{"id":4338,"date":"2012-10-09T11:11:45","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T15:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=4338"},"modified":"2012-10-16T11:17:22","modified_gmt":"2012-10-16T15:17:22","slug":"john-lennon-the-last-great-anti-war-activist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/john-lennon-the-last-great-anti-war-activist\/","title":{"rendered":"John Lennon: The Last Great Anti-War Activist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAll we are saying is give peace a chance.\u201d\u2014John Lennon<\/p>\n

Despite the moving tributes that were paid to John Lennon\u2019s lyrical vision of a world without war, racial or religious divisions or hunger at the conclusion of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, there\u2019s really very little real talk of peace anymore.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t hear much talk of peace from presidential candidates Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, both of whom are indebted to the $600 billion military industrial complex for their campaign dollars. It\u2019s the same military industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t hear much about peace from the various talking heads whose mindless chatter keeps us distracted from the ongoing wars that are bleeding us dry (the Afghanistan war just marked its 11th\u00a0anniversary on Oct. 7, 2012, making it the longest war in U.S. history).<\/p>\n

And you certainly don\u2019t hear much about peace from the current crop of musical and cultural icons making headlines today\u2014whether it be teen heart throbs such as Justin Bieber or screen heart throbs such as George Clooney\u2014whose activities seem more geared at cultivating their celebrity status and advancing party politics than promoting peace.<\/p>\n

It may be that John Lennon, born 72 years ago on October 9, 1940, was the last great iconic anti-war activist of our age. Thrust into the spotlight as a member of the Beatles\u2014and what an incredible spotlight it was, with the world at their feet\u2014it didn\u2019t take long for Lennon to recognize that he could use his celebrity status to not only communicate his own ideas about the world but change the way people thought about issues of the day. As\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/em>magazine contributor Martin Lewis noted in his remembrance of Lennon on the 20th\u00a0anniversary of his death: \u201cJohn Lennon was not God. But he earned the love and admiration of his generation by creating a huge body of work that inspired and led. The appreciation for him deepened because he then instinctively decided to use his celebrity as a bully pulpit for causes greater than his own enrichment or self-aggrandizement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lennon\u2019s interests were as varied as the musical styles he sampled throughout his 20-year music career. They ranged from distrust of authority (seen in \u201cWorking Class Hero\u201d), politics (\u201cGimme Some Truth\u201d) and literature (\u201cI Am the Walrus\u201d) to spirituality (\u201cAcross the Universe\u201d) and Primal Scream Therapy (\u201cMother\u201d), and he immortalized all of them in song. Yet paramount among the causes to which Lennon was committed was his almost single-minded devotion to the anti-war movement, which moved to the forefront in the wake of his 1969 marriage to avant-garde artist Yoko Ono.<\/p>\n

Starting with their infamous \u201cBed-Ins for Peace,\u201d Lennon and Ono turned the tables on the paparazzi that dogged their every move in order to stage their own unique anti-war \u201chappening.\u201d It was an inspired tactic on the duo\u2019s part, and one that has never been successfully repeated by any other celebrity of note since then. Using their honeymoon at the Amsterdam Hilton in March 1969 as a launch pad for their anti-war efforts, the Lennons invited the worldwide media to join them in their hotel suite, where they sat in bed for two weeks straight, from nine in the morning to nine at night, engaging in discussions about world peace. A second Bed-In followed three months later in Montreal, where Lennon wrote and recorded what was to become the unofficial refrain of the peace movement\u2014\u201cGive Peace a Chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Lennon explained:<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re really doing is sending out a message to the world, mainly to the youth, especially the youth or anybody, really, that\u2019s interested in protesting for peace or protesting against any forms of violence\u2026 There\u2019s many ways of protest, and this is one of them. And anybody could grow their hair for peace or give up a week of their holiday for peace or sit in a bag for peace. Protest against peace, anyway, but peacefully, because we think that peace is only got by peaceful methods, and to fight the establishment with their own weapons is no good, because they always win, and they have been winning for thousands of years. They know how to play the game violence, and it\u2019s easier for them when they can recognize you and shoot you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By October 1969, \u201cGive Peace a Chance\u201d had become a universal chant at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. On November 15, during a peace rally in Washington, DC, the legendary folk singer Pete Seeger led nearly half a million demonstrators in singing \u201cGive Peace a Chance\u201d at the Washington Monument. Asked what he thought about that day, Lennon later remarked, \u201cI saw pictures of that Washington demonstration on British TV, with all those people singing it, forever and not stopping. It was one of the biggest moments of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the Bed-Ins, Lennon and Ono became even more activist-minded, lending their support to the plight of the working class by way of a shipbuilders\u2019 work-in, railing against the Vietnam War, voicing their discontent over the brutal murders of 14 unarmed civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland (memorialized in \u201cLuck of the Irish\u201d and \u201cSunday Bloody Sunday\u201d), bemoaning the death toll from the uprising at Attica Prison, and holding forth with leading American peace activists of the day such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman\u2014all the while, using music as the medium for their message. Released in October 1971, Lennon\u2019s\u00a0Imagine<\/em>\u00a0album would become his musical calling card for world peace.<\/p>\n

In December 1971, Lennon appeared at a benefit concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for peace activist John Sinclair, who had been arrested in 1969 for selling two joints to an undercover policewoman and was sentenced to ten years in prison (hence the lyric \u201cThey gave him ten for two\u201d in Lennon\u2019s song \u201cJohn Sinclair\u201d). The day before the concert, the Michigan Supreme Court denied Sinclair\u2019s appeal. By this point, Sinclair had been in prison for two and a half years. The rally, which was broadcast live, drew 15,000 attendees, who gathered to hear Lennon perform. The next day, the Michigan Supreme Court reversed its decision, and Sinclair was set free.<\/p>\n

Writing for\u00a0Time<\/em>, Martin Lewis concludes, \u201cOf all Lennon\u2019s legacies, one of the most enduring, and perhaps the most impressive, is who his enemies were. The true measure of his greatness was that in the 1970s he terrified the most powerful man in the world.\u201d While it\u2019s open for debate whether Lennon had more enduring legacies than inspiring terror in government operatives, there is no doubt that for a little while, at least, he became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government. This resulted in a four-year campaign of surveillance and harassment by the U.S. government\u2014spearheaded by J. Edgar Hoover, an attempt by President Richard Nixon to have him \u201cneutralized\u201d and deported, and an FBI file more than 400-pages deep.<\/p>\n

Right up until his death on December 8, 1980, at the hands of an assassin, Lennon remained true to the anti-war activism that had shaped much of his life. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the nation he came to call home. According to the latest report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the U.S. spends $2.16 trillion annually on violence containment\u2014that is, anything related to inflicting, preventing or dealing with the consequences of violence. This includes everything from costs associated with national defense and law enforcement to prisons, counterterrorism and border control. That\u2019s a lot of money\u2014roughly one out of every seven dollars spent per year or $7,000 per American taxpayer annually\u2014to not only administer violence, war and killing but deal with the after-effects of them, as well.<\/p>\n

Put another way, the amount we spend\u201415% of the U.S. economy\u2014to administer and contain violence annually equals the United Kingdom\u2019s entire economic output. That same money, if most of it were channeled into more productive avenues such as education and health care would reduce unemployment by 13%.<\/p>\n

One can only imagine what John Lennon would say about a world where more money is spent on feeding the war machine than on feeding the poor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite the moving tributes that were paid to John Lennon\u2019s lyrical vision of a world without war, racial or religious divisions or hunger at the conclusion of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, there\u2019s really very little real talk of peace anymore. You don\u2019t hear much talk of peace from presidential candidates Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, both of whom are indebted to the $600 billion military industrial complex for their campaign dollars. It\u2019s the same military industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. You don\u2019t hear much about peace from the various talking heads whose mindless chatter keeps us distracted from the ongoing wars that are bleeding us dry (the Afghanistan war just marked its 11th anniversary on Oct. 7, 2012, making it the longest war in U.S. history).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":4339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214,212],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4338"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4338"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4341,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4338\/revisions\/4341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}