Continuing John Judge’s Legacy

John Judge

Four years ago today, on April 15, 2014, John Judge died ~ or (as he would say) embarked on a new adventure.

I miss him… I have become resigned to his absence, but I still crave his wise perspective. Each time I am reminded of the ever-increasing chaos in our country and around the world, I think of what John would say. I remember him telling me that the history of the world was a history of “competing conspiracies.” Every day, that observation seems more true.

The corruption John railed against ~ the corruption that once operated surreptitiously in the shadows ~ is now overt and shamelessly brazen. Oligarchs use their fortunes to influence policies. We see back-room deals, influence peddling, distortions of the truth, nepotism, blackmail and payoffs and the ever-increasing drumbeats for More War. None of this would have been a surprise to John. He saw it all coming ~ the “final stage of monopoly capitalism,” he called it, and “human beings reduced to commodities.”

But all is not darkness. On March 24, we all watched as 800,000 people converged on Washington, DC, to demand change. Countless others gathered in cities around the world. Grief permeated that day, but so did the triumphant sense of unity that was so much a part of John’s vision. I heard words like, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that” and “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” I watched and wept as the granddaughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., repeated her grandfather’s words.

You and I both know that John would have been right in the middle of that March for our Lives! He would have had a house full of demonstrators the night before, ordering pizza and sleeping on his floor. He would have driven folks around by the carload. And then, he would have been on the street himself, his booming voice crying out, “Never again!” He would have loved the massive outpouring of community, passion and hope.

A short time before John passed, I watched him working in a DC park during “Occupy Wall Street,” telling everyone who would listen about economic injustice and about the way violence and war threaten human progress. John understood so well that the system was like a rusted car ~ appearing cosmetically sound, but corrupt beneath the surface, barely holding together, and subject to collapse at the slightest impact.

John was indeed a visionary. He saw that the only answers were peace and justice. I miss him so much. That is why, day after day, I work to preserve his collection of books and papers, to assure that his message continues to thrive and triumph.

We are making great progress at the Hidden History Center. Danielle and Maya, our interns from York College, have been working diligently with me to organize our collection. I can’t say enough about their dedication and commitment.

So far, we have worked our way through the 16 boxes of the Penn Jones Collection, creating a list of all the file folders in those boxes. (For those who don’t know, Penn Jones was a reporter on the scene the day JFK was assassinated.)

Right now, we are organizing the 7 boxes in our Jonestown Collection. Next on our agenda will probably be our collections of Psychological Operations / MKULTRA / Mind Control and GI Resistance / Counter-Recruitment / Draft Counseling. Portions of these 2 collections are spread amongst 38 boxes in the HHC Archive including a recently donated box from Doug Valentine on MKULTRA for which we are deeply grateful.

We need many supplies for this work, including file folders, binders, plastic page protectors, filing cabinets and bookshelves. We also need to meet our basic operating expenses, such as website development, rent and utilities.

Regarding our web presence, the redesign and upgrade of hiddenhistorycenter.org is nearing completion and will go live by the end of May if not sooner. Organization of content will be presented in the following five top-level categories (with 50 second-tier subject groups):

  1. US Colonial-to-Corporate Terrorism
  2. Impacts of Technology On Evolution
  3. Beyond 1984
  4. Military Intelligence Dominance
  5. One does not sell the Earth

 

Please help us preserve John Judge’s legacy. Don’t let this anniversary go by without remembering John in a tangible way.

Thank you so much for whatever you can do to honor JJ’s irrepressible spirit.

John Judge speaking at Univ of Washington, Seattle, 16 Feb 2002:

Privilege is the first and most basic violence asserted in a society. It kills the human spirit. It creates the rage that leads to all the other violence, historically. So if you end that privilege, if you restore justice, then you restore hope. And you know that from a family argument. I don’t have to go to an international argument with you. You don’t resolve it by fighting back, you don’t get even with somebody. All that does is create a feud and it makes the violence cycle into yet another generation. The Paris attack bombings were done in part by young kids whose parents had been murdered by the French and the Algerian freedom fighting wars from 20 years before….

It’s obvious to anybody that thinks about it that you have to go the other direction. That the way you end what you’re calling terrorism is to restore justice, is to restore hope and then the sanction and the support for violence in those communities diminishes and it goes away. Because instead you have the sort of natural, civil and community structure that all of us would have were it not for the fact that we live under the demands of capital and its accumulation. We live under a situation that mis-educates and under-educates us. A situation where it’s hard for us to find out what the truth is about our society or our world. And a situation that values us the same way that miners in the 1930s were told that when the mine begins to collapse you push the mules out first because it costs money to replace a mule.

That’s the position we’re in in relation to the people that hold the wealth in this world. We are expendable and they’re going to escalate that expendability. The choice and the power is there. But the choice to recognize that power, and take responsibility for it, and make this into a world where all of us can live, sits right here.

Marilyn Tenenoff is the Executive Director, Museum of Hidden History, Hidden History Center

 

 

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