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John Lennon - Dissident Beatle

10 Dissidents Who Changed the World: #3

Dissident 3 Beatle mop-top John Lennon threw himself into the anti-war movement with full abandon on June 1, 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, when he recorded Give Peace a Chance.

John Lennon The song was written off-the-cuff at one of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s weeklong Bed-Ins for World Peace. Later, with dozens of journalists and celebrities packed into Room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Lennon sang the song into a rented 8-track recorder. Comedian Tommy Smothers accompanied Lennon on guitar, and the rest of the room chanted along on the chorus.

Three years later, the Nixon administration was fed up with Lennon’s growing anti-war influence on America’s draft-age cannon fodder. In 1972, the U.S. Government told the former Beatle he had thirty days to leave the country. To their surprise, Lennon fought back.

John Lennon’s Traumatic Childhood

Young John Lennon John Lennon’s traumatic childhood began when he was born in a Liverpool hospital during a WWII German air raid in 1940. Then, when he was five years old, he had to choose between his mom and his dad…

In 1946, John’s roving father came home and took him on a vacation. When they didn’t return on time, John’s mother and her live-in boyfriend came to retrieve John. At a vacation cottage in Blackpool, John’s father asked his son to choose: sail away with his dad to seek fortune in New Zealand, or stay in Liverpool with his mom.

John chose his father, and watched his crying mother walk out the door. But after she’d gone, John changed his mind and ran down the street after her.

In the following years, John lived at his Aunt Mimi’s house. She and her husband doted on him, and his mom visited almost every day. It was his mom, Julia, who bought him his first guitar, and played him Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry records.

Then, when John was 17, he watched his mom get run over by a drunken off-duty police officer. It’s a miracle a boy with so much baggage grew up to function at all in society. And yet, as coal turns to diamond, incalculable stress and pressure often begets phenomenal results in people, too.

John Lennon in America

John Lennon kept playing his guitar, and soon hooked up with another teen who’d lost his mom. His name was Paul McCartney, and by 1964 The Beatles had grabbed a hold of the world, and they didn’t let go for the next six years.

John Lennon By 1970, the band had dissolved. But Lennon, along with his new wife, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, had found a new pursuit: opposing the Vietnam War.

In August 1971, the couple moved to New York City.

After becoming friends with anti-war leaders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, they planned the first concert tour by a Beatle since the Beatles had quit touring in 1966.

One idea was for the tour to shadow President Nixon’s campaign speech tour around the country. Since passage of the 26th Amendment, the 1972 presidential election would be the first in which 18-year-olds had the right to vote.

Besides speaking out against the war, Lennon wanted to use the tour to persuade those 11 million new eligible voters to register and vote against the war — which meant voting against Nixon.

But first, Lennon was asked to perform at a concert to bring attention to imprisoned poet and activist John Sinclair…

John Lennon Helps Free John Sinclair

In 1971, John Sinclair was serving ten years in prison for selling two marijuana joints to an undercover cop. Hoping to draw attention to Sinclair’s outlandish prison sentence, John Lennon and Yoko Ono headlined the December 10 concert in front of 15,000 people. As a testament to Lennon’s growing political influence, the State of Michigan released John Sinclair two days later.

The Nixon administration was paying attention.

In early 1972, Senator Strom Thurmond informed Nixon of Lennon’s plans for an anti-war, voter registration concert tour. Thurmond reminded Nixon that there would be many new voters under the age of 21 — probably all Beatle fans and probably all anti-war. Thurmond suggested that Lennon — a non-U.S. citizen — be deported.

John Lennon Fights Deportation

In March 1973, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings against Lennon. They claimed that Lennon was ineligible to be in the United States because in 1968 he had been convicted of misdemeanor cannabis possession in London. The tactic worked, and tied up Lennon enough to prevent his anti-war concert tour. And Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide.

For the next couple of years, Lennon was under a constant 60-day order to leave the country, which his attorney managed to repeatedly get extended. But even while being harassed, wiretapped, and tailed by FBI agents, Lennon didn’t stop speaking out against the Vietnam War.

John Lennon Finally, after Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal, Lennon was granted his green card in 1975.

Watching the Wheels

On John Lennon’s birthday in 1975, Yoko gave birth to John’s second son, Sean. Lennon took a five-year vacation to spend time with his son — something he’d neglected to do with first son, Julian. In 1980, he returned to the music scene with a new album. The record was climbing the charts when he was murdered.

Because he risked his reputation for what was right, spoke out against a senseless war, ingeniously promoted peace, and ultimately overcame a government that wasn’t playing fair, John Lennon is one of my favorite 10 Dissidents Who Changed the World.

* * *

Go to the next article in this series:
Stanislav Petrov - Dissident Comrade.

Go to the previous article in this series:
Ehren Watada - Dissident Lieutenant.

Go to the series index:
10 Dissidents Who Changed the World.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under Art & Culture, History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “John Lennon - Dissident Beatle”

Xman says:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 8:55 am

Boy, everytime I think I’m over his death I see something like this and realize there is still an open wound. There is quite a bit online about his assassin being cia, but seems very hard to believe. But who knows when our government is staffed with criminally insane mental midgets?

Reply
Xman says:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 9:36 am

btw, does anyone read Felicity Arbuthnot?
This girl swings a mighty devistating club and I don’t mean golf.
She let loose today on Tony Blair. Simply a masterpiece.
She is freelance for http://www.globalresearch.ca where the Blair piece is….and has her own blog at arbuthnot4iraq.blogspot.com…where the piece is not yet.
She is one of my top ten favorite writers.

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JoeC says:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 10:58 am

Xman: Yeah, I would have liked to have heard Lennon’s voice around all these years since he’s been gone…in opinion interviews AND on the radio. He was definitely a jerk sometimes, especially in his younger years, and probably a bit gullible and too trusting (but I like that about him, too…) but he always seemed to be brutally honest and just had a way of cutting through the crap. He really was a dreamer, and in all the home movies of him, it’s still fun to see the excited kid bubbling up in him.

I haven’t been reading Arbuthnot’s articles, but will keep an eye out now. Just read the one you pointed to…jeez, she does clobber old Tony and Dubya, don’t she? Deservedly so, too. The part about phony Tony and Dubya clearing out the town for the bar photo op, bringing in his own chef, locking everybody’s houses down…what a phony act. If you’re not going to REALLY get out and mingle (which might be a wise choice, considering how much people love these two war criminals…) then just take your lunches in the White House and 10 Downing Street, and don’t make it more difficult for everybody else. What a pair…it’ll be nice when they’re both hiding out from war crime tribunals in South America.

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Xman says:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 1:21 pm

oh? Does Tony have property down there too?

Reply
JoeC says:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 2:14 pm

I haven’t heard of Tony buying any land, but the report was that Bush bought 98 thousand acres in Paraguay…with that much, he’s just GOTTA be thinking about letting Tony squat on a few of those acres ;-)

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Indigobusiness says:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 3:26 pm

My hero.

What a world,
that so many take such a man for granted,
or see him as a threat.

Reply
JoeC says:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 4:52 pm

Indigobusiness: John Lennon’s one of my personal heros, too. People argue that he was a bad example, did this, did that… You know, EVERY human does things that make them bad examples; I think it’s how much their love outpaces their hate that makes them heros, and arguably everybody is a hero just for showing up and making a go of it on this planet.

But back to Lennon, and the rest of the fabs, it still freaks me out to sit back and review all (12?) of the albums they recorded, plus a couple albums worth of singles that weren’t even on the albums, and then to think that if they’d just finished recording Abbey Road in 2007, they would have put out Please Please Me in 2001. I’m overwhelmed that all that music and creativity and innovation came in just six years…How I wish I could get treated to two new full albums a year like folks did in the sixties…blows me away.

P.S. Highly recommend getting the “Love” remix in 5.1 surround sound, park your face right up to the center channel, and hear Lennon’s voice, solo, chewing gum, like he’s right in the room with you, singing goo goo ga joo…

Reply
Ste says:

Friday, June 8, 2007 at 5:49 am

just to let you know, i’m only going on here for homework. In any other situation, I wouldn’t waste my life here. Just to let you know.

Reply
Hard-boiled Dreams of the World » Blog Archive » Stanislav Petrov - Dissident Comrade says:

Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 2:55 pm

[...] Go to the previous article in this series: John Lennon - Dissident Beatle. [...]

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John Lennon - Dissident Beatle

10 Dissidents Who Changed the World: #3

John Lennon’s Traumatic Childhood

John Lennon in America

John Lennon Helps Free John Sinclair

John Lennon Fights Deportation

Watching the Wheels

9 Responses to “John Lennon - Dissident Beatle”

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