The following is inspired by and dedicated to John Judge, a most uncommon common man who devoted his life and energies to urging this nation live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all and to caring for the Earth and all its kin. John lived his life, and gave everything he had, to honor and serve Life’s needs.

The protracted war envisioned by some in the White House, under the rubric of ending terrorism and “eradicating evil” will destabilize not only the oil-rich Arabic world, but potentially the various states of the former Soviet Union. These counties are similarly rich with the sort of resources and well-educated labor that the globalization agenda demands. It will also change economic relations here in the United States, throwing us back into the permanent war economy of the Cold War years, and a severe economic slump.

—John Judge, “A New War or a New World?,” 23 Sep 2001

I do these things because I’m hoping that a little bit of humor, a little bit of perspective, it’ll open up something for you that you’ll look at the paradigm in a different way. In fact I wanted to write a memoir, and thinking about a title of a memoir would be Brother Can You Paradigm? Because if you can’t paradigm you’re in trouble. It’s not that everything they’re telling you is a lie. But the focus, the lens, they’ve got is a little skewered so that you don’t see it straight when you look at it.

—John Judge, “What the 9/11 Commission Didn’t Report,” 21 Feb 2005

This is an invitation to explore the unknown possibilities of existence through the process of exercising our imagination and intelligence to visualize what an actual democracy would look like today. Not the centuries-old representative form fashioned in the 1700s where the only method of communication and travel was either a horse or a boat. In the present era of mass communication, participatory democracy is both feasible and of critical necessity if the human project is to survive, making it possible to mend the sacred hoop of Life’s creation to truly meet the needs of the seventh generation yet unborn.

In a letter earlier this year, author and researcher Graeme MacQueen wrote about the process he explored in writing “Beyond Their Wildest Dreams…” (see below). His motivation was “to understand how people come to know the world and how we can open up closed minds.” He explained some of this as his “imagination approach” in the following:

I adopted the word [imagination] from German philosopher Gunther Anders, whose little article, “Thesis for the Atomic Age” (published in 1962) had a big effect on me over the years as a peace and environmental activist. Anders said that in the nuclear age we are doomed if we don’t have imagination. He said,

The basic dilemma of our age is that “We are smaller than ourselves,” incapable of mentally realizing the realities which we ourselves have produced. Therefore we might call ourselves “inverted Utopians”: while ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing.

He also said that escapists of today do not hide in imagination, they hide in the ivory tower of perception, because the senses are “senselessly narrow.” So, he was giving a power to this word “imagination” that we don’t normally give it. “Imagination” is what we give ourselves to when we have the courage to face the world, to actually visualize what is going on. It is, he says, part of the courage to be afraid.

The following (at <ratical.org>) was composed to invite [re-]exploration of what has now entered the beginning of its SEVENTEEN YEAR: truly a global war of terror produced and executed by the United States. The rest of this invitation is at: <https://ratical.org/ratitorsCorner/10.05.17.html>.

Marking 16 Years of the US Global War Of Terror

Guy Debord: In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy, which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government that accompanied this reign….
Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in general; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past…. With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning….
All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance….

Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

COLD WAR: THE NEXT GENERATION

“It is a sobering thought that better evidence is required to prosecute a shoplifter than is needed to commence a world war.”

Anthony Scrivener QC, The Times, 5 Oct 2001

“It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.”

Dick Cheney, 21 Oct 2001

 

Legend has it the Cold War was closed out in 1991. 10 years later, its Next Generation spawn was inaugurated. 16+ years into this war that will not end “in our lifetime”, it is our moral responsibility to reveal its covert and overt roots and, in doing so, end it given that it is being done in our name every single day.

“Your loyalty belongs to the human race and not to a flag, not to a country that’s supposedly under attack from some mystical force that’s out there that you can’t even identify—I mean, these terrorists, the way they’re presented to us, it’s as if they dropped in from outer space. All you know about them is that they hate you and they want to kill you. You can’t negotiate with them. You can’t talk to them. You can’t understand them. All you can do is kill them. And you got to kill every last one except, you never know…. It’s like the pod people, you know, maybe it’s spread to somebody else and then you’ve got to start killing them.”

John Judge, 21 Feb 2005
Ed Curtin:
Graeme MacQueen:
John Judge:
Antidote to September 11 – Exercising Our Imagination:


John Judge was an unparalleled historian of the US National Security State.
An exemplar earthling, his loyalty was to the human race, not to a flag or a country.