National Security State. An exemplar earthling, his
devotion was to the human race, not to a flag or country.
Solving Pieces of the Puzzle: MLK to Jonestown and Beyond
Mount Taber Baptist Church, Los Angeles, 16 January 1987
I want to end, instead of all this horror, which I do think exists, with a note of hope. Because I do have hope, having done twenty-five years work on these things. I know that they exist. I also know that they’re done by a small number of people. That they don’t represent the interests of most people in this country. That people can be alerted to these things. That people do have a conscience and people can change.
Dr. King’s message to us was that we have a power greater than any force on Earth. We have the power of truth. We have the power over what George Orwell once called the space between our ears.
And with that, we can choose, even in this late hour, for violence and destruction, or non-violence, and a future. But the fact is, we must choose. If, I believe, we begin to tell the truth now, to ourselves and to others, this situation can be reversed.
It’s only history. It belongs to the people.
The vast and incisive legacy of John’s research, wisdom, and voice provides an illuminating beacon to engage all one’s wits and creative imagination birthright to help the human project change course and stake out a different future than the current one based on the demands of capital and its accumulation. Exercising our intelligence in this manner, with clarity and coherence, is of the highest calling Life presents us with.
From Note 3 in the Preface of the 2nd Edition of Understanding Special Operations:
John’s father, John Joseph Judge, was a WWII Army Air Corps veteran and had been a cryptographer assigned overseas. He worked as a civilian at the Pentagon after his return from the war until his death in 1965, Judge 2006. John’s mother, Marjorie Alice Cooley Judge, worked for 25 years as a man-power analyst for the Deputy Chief of Staff in the Personnel Office of the U.S. Army, directly under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As John described in 1992:
My mother worked for 30 years altogether, but 25 years for the Deputy Chief of Staff in the Personnel Office of the U.S. Army, directly under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She was the highest-paid woman employee of the Pentagon; she was five levels above top security. I mentioned to Fletcher Prouty the other day I worked from the bottom up and he worked from the top down, and we met at the Joint Chiefs. My mother’s job was to project overall national draft call figures five years in advance. She had to project an annual national Selective Service call that was right within a hundred people either way five years ahead. She knew from those projections and from the information she got that they were withdrawing from Vietnam….
He was pulling out. My mother knew that because she had to project those kind of figures. I asked her after she retired, “When did they tell you they would escalate in Vietnam?” Because she had to be among the first to know. She said, “Late November of ’63.” I said, “The last week in November?” She said, “Yes, the Monday following the assassination.” I said, “Was this a few more advisers, a change in policy?” She said, “I couldn’t believe the figures. I took them back to the Joint Chiefs—in what must have been the first protest by the civilian community to the war in Vietnam—and said, ‘These can’t be right.’ And they said, ‘You’ll use them.’” They told her November 25, 1963 that the war in Vietnam would last for 10 years and that 57,000 Americans would die and to figure that in. Judge 1992a: 4:38.
Growing up in the shadow of the Pentagon, John’s spirit was prompted to question and challenge the war-making imperative that he encountered in this world at a very early age. In grade school John refused to “practice for a nuclear attack by crouching under … desks and covering … heads.” He argued “that a desk would not protect him from a nuclear blast. He soon found himself in the principal’s office.” Our Founder 2019. John found many ways to express his opposition to war including its human costs to veterans; see Judge 2011. Prompted by the false flag events of September and October 2001, John observed how Pan-daemonium had been given free reign and license with the construction of the house of war, begun on September 11, 1941 and completed-dedicated on January 15, 1943:
John Judge, University of Toronto, 10 August 1991
I don’t worry about being killed. They can kill you from a satellite. They can kill you from the length of a football field with a little flechette. They can kill you by slipping something into your water supply. I mean there’s too many ways that they can kill you. You can’t decide how you’re going to die, only how you’re going to live.
You have to take a reasonable level of precaution but in the end, as I said last night also, I think we’re all dead already at least as far as how much we’re conscious of and have power to strike back against this system. If we remain in the kind of apathy and disempowerment that they’ve taught us to live under, the cynicism that they’ve taught us to accept instead of social change and activism and we don’t stand up to them then we’re just going to die quietly which is what they want us to do. And I think we can back ’em off, we can expose them.
I think individuals and groups can do a great deal to change things. But you get to a certain point—if I lived in Nazi Germany and I found out about the camps and I found out about the soap then you get to a certain point where you’re going to decide, Well, it’s not worth my effort. It’s not me they’re coming after. I’m just going to go home, take a shower and use the soap and wash my hands of it.
Or you can say no. To me it’s a moral imperative at a certain point, if you have any personal integrity, if you have any moral consciousness, you realize a certain amount of truth about these things and you can’t turn around. You can’t go back.
You can’t go take up the good life and live the privilege and live the lie because the lie is gone for you. At that point, I think, you have to—regardless of the consequences, even if it means that I might get killed for speaking out—go ahead and speak out because it’s the only thing to do.
What the hell does it mean that they kill me? Do you know how many people they kill every day? In the third world, in my name and supposedly with my sanction if I keep silent? What on earth does one death of one person in the United States mean? What would the death of one German who cooperated with the fascist regime mean? What’s it worth?
I mean if we’re here for some purpose, it seems to me, it’s to figure out who and where we are and take back our lives and get at that truth. There’ll probably, unfortunately, be more comment about my death if I ever do die than there’ll be about the hundreds of people that were killed at Jonestown. And these were predominantly black people—which was never discussed about the millions of African people currently dying of AIDS, dying of cholera; tremendous level of death all around the world both intentional and through the forced starvation and the exploitation of labor and the near slavery conditions.
But those deaths don’t bother us much. I mean most of us go on with our lives and don’t think about them. But we’re part-and-party to genocide in these current systems and we have to speak up it seems to me even if there’s some cost to us.
So if what they want to do is kill me it’s fair game. I don’t want to kill them. I want to bring them back their human consciousness and give them some chance at seeing again what real human existence and communication is.
My favorite dream—and it’s a very powerful dream I had and I’d like to write a book about it—is one in which I’m pursuing one of these Nazis with a group of people. It’s set in England in the 1890s in the gaslight running down these brick alleys. The Nazi is like sort of like Jekyll, with the little top cap and the cape. He comes to the back gate of the house where he’s got to go in and he hasn’t got time to fumble out the key and get in before we catch up with him.
He turns terrified toward us and instead of a face he has a skull because his human face is gone. And instead of a weapon I pull out a little pouch and open it up and hold the flesh of his human face back up to him.
That’s my dream vision. I don’t like Nazis or fascists one single bit. But I know what human existence is worth. I know who we are at the deepest level and I know what we have to offer each other even if we haven’t committed those sorts of crimes. And I exist in a society that most of my life has totally ignored the worth of the people around me. And I just feel that it’s my responsibility, duty bound, to reverse that direction.
