This week we will launch the First Annual Anti-Communist Film Festival. It will be held at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C.
This year also marks the 30th year since my father Joseph Judge passed away. I wish he were here to come to the festival. My father was a John F. Kennedy Democrat – although he voted for Nixon in 1972 — who loved literature, music, art and poetry.
He also hated communism. From the New York Times obituary in 1996:
Joseph Judge, a writer and editor who spent 25 years at National Geographic magazine, died on April 20 at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 68. The cause was cancer, his family said.
He retired in 1990 as the senior associate editor of the monthly, which began publication in 1888. His articles brought to American coffee tables such far-flung subjects as Alaska, Ireland, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, the Zulu of South Africa and a replay of the first trek across Australia in 1859.
Here’s the Irish Times:
Ireland lost a great friend in the recent death of Joe Judge, former senior associate editor of the National Geographic magazine. His forbears came from Garrywadreen, in Co Mayo, and for generations his family kept in close touch with relatives and neighbours there. He wrote beautifully in the National Geographic about Mayo and many other parts of Ireland.
Joe certainly was a man of many parts – writer, journalist, historian, painter, poet conservationist. He was equally at home in Ballyvaughan (where a tree planting ceremony remembered his many visits), Claremorris, Alaska, Borneo or Melbourne. He visited Ireland often, organising group visits and lecturing them on the history and heritage of the island. (I recall meeting him in Ballyvaughan with 32 of his family and neighbours in nine cars – a travelling open university.) He accomplished in his 68 years more than most other people dream about. Under his kindly guidance, the National Geographic sales reached 12 million copies a month.
Like most things Joe attempted, his marriage was a roaring success. With his wife Phyllis, he presided over a family full of laughter, argument, poetry and opinion and great family parties. On the night he died, the neighbours set a circle of paper lanterns burning around Hayfield Court, Potomac, where he lived a shimmering, luminous tribute of love and affection and a signal to the heavens that Joe was on his way.
Dad’s travels also brought him to the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. I’ll never forget picking him up at the airport when he got back. It was the only time, in all of his years of travel, that I saw him kneel down and kiss the ground. I asked him what Russia was like. “Hellhole,” he replied. He described rampant alcoholism, depression, surveillance, and no artistic freedom. Whenever we had one of our roaring parties, my father was in his element, laughing, reciting poetry, telling stories. However, if someone started praising Moscow and offering the usual leftist nonsense about what we could learn from Cuba, dad would quickly turn deadly serious. He would quietly explain the despair, censorship, and pure evil he had witnessed in communist countries. Despite being a JFK fan, dad voted for Nixon in 1972. He saw that the democrats were going off the far-left cliff. He would have found it incredible that more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left is still holding out for socialism. Dad loved the film The Lives of Others, which is the centerpiece of the festival.
It’s deeply sad to me that the Democrat Party has been swallowed by Marxists and the Democratic Socialists of America. A major influence my father had on me was a resistance to being a mindless joiner of any group. He taught me to stay a critical thinker, even if that leads to some opinions that might not go over well — even with conservatives, who represent the side I most agree with. Earlier this year I posted a piece about how conservatives have failed at art, and it relates to the Anti-Communist Film Festival:
On the International Movie Database list of the “50 Best Conservative Movies,” the most recent film, Juno, came out in 2007—almost 20 years ago. Other films on the list are brilliant but most are more than two decades old: The Incredibles, Metropolitan, The Lives of Others.
The right mocks Lena Dunham, but what she accomplished, not only with Girls but also with her film Tiny Furniture and the book Not That Kind of Girl, require remarkable work, skill and dedication—and imaginative shoots and locations.
Over the last century, beginning with movies, jazz and literature, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries. They defended James Joyce. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and directed Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.
My father knew it was fine to have opinions, but there is no substitute for the hard work of creating art. I still remember the night when I was in high school and I got home after midnight — on a Thursday. He met me at the door, looking upset and asking me where I had been. “Doing this,” I said and handed him a copy of The Unknown Hoya, the underground newspaper I and two other guys put together. Suddenly his tone changed. He looked at the paper and started laughing. I had been out creating. He celebrated that I was so in love with music, which in the 1980s was like an extension of the modernist writers and poets he loved. He had read everything, but his favorite book was The Lord of the Rings. He raised all of us to see through BS. To not be mindless mouthpieces. To be free men.
The Anti-Communist Film Festival wants to reintroduce Americans, especially young Americans, to the idea of being a free people. Of writing the books you want, playing the music you want, and making the movies you want. Of being fearless and telling the truth. Communism represents everything we hate. Only idiots fall for it.
The festival will take place just a few blocks from the offices of National Geographic. I will be thinking of dad, and of a speech that Aaragorn makes in my father’s favorite book, The Lord of the Rings: “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight!! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!!!”
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