not integrated into white supremacy, not well integrated into capitalism and imperialism, and therefore they represent a threat to the hegemony of the US. And so we're seeing the drumbeats from both sides of the political aisle again. Trump launched the trade war against China, but Biden is in and he's pursuing a military encirclement. They have a new thing called the Quad. It's an alliance between the United States, India, Australia, and Japan directly targeted at China. And so I think we have to be on the alert, not just for this New Cold War, but for the potential hot war that it represents, because all of these are aspects of war that came for imperial ambition and a wounded and threatened US empire, which we're seeing now and we live in, is particularly dangerous. So I would just urge people to keep those thoughts in mind that the roots of it extend far back into settler colonialism and attacks on native nations and the consequences of that period that we turn the Cold War are still with us. Thank you for Michael Novix.