Cold War Truth Commission: Putting the Cold War on Trial

This invaluable just-published volume features more than 50 testimonies and expert analyses compiled and transcribed from the Cold War Truth Commission hearings in 2017 in-person in Los Angeles and in 2021 via zoom.
The wide-ranging contributions in the book bring to life the assertion and perspective of the Cold War Truth Commission that the so-called Cold War is a third great crime of the US Empire against the people of the world, after the land theft and genocide of Indigenous people and the enslavement of African people. Some selections are from people no longer with us, such as Daniel Ellsberg, Julia Scoville, and Ramsey Clark; but most are from current contemporary organizers and scholars, including in addition to co-producers Rachel Bruhnke and Frank Dorrel, such luminaries as Marcy Winograd, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin of Codepink, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Stephen Vittoria (co-authors of the Murder Incorporated trilogy), Eric Mann of the Labor Community Strategy Center, Jeremy Kuzmarov and Chris Agee of Covert Action Bulletin, Nuri Ronaghy of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, S. Brian Willson, Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff of Project Censored, Carolfrances Likins of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, Kathy Kelly, Bruce Gagnon, Ed Rampell, and professors Vivian Price and Gerald Horne, among a host of others, some equally well-known and others equally-dedicated to peace, justice and liberation but not as renowned.
Topics covered include the origins of the “Cold War,” McCarthyism, HUAC, the weaponizing of space, the military-industrial complex, US interventions, coups, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Honduras, El Salvador, China, the USSR and later Russia, Afghanistan and Syria, the Cold-War impact on media, labor, and the classroom, the dirty war in Argentina, and much more. There are several pages of illustrative graphics and photos. Most selections are brief, few longer than 4-5 pages, but insightful; each is prefaced by a brief bio of the contributor.
The direction and shared perspective is that the history is a guide to current action and practice, and that the Cold War-which was never cold and has never ended-has both shaped and extended into the world in which we live and struggle today.