 Next, we have a super special guest. Medea is moving up in the program a little. Thank you so much on the East Coast for staying awake and with us, Medea. She will be speaking on her experience with the seeing the Cold Wars effect on the African liberation struggles in Africa. Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the group Code Pink, Women for Peace, and the co-founder of the Human Rights Group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. Medea writes books. She speaks at many anti-war events. She organizes and takes activists to other countries, and she has spoken out at government events, where she is often removed from the room for interrupting. But she is actually speaking truth to power. Medea? Well, thank you so much, Rachel. And it's really amazing what you and Frank and Mary behind the scenes there have organized. I've met people or seen and heard them that I've long wanted to meet. And it just seems like such a rich bringing together of so many aspects of this Cold War. Like many of the other speakers, my life has really been shaped by the Cold War, including the Vietnam War. When I was in high school, I was taught that if we didn't stop communism over there, we would be fighting communism here at home. And then when my sister's boyfriend was drafted to go and fight in Vietnam, and he sent her home the era of a Viet Cong as a souvenir, that's when I joined the anti-war movement, which I have never left. My government's hatred of communism really inspired me to learn more about it, not just by reading the books of Marx and Lenin, but also first as a hippie and later as a UN nutritionist and a economist, traveling the world in support of liberation and socialist struggles. And everywhere I went, I was devastated to find that my own government was supporting the most reactionary forces that were trying to quash any of these experiments. This was especially true in Africa, where anti-communism and US corporate interests colored virtually every aspect of US policy. Take, for example, the Congo, formerly a colony of Belgium, where the liberation leader, Patrice Flamumba, scared the US corporations, they feared they would lose access to the nation's vast minerals. They accused him of being close to the Soviets and in 1961, the US government helped orchestrate a coup in which he was killed and replaced with the dictator, Mobutou Sessi Sekou, who robbed the nation's resources, ruled over the people brutally for three decades. Anti-communism put the US in bed with the despicable apartheid government in South Africa, the brutal Portuguese colonial rulers in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, the white minority government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, which only yielded to majority rule in 1980. I worked in Africa for much of the latter part of the 70s and into the early part of the 80s, and I saw firsthand the devastation of the Cold War. I wanna give you the example when I went to work in Mozambique. Mozambique had just won its independence in 1975 after a long grueling arms struggle, but there was elation that they were building something new, something exciting, something different. The president was Samora Machel. His wife was Grassa Machel, who later married Nelson Mandela after Machel died in a mysterious plane crash. But Samora Machel was a terrific leader. He used to be a nurse. He left nursing to join a liberation struggle and fight with the movement for limo. After independence, I remember he would gather thousands of people together every single week in the sports stadium. And first they would start out singing with five-part harmony. And then he would give long talks and have discussions with the people and empower them about building a new society. The Portuguese had been among the worst, well, the worst colonizers in the world. They left a totally impoverished nation with a 95% illiteracy rate. For limo's motto was each one teach one in everywhere you looked, under the trees, under the rooftops and the evenings in the schools, people would teach each other how to read and write, how to add and subtract. I was working as a nutritionist and every day we worked with farmers in the fields to increase yield so they could better feed the people. Everywhere there was tremendous excitement. We were building a new society, becoming a model for the rest of Africa, a model of cooperation, overcoming tribal differences, liberating women, empowering youth. But this cooperative model of empowered black citizens was a threat to U.S. allies in the white-ruled South Africa and Rhodesia. They labeled the Mozambican government communist and began funding an armed opposition movement called Renamo. Renamo began to attack villages. They burned entire villages, raped women, took them as sex slaves. They forced children to become soldiers. In fact, a third of their forces were children. They destroyed hospitals, roads, schools, any infrastructure that existed. This war lasted for 15 years. About a million people were killed or starved, five million displaced. The U.S. government's own study said, a large number of civilians in these attacks were victims of purposeful shooting deaths and executions of axing, killing, bayonetting, burning to death, force drowning in asphyxiation and other forms of murder where no meaningful resistance or defense is present. This sounds very much like the extremist forces tearing Mozambicans today who call themselves followers of ISIS and publicly behead women and children. One could make the argument that the breakdown of society during Renamo's long brutal war paved the way for the devastating attacks today. While Africa continues to feel the consequences of the last Cold War, it's also the site of competition today between the United States and China. China is expanding its influence by building infrastructure and making investments all over the continent, including buying up land. The U.S. is building military bases and beefing up Africa. But if you wanna see a real example of solidarity with Africa, look at the poor, small island nation of Cuba. While working in Africa, I met Cubans all over the continent. They weren't exploiting the resources or profiting from business ventures or building up military bases. No, some of them were there as soldiers to stop right-wing forces, but most of them, over 100,000 Cubans, went to Africa working as much needed doctors, nurses, teachers, technicians and living in some of the poorest villages on the continent. And tens of thousands of African youth were invited to Cuba to study for free, becoming doctors, engineers and other professionals. Most recently, Cuban doctors and nurses have been traveling around the continent, treating people for COVID and stopping its spread. It's amazing that this impoverished island nation of 11 million people battered by the United States for 60 years as part of the Cold War exemplifies such a beautiful example of solidarity. As Mozambique's first president, Samora Michelle said back in 1975, international solidarity is not an act of charity. It's an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains towards the same objectives. The foremost of these objectives, he said, is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level possible. Let us practice solidarity by working hard to shut down Africa and U.S. bases now littered across the continent. Let us work together with our African neighbors to fight COVID and other diseases and hunger at home and abroad and address the climate crisis that's creating millions of African refugees. As Samora Michelle ended every talk with the people, a luta continua Victoria esterta. The struggle continues, Victoria esterta. Thank you. Thank you so much, Medea. Bravo. And leave it to Medea to come up with another amazing project, Africa. Let's steer this Cold War Truth Commission definitely and work on everything that you just mentioned. So incredible. We're doing a little shifting around into the program. So while everyone is congratulating Medea in the chat, let me find out where I am. We are is...