 So our next testimony will be from Jim Lafferty. Jim Lafferty is the Executive Director Emeritus of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles, host of the Lawyers Guild show on KPFK and a member of the governing board of the ACLU of Southern California. Jim has, over the past 55 years, played a national leadership role in major anti-war and civil rights movements. Jim? There we go. Hi, Rachel. Well, Frank, Rachel, thank you so much. Those who have organized this really comprehensive war crimes, tribunal, if you will, a commission on the Cold War, I think did so on behalf of exposing the lies and common misconceptions about the Cold War and what I'm going to try to do in anticipation of hearing from a wide array of highly knowledgeable speakers is to raise some of the critically important questions about the Cold War that call for answers and understanding and to flag in advance some of the key lies and myths that today's speakers will no doubt explore more fully. When historians speak of the Cold War, they're generally talking of that period from 1947 to 1991. And it's called a Cold War because the United States and the former Soviet Union as well as China were not in direct military conflict with one another. But I contend therefore that the very first lie or myth that must be laid to rest about the Cold War is that it was a Cold War because there was nothing cold about it. In fact, estimates of the death toll linked to the Cold War, as I think Frank mentioned, run from 20 to 25 million people by estimating the tally from related civil wars, interventions, genocides in which the former Soviet Union and the United States often played a pivotal role. As such, the Cold War was ranked as the ninth deadliest in world history and the United States bears the responsibility for the great majority of those deaths. This horrific death toll is in major part a direct consequence of the fact that although the United States was not engaging in a direct military war with the Soviets or China during the Cold War, didn't mean the three nations were not at military war with each other by proxy, by supporting an army one side or another and one or more other nations civil wars that took place over the course of the Cold War. Think of the millions. Think of the millions who died in Korea and Vietnam, both militarily and civilian deaths. Does anyone doubt that the death toll of those civil wars would have been far lower had the two sides in those civil wars not had the backing military and otherwise of the world's two major powers as well as China. I saw the evidence of this firsthand in 1971 while North Vietnam was still at war. I was in Hanoi at the time. I was visiting the war museum at one day in Hanoi where I could clearly see written on the fragments of the munitions in that museum made in the USA. Further proof that the Cold War was not truly cold is found in the answer to this question. Can acts of a government other than military acts constitute acts of war? Well, for instance, what about sanctions that Ramsey was just talking about? Sanctions imposed by the United States on nations like Cuba and Iraq and Iran and on and on it goes. They've caused hundreds of thousands of deaths if not more and injuries primarily to civilians in those sanctioned countries are not then imposing sanctions acts of war? How about refusals? How about embargoes, blockades, refusals to trade with unfavorable nations? All of these non-military actions cause death and destruction as surely as do bombs and guns and tanks. And as I say, it's the United States that's responsible still for much of the starvation in North Korea caused by our continuing sanctions they're imposed on that nation even after the end of the military conflict in the Korean War. Are we not responsible for some of the suffering in Iran? And think about the life destroying sanctions and embargoes we're now putting in place and now in place against Venezuela. What about political interference and sabotage conducted by Cold War countries? Was not the United States orchestrated overthrow Muhammad and most of that in 1953 the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, an act of war or our aid and backing of the 1973 military overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in Chile. Now, there are other myths about the Cold War that today's fine speakers will no doubt talk about the notion that it brought stability to the world and halted the proliferation of nuclear arms and all of that nonsense. But I wanna turn now to this. In the United States, we were told it was because we had to stop communism before it reached our shows. Remember the shores, remember the so-called domino effect. And so in the name of stopping the spread of communism to our shores, we not only experienced McCarthyism era witch hunts, ruining untold numbers of American lives at home, we also sent our sons and daughters to die in foreign lands in Korea and in Vietnam and we spent trillions of dollars on military hardware and equipment that should have been spent on domestic needs instead of making obscene profits for corporate America. Now, a second lie or myth is the claim that the Cold War ended in conjunction with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But does anyone seriously doubt that the United States is still engaged in a Cold War? A Cold War with Russia and not also China? I mean, just this past week, President Biden called Vladimir Putin a killer and promised reprisals for Russia's alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election. And now corporate America has got behind the notion the government has got to spend over $27 billion in new anti-China military readiness in response to Admiral Philip Davidson's belief and I quote, China is the strategic threat of the century to the US, close quote. The top officials in the Biden administration including Biden himself agree with him. Now this is not just a democratic Republican thing this is a capitalist thing. And so the never ending arms race and the profits to be made from it continues and gains more speed. And think about how the Cold War nations are still waging proxy wars with one another in places like Syria and Yemen and the cyber wars now taking place between the major powers as well. But we've got to dig deeper still to understand why the ruling elite in the United States so desperately needs a boogeyman to frighten the American people would be at Russia or China and thereby continue the Cold War. Because no matter how far those countries have strayed from true communism making them the boogeyman still provides political cover for the United States political cover for corporate America to continue its imperialism, to continue gobbling up the resources of weaker nations in the name of ever greater corporate profits be those the resources of capitalist nations or suitor communist nations. Well, this in turn makes it very clear to me that the Cold War is and always has been a class war a class war throughout this world and here in the United States as well. And exposing this truth and then building a powerful enough movement to replace the greedy and corporate capitalist economic system with a socialist one must surely be our goal. And this in turn is why this Cold War truth commission is so critically important. The world is in crisis brought about largely by hundreds of years of capitalist cause wars and spoilation. Neo-fascism is again on the rise at home and abroad. Our planet, our home is in danger of becoming unable to sustain life due to our despoiled environment. But what we must remember if we are not to give up and despair is that we have one great victories over these same evils in the past and that therefore history itself is on our side. Yes, we've gotta remember that things can change if we have the will to change them. Today, yeah, America is a divided country. But ironically in that division may lie the best hope and opportunity we've had in generations to finally make America the kind of socially and economically just country it can be. Because while the stakes have never been higher neither has the awareness of so many in our nation that our capitalist system is failing our people. So as you listen to today's inspiring activists and knowledgeable speakers, vow to join the growing movement to form a more massive and more united movement. A movement for true progressive and liberating change. And as you join this effort, vow to remember that with history on our side we the people at long suffering last can and will finally make America the America of our dreams. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jim. I purposely kept my words short at the beginning. I'm gonna take a little liberty every once in a while to interject after our different testimonies. First of all, I wanna have you look at the chat. Emily Dorrell just put in the link to the program. It's such a long program. You might not have it right there but if you click on that link you'll be able to see and remember throughout the day what the next speaker is, et cetera, et cetera. Something Jim mentioned, Vladimir Putin. And as you know, not only was he called a killer but he right back at Biden called basically for a global debate. Basically, in my mind, a global Cold War truth commission and a global commission on violence. So that might be something interesting to hook up with them. Also, Jim mentioned the harm and destruction that has come from the US Cold War around the world. And to me, I'm an environmental resource engineer. That's my training. That's what I work in. I teach high school teaching kids about sustainable development and being so inspired by them. But to me, this is also such a question of why we had to crush these different models around the world that they're basically the idea of two different development models. One of cooperation and the other of competition. One of whose priority is human resource development and the other whose primary concern is consumption. And so we're finding that both humans and the environment are coming up against limits to the development model that has been pushed and quote unquote, one through violence. So people might say we won the Cold War in 1991 and my answer to that would be, so how's that working for the world? So should it have been the one that won? So again, up for debate. Before I introduce the next speaker, I will ask a question of you all in the chat. Help us out for the record here. The reason that we called it a truth commission was very much to be able to tell these stories, but also it builds upon the unfortunate but very important legacy of other truth commissions that the world has had and had to have had. And so I'm gonna mention a couple now, but if you please would in the chat, if you know of others that might not have called themselves truth commissions but that they had the same type of intent. The first truth commission was Argentina after the dirty wars in the early 80s followed by Guatemala and South Africa. Those are probably, and Rwanda, those are probably the first three or four best known truth commissions in the world. And again, I ask you in the chat to mention other truth commissions that you might know of.