 Okay. Thanks, Rachel. Dr. Gerald Horn holds the Moore's professorship of history and African-American studies. His research has addressed issues of race and a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, and war. Dr. Horn received his PhD in history from Columbia University and his JD from the University of California, Berkeley. I'll say I've heard Gerald Horn many times over the years on KB of K with Margaret Prescott. Now we're gonna have somebody read what he's submitted. That's it. Genesis Mora will be reading and she is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, youth member. Hi, everyone. Okay. I welcome the Cold War Truth Commission as I salute the organizers of this forum. Assuming we allude the minefields left by the detritus of this U.S. engineered debacle, including nuclear war and climate change, future historians will no doubt conclude that the Cold War was possibly the largest self-inflicted wound a nation has inflicted upon itself. It is not simply the trillions spent on war and conflict while education, healthcare, and the nation's infrastructure was left to wither on the vine. It is not simply the Cold War compliment speaking of the Red Scare, which demonized the tallest trees in our forest, including Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Claudia Jones, compromising the working class of various stripes ideologically. The Cold War and its evil twin, the Red Scare, also led to an assault on progressive unions, including West Coast Longshore and the National Maritime Union, which devastated the latest working class folk while making the strategic sector less able to defend itself against the ascendancy of right-wing populism as evidenced by Trumpism. Still, the most harmful aspect of the Cold War was manifested in the realm of U.S. foreign policy. It was not just that the reigning ideology of anti-communism led to a de facto alliance with apartheid South Africa during the pre-1994 era, not to mention colonialism in the sub-region. The Cold War also contributed to a pernicious global trend manifested most dramatically in Afghanistan, where an left-leaning government was destabilized, beginning most avidly in the 1970s, which included an alliance with religious cellists. This gambit brought the latter to power and led directly to an attack on New York City and Northern Virginia on 11 September 2001. This global trend of attacks on secular forces while cuddling intense religiosity has also been manifested on these shores as we witnessed the explosion of white Christian nationalism on 6 January, 2021. The Cold War reached a turning point a half a century ago when Henry Kissinger flew to China to effectuate an anti-Soviet alliance with China. This not only led to U.S. imperialism taking a soft line via these, the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia also to an attack on Vietnam by China near that same time. Still, what drove this entente was the notion that Washington should seek to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing. However, by 2021 it is precisely this eventuality which has emerged, leading to the harebrained policy of dual containment, whereby Washington will seek to confront both giants simultaneously. Worse from the viewpoint of U.S. imperialism is that part of the payoff to China for the 1970s bargain, massive direct foreign investment has created a juggernaut placing China in the passing lane with consequences too gargantuan to imagine. The question needs to be posed. How and why did this catastrophe unfold? To answer this potent query involves a deeper investigation and inner vocation of U.S. history. Specifically, we need to move sharply away from the gauzy romanticized view of the founding of this republic, which after all involved genocide against the indigenous and tightening of the chains binding the enslaved African population. And ultimately the nascent U.S. moving by the 1790s to control the African slave trade to Cuba and doing the same in the largest market of all, Brazil by the 1840s. Post 1865, one aspires a further drive to expropriate and liquidate the indigenous population culminating in the 1890s with the overthrow and seizure of the regime in the Hawaii archipelago and the annihilation of the tottering Spanish empire and the effective seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines. Given this bloody genocidal history should any be surprised by U.S. depredations in Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, Panama, Granada, Iraq, Libya and other tortured sites too numerous to mention. So what is to be done? We should all join and or hail the campaign to move the money from the Pentagon to human needs reducing the Pentagon budget and joining Congresswoman Barbara Lee in similar efforts should be seen as the highest priority. And we should back the passage of HR 40 a step towards reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans a step towards making the Native American population whole while opening the door to somehow seeking to compensate the countless victims of U.S. imperialism. Wonderful. Thank you, Genesis. Go PSL. Thank you for reading Gerald Horne's words for the on the Cold War. Thank you.