Today is the June Solstice, where the Sun, appearing to travel along the ecliptic, reaches the point where it is farthest north of the celestial equator. In the northern hemisphere days are longest and nights shortest while the opposite is happening in the southern hemisphere.
PHOTO: VARUN SAXENA
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John Judge died of complications from a stroke on 15 April 2014. He was a nonpareil friend of inestimable value. In 2012 John invited me to be a board member of The Museum Of Hidden History, his newly established 501(c)(3) in Washington D.C. At the time I begged off as I thought I had too much on my plate. In retrospect, I had yet to learn another lesson in the brevity of what Life includes; of being here for such a brief, transcendent moment before, !=poof=!, time’s up! In 2012, I mistakenly took for granted that I would have many more years of relational, nurturing connection with John in this dimension. After his death I had the great privilege and high honor on May 31st of speaking about him at his Life Celebration held in the National Press Club in Washington D.C. The next day I went to his house to meet with others and received a tour.
PHOTO: VARUN SAXENA
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At some point in the ’90s I had visited John in D.C. when he lived in a different house. While being given a tour of his home on June 1st, I was profoundly moved by the sheer size of his library and archive of papers, documents, and books. At that point I understood it was crucial to participate in helping this unique trove of our history endure. I posthumously accepted John’s 2012 invitation, joined the board of the Museum, and began to work with Marilyn Tenenoff, John’s partner and Executive Director of The Museum.
Four years ago the concept was hatched of what today begins at https://hiddenhistorycenter.org/. A portion of the draft proposal written in August 2014 is presented below. It includes a massive outline of sources, grouped in categories that suggested themselves based on what I had learned from John, Mae Brussell, John Gofman, Richard Grossman, and many, many, other writers, professors, and historians.
At last, four years later, a compelling and provocative interface is now in place through which to relay information, raise questions, and generate discussion. The driving imperative has been to craft something akin to what John would have envisioned were he alive to establish a brick-and-mortar Museum in D.C. to serve as its complement on the internet.
John’s worldview encompassed an uncommon melding of his exhaustive study of our history, with particular focus on the 20th century. As he described it, “Whatever intelligence I have I credit to my mother, who rose to a position as the highest paid woman employee at the Pentagon over the 30 years she worked there, and who had a security clearance five levels above Top Secret.” Early on, his mother instilled in him a fierce drive to exercise his intelligence with clarity and coherence. As a youngster in school he relays how, “I refused to get under my desk for an atomic air raid drill and was sent to the principal’s office. I was horrified that adults could have such a weapon or use it, and then even more frightened when they offered me no protection at all against it in the drill.”
This penetrating urge to know and understand the world blessed John with an uncompromising intent to gather in, synthesize, and relay to everyone he encountered his analysis of where we have come from and where we are going. In a 2013 letter John wrote:
We must constantly create and encourage enemies, especially since the end of the Cold War. These keep the populace in a state of fear allowing unconstitutional excesses, they justify the endless increase in funding for police, security, military and intelligence agencies, and they create conditions that justify the move toward martial law. The only reason that the tension between the illusion of democracy while maintaining control and open fascism—glove off the fist approach of martial law—has not led to the latter yet is that factions within the ruling class counter each other when it seems someone will get to the top of such a structure, creating scandals that allow the illusion to proceed.
None of this will stop, including the amateur conspiracy detectives on the internet and the parlor game conspiracy guessing with each incident, until we address the structural level of control that comes with militarization and permanent war, economic pressure for commoditizing everything and the genocide that results from technological advance with no distribution of wealth or sustainable development, the devaluation of currency and the concentration of wealth and power, and the curtailment of democracy that mark late stage monopoly capitalism which is fascism, the merger of the state and the corporations for reactionary purpose.
As long as our primary relationship to each other is economic, not human or community based, and all our natural human relations are alienated and sold back to us in their most distorted forms, we cannot work toward real and participatory democracy or a healthy planet. Post-historical, post-literate, post-scientific and post-logical, the society blindly stumbles toward the nightmare it faces and creates, while most of the critics jump from item to item in the media news flow, divided into those who feel all is benign needing only tweaking reform and those who feel all is helplessly lost to some vast Matrix conspiracy of control. Who is doing a structural analysis and who is proposing a solution?
Throughout his life John developed an evolving structural analysis ranging across an on-the-ground level of exhaustive detail to a 600-mile-high vantage point encompassing a holistic awareness of the influences and historical forces that combine to drive what is occurring in our world. While there is now a resurgent popular focus on and concern with fascism, John began studying this process in the 1960s. He has explained its meaning as being when the state and the corporations merge into one and how, “[i]t is an objective economic and political reality that develops from the final stages of monopoly capitalism.” He covered this at great length in a 2005 talk on The September 11 Omission Report: What the Commission Didn’t Report:
I think ... we [are] in the place where the German people were in September of 1939 in terms of our responsibility and the threat of the rise of global fascism. Mussolini called fascism corporatism plus reaction. He said it was when the state and the corporations merged into one. That is objectively what fascism is. Fascism is not Adolf Hitler, an anti-semite, that decides to get a whole country to go along with killing all the Jews and tries to take over the world. It is an objective economic and political reality that develops from the final stages of monopoly capitalism. When wealth concentrates to a particular level and when technology moves forward at a particular level, human labor becomes expendable.
The first people killed in the Holocaust were the mental patients because they were useless eaters, they were taking up space, they were untermenschen. The American Psychiatric Association, the World Psychiatric Association, the world eugenics associations were like this [fingers held up side-by-side]. They believed that they could clean the gene pool out. In fact the defense at Nuremberg was, Why are you taking us to court for this? You started mass sterilization in 1928 in the United States. You started getting rid of these people that didn’t fit in the gene pool and the feeble-minded. You taught us how to put people into concentration camps with what you did to the Native Americans. And we’re just doing what you did so why are you taking us to court? I mean one genocide doesn’t justify the next but it’s a legitimate question that we seem unable to ask.
Basically we blame the rest of the world for what we’ve done and the situations that we’ve set up. These things are being done in our name. After 9/11 all these people said, Well why do they hate us? It’s like, Well if you don’t know history—and many people don’t because they don’t teach it in school—you don’t know what’s being done in your name abroad for the last 50 years. But the people in those countries know. They know the corporations that came in. They know who came in and stole their labor. They know who put the dictator in that repressed them. They know where the money was coming from. They see what the relations are to the US military and the US State Department in the embassy there. They’re not fooled. But the American people have to be kept in the dark about it. Because it’s being done in their name.
The yearning has been constant over the past four years to ask John what he thought, what he wanted, what to do, to seek his advice and counsel. This internet aspect of the Hidden History Center project of the Museum of Hidden History is our endeavor to manifest what John explored and expressed throughout his days here. I want to express my gratitude towards and appreciation of Amie Tracey, nonpareil web wizard. This redesign/upgrade would not have been possible without her good-natured help, support, savvy, and counsel.
The framework is not yet at full power; of the intended 49 subtopics—see the linked list of 31 Second Tier Subjects in Table of Contents—19 remain to be implemented including Alternative Economic Systems, Climate Catastrophe, Drones and Targeted Assassinations, Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless Tech, Food Security, GI Resistance/Counter-Recruitment, and Nanotechnology.
On September 1st 2001—10 days before we were presented with “The New Pearl Harbor” Show, courtesy of The Project for the New American Century, and its blueprint for US global domination laid out in the September 2000 report, REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES - Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century—John shared his current thinking about Real Democracy In The Belly of the Beast to his list of correspondents:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said there are three pillars that hold up the current system of domestic oppression: poverty, racism and militarism. In order to have real democracy, economic justice, peace and a unified society, we have to both envision our own liberation in our time and take back our history, power and moral integrity.
The reason Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. King were both loved and hated, both followed and murdered had to do with their use of “satygraha” or truth force and “ahimsa” or nonviolent harmlessness. These powerful tools moved them outside the control game that has secured privilege for a few over millenia. These systems of privilege, which are the real, deep violence of society, cannot be challenged or defeated using their own violent methods. Nor can they be changed by substituting a new elite in the seat of power, or by reforming them.
As I see it, the crucial steps that must be taken now to stop the current trend to global corporatization, fascism and genocide/ecocide/ethnocide include the following, here in the belly of the beast....
There are many brilliant people and communities thinking about, practicing and expanding these ideas and actions that are the answer to the current global dilemma. If you are inspired, if you wish to share your vision of them, if you want to learn more, please contact us.
This is an invitation to rededicate ourselves to both envision our own liberation and take back our history, power, and moral integrity. Please communicate with us, sharing your own endeavors and pursuits on behalf of the Seventh Generation yet unborn and your ideas of what to build into the Hidden History Center internet archive.
Encoded in our individual DNA is the experience of our lineage from the very beginning. Whose whole perceptional reality was what I was just saying: all things have being, we’re made up of the Earth—all my relations, pray to spirits. See, and they didn’t pray to man or human form. The closest they came to it was they prayed to spirits that were called ancestors. And because they were praying to those ancestors for help and guidance, they understood that we were borrowing today from the past and the future. We’re borrowing it from both places. So they had this understanding of reality. They knew that to keep the balance was the purpose.... The reason for being was to keep the balance.... So this was what I will call a spiritual perception of reality. Because of the spiritual perception of reality they understood that life was about responsibility. It wasn’t about the abstraction of freedom—it was about responsibility.—John Trudell, What It Means To Be A Human Being (2001)
May we all continually awaken to and be renewed by recognition of our participation in and partaking of life at this unique time of Koyaanisqatsi.
For the Earth, the children, and all that follow us here,Dave Ratcliffe
rat haus reality press
Roslindale, MA 02131
https://ratical.org/rhrPress.html
Assistant Director
Museum of Hidden History
https://hiddenhistorycenter.org/MoHH
Archivist, Board member
Committee for Nuclear Responsibility
https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/
FIRST DRAFT (version 0.7, 3 Aug 2014)
“The real history of the world is a history of competing conspiracies.”
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 1972
Preamble