 So, we will have another testifier and it is, he is Richard Moser and it will be a, it will be a filmed testimony and Richard Moser, excuse me, is, he is a historian and recent America, of recent America and author of The New Winter Soldiers, G.I. and Veteran Descent During the Vietnam Era. Moser also worked as a staff organizer for District 65, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers. You can follow his writing at befreedom.co. Richard Mosers, please. Hi, I'm Richard Moser. I'm an activist and organizer and historian of recent America. You can follow my work at befreedom.co and in the pages of Counterpunch. My contribution to the Cold War Truth Commission today is going to be talking about the domestic impacts of the Cold War. The American people lost the Cold War. We did. Because under the cover of the Cold War and anti-communism, the U.S. established itself as the dominant global empire, which immediately led to a series of institutional and systematic changes that killed off the last remnants of democratic and constitutional government. We paid a very high price for the Cold War. After World War II, the American people were tired, tired of fighting. Truman was convinced that he had to scare the hell out of people. And he did. That's just what he did. So evil was the Soviet Union. So alien was their way of life that the Red Scare summons up its opposite, America, an American identity as innocent, good, chosen, and exceptional. Our new enemy was made out to be an existential threat, even though they had just lost 20 million people in World War II fighting by our side against Nazi Germany. And our global superiority was based upon the fact that all our competitors were crushed in the war. Our empire was the last and a long line of European empires, because we assimilated and reorganized the broken pieces of the British Empire, the French, and yes, the German Nazi Empire. We assimilated that too. So Cold War anti-communism was really like ruling class magic. Because under its hypnotic spell, people stopped seeing the empire at all. It made the empire disappear. We were not, according to the official story, an empire at all, but the world's greatest democracy defending the free world from communism. But no justification could hide forever the fact that the empire changed the United States. A new form of government came to be that was often called the national security state. These changes were sweeping. They decisively undermined checks and balances, separation of powers, and the rule of law. Soon, the executive branch grew far beyond anything the Constitution had ever called for, and it turned into what we sometimes call the imperial presidency, a new tyrannical executive branch. You know, I mean, the United States presidents has war's powers that a king would be jealous of. Even though the Constitution is crystal clear, only Congress can declare war. You all know that we have not had a declared war since World War II. And once that keystone is removed and surrendered, that power surrendered by Congress, the remaining edifice of the Constitution and of the Republic, which was never strong to begin with, began to crumble. Tyranny was soon to follow. You know, it's an old story after all, how empires destroy the republics that give them birth. Another part of these institutional changes was the rise of militarism. Before the Korean War, the United States had no standing army. We had a small army in an officer corps, and armies were raised through the draft. And when the war was over, the soldiers were sent home. There was no military industrial complex. There were auto factories and airplane factories, and they were converted to wartime use and converted back. Of course there were war profiteers, but never a powerful permanent war industry directly bonded to government. So we have a violent war like past, but we're not militarists. And that's an important distinction. Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, was so disturbed by what he saw that he warned us in his farewell address. And I'm going to read a short quote from it. The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, spiritual is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We should take nothing for granted. And Eisenhower was the last president to speak honestly about this to the American people. So today war is big, big business, and the MIC has only grown. Since 9-11 and the First Gulf War, the military industrial complex now includes hundreds of security and intelligence corporations, including the big tech. Another part of this institutional shift is the emergence of secret police forces. During the Cold War there was a rapid growth of secret police forces. We now have 18 of them. Of course we call them the intelligence community. That's a euphemism. These are secret police forces. And they are real players in domestic politics in the United States, intervening in our own elections, and suppressing free speech by spying routinely on millions of Americans. According to those documents liberated by word Snowden, they spy on us more than they spy on Russians and more than they spy on Chinese. How do we explain that? You probably remember from the last primary that the night before the Novotikovs. The intelligence community comes out and says that Bernie Sanders is the choice of the Russians. They offer no evidence. They never did, never have. That is a gross violation of their power, abuse of their power. So the imperial presidency, militarism, secret police forces, these have had a profound effect. And that effect is to hollow out the remnants of the U.S. Constitution and the American Republic. So tyranny is the price of empire. Always has been, always will be. But empires are shot through with contradictions and they're very difficult to maintain. So one of the key things maintaining empire, holding it together, like the republic it destroyed, is whiteness, is white racial identity. Because white racism has long been the primary form of class collaboration in which everyday white people identify with the ruling class instead of with their fellow workers. Now over the centuries there's been white privileges and they were sometimes quite substantial. And it allowed white people to think that the government was on our side and that we were part of it. But maintaining whiteness is now caught on the horns of a dilemma, of an imperial dilemma. Because the empire strives for full spectrum dominance to use their own term. They want to dominate everything at every level. And the corporations are driven by a very similar imperative, which is maximum possible profits, not profits, maximum possible profits. So these two imperatives demand austerity from the entire working class, including the white working class. And that's the dilemma. They're in and we're in too. The 45 years of austerity that begin in the mid 1970s works contrary to the special material benefits needed to win over whites and other people. And if my interpretation is correct, then the empire destroys the last vestiges of democratic government, even for whites, and puts whiteness on a path to decline, if not its ultimate distinction. The recent failure of government to raise wages to even the paltry sum of $15 an hour is a prime example of the dilemma faced by the rulers. And they chose austerity again, because that $15 would raise wages for the entire working class, something they simply cannot allow. So when you see millions of people, white workers, young white workers out protesting at BLM last summer, I think part of it is motivated by the realization that they too have no future. And that making common cause with blacks is far smarter than waiting on the government. Now the only play left for the ruling class, since it is unable to provide material advantages, is to increase what W.E.B. Du Bois called the psychological wage. So they can't provide material wages, so they must provide psychological wages. And what that means do do everything in it and whatever you want to do. Okay. Republicans and the neo-fascist and more shallow and transparent forms of corporate identity from the Democrats and corporate Republicans. Both are ploys to create a vertical cross-class alliance bonding working people to the existing order. Just as important, the ruling class is going to try and solve its internal problems with the new Cold War. Like the old Cold War, the new one is going to be driven by fear first and foremost fear, but also mass conspiracy theories in which Russiagate, QAnon, have replaced the old international communist conspiracy. And of course, it is also driven by the shared glory of world supremacy. But this time it must encourage white people and others to revel in the greatness of empire with a bare minimum of material rewards and benefits. I'm not sure it's going to work. But maybe this is why a majority of Americans are tired of war. On the other hand, the war propaganda for the new Cold War is powerful. It is bipartisan and it is working. Can the new Cold War satisfy the psychological payoff to keep whites and others in line without significant material payoffs? This crisis and opportunity it presents for a new peace movement is why an anti-imperialist perspective is so important. And one of the reasons this view has also been so marginalized. But the opportunities for peace and democracy awaits us if we can intervene in this crisis of empire. Thanks for having me and thanks for listening. And again, you can follow my work at befreedom.co. Thank you, Richard.