January 23, 2006
John Judge in New York -- I saw John Judge talk in New York at the 911 Truth meetings that take place every Sunday at St. Marks Church at Ninth Street and Second Avenue. This time the meeting was moved uptown to 35th Street and you had to go to the meeting to see the sign on the door to find out it had been moved. But Judge was -- is -- a revelation, a marvel. No one has a more encyclopedic knowledge and fundamental grasp of the post World War II rise of global fascism.Fascism, Judge points out, is not some cult that grew up around Hitler. Hitler, in fact was recruited because it was observed that he had a certain charisma with other soldiers, and he was put to use. Fascism is the final stage of monopoly capitalism, Judge says. And we are in it, we are in the transition to it right now. What happened in Germany is now happening on a global scale.
The U.S. is now, Judge said, at the point where Germany was in 1939 when the invasion of Poland was done, and the rest of World War II was about to take place. It was up to the German people then to stop it from within, but of course that didn't happen. Now, he said, it's up to the American people to stop it. Will it happen? It's hanging in balance and no one really knows.
Judge started his lecture by talking about "some things others aren't talking about." Since so much has been covered by so many people, his chosen subject put him into minutiae on the fringes of the vast subject at the first part of his talk. He described, for example, how in the time since 9/11, the administration has -- rather than building up domestic defenses against terrorist attacks -- actually further dismantled the capability. Valerie Plame, he said, operated under an assumed name over a network that tracked the nuclear capabilities of networks in the middle east and beyond. So the "outing" was more than just a slap in the face of her husband for telling the truth about the administration's bogus claims, it was also the destruction of her very vital operation. There are many other examples of the destruction of the defense capability.
After covering a great deal of technical information about the actual breakdowns involved in the failure of US defenses on September 11, 2001, Judge went on to explain how it fits into his global view of the rise of fascism, and at that point those who did not know him could see his dazzling command of that alternate history.
At one point Judge mentioned feeling the shudder of impact in his apartment when the Pentagon was attacked only a mile away. He also said he had talked to a number of witnesses, including a maid who had seen the plane. At the sound of the word "plane" a number of people in the audience piped up with responses -- "Impossible..." and so on, because many in that crowd believe that it could not have been a plane that hit the Pentagon. It's a point of contention among those who reject the official explanation of 9/11. Judge dismissed the disagreement in favor of higher levels of discussion on which agreement is more important.
"Some of you have come to different conclusions than I have, but I have come to a place in this that I came to in the Kennedy assassination in that I'm no longer down in Dealey Plaza trying to figure out which bullet came from which direction and whether a gunman was hiding behind a tree or where. What we do know is that this was an operation that took place with complicity on the highest levels, because there was no way for it to have been pulled off without that."
I first discovered him around 1990 when Bush Senior was ramping up to pull off his Desert Storm scam, after shattering Panama to silence his former employee Noriega. A friend gave me six 90-minute tapes of Judge speaking in Toronto, nine hours of the most mind-blowing, paradigm-exploding material I had ever heard. It created a context within which to place the horrifying events I was witnessing as Bush turned the US into a media-controlled fascist military state.
Judge started out as the son of two Pentagon employees, and growing up in that milieu he was alerted early on to a way of thinking that is remote from most Americans. He responded to that exposure in a unique way, based on his propensity for study and reading about history. A great day for him was when his mother dropped him off on Saturday in the Pentagon library and he could spend the whole day reading.
He's a prodigious researcher. I think he does little else. I would like to ask him how many books he reads a week. I believe he has continued to build the enormous knowledge I encountered in him 15 years ago at a continued lightning speed, so that he's still light years ahead of the vast majority in his understanding of what is going on.
It's an overwhelming picture, because what is happening is nearly overwhelming. But Judge maintains a sense of hope, which is extremely valuable and reassuring. After being exposed to the kinds of things he says, it's hard to pick oneself up off the floor and gather the wherewithal to continue. But he expresses hope. "I would find it a very depressing world if I didn't think that you can know things about the world around you." Most Americans have no idea, really no idea about what is going on in the world, there's no way around that grim fact, but Judge still characterizes the American people as the last best hope for democracy in the world, and he holds on to hope that fascism can still somehow be staved off. "There are more of us, and we can think," he says.
It all comes back to building and spreading awareness.
Meanwhile, here are some good links:
More on the Plame case: "Fitzgerald Eyes Plame-Niger Conspiracy Prosecutor Probing Niger Forgeries, Possible Conspiracy in CIA Leak" by Jason Leopold at truthout We Do Get Fooled Again -- Mark Crispin Miller on why the media won't touch his book on how the Right stole the 2004 election. "Bush/Cheney stole their re-election in 2004. They stole it not just in Ohio, but all throughout the USA, from coast to coast. They stole it not by using any single ploy, but through a stealthy combination of computerized vote theft, bureaucratic monkey business, systematic shortages of viable equipment and old-fashioned dirty tricks, including rampant bullying, disinformation and obstructionism." Scoop The Death of Traditional Media -- This is quite old now, but an excellent piece by Danny Shecter on the decline of the media in the U.S., not just its obvious decline in value and quality, but its decline in profitability. See Buzzflash.com