Posted on 08/11/2021 12:12:04 PM PDT by Cronos
In the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremonies, there was the sad spectacle of a children’s choir singing the John Lennon song, “Imagine.” While some just think of the song as “pretty” the radical atheist/globalist words are a direct attack on things central to the existence of any civilization. Lennon imagines, with approval, a world without God, religion, or country. In effect no piety, no loyalties, and nothing worth dying for. He also dismissed the idea of heaven, hell, and more than implies that religion, faith and God are the source of violence, greed and disunity.
As you will see below, there is strong evidence that John Lennon himself later distanced himself from many of the notions celebrated in the song lyrics.
I wonder if the kids knew how truly empty, dark, unrealistic, and dystopian the world they sang of was. I wonder too, if the organizers of the opening ceremonies understood the irony of singing of world without countries, even as athletes marched in under different flags from different countries prepared to compete.
Here are some of the lyrics of Lennon’s song:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions ….etc.
So there it is, a world without faith, religion, Church, Country, piety, patriotism and the free market economy. The song implicitly endorsed atheistic Communism, or at least Socialism in its dream of “no possessions.” Imagine, was perhaps the most secular and radical of popular songs ever written, dripping with contempt, deconstructionist, revolutionary, and reductionist, a Magna Carta for secular humanism, and Communism.
And yet, it would seem John Lennon either disavowed much of the song, or never meant it in the first place. In a 1980 interview given shortly before his death, perhaps his last, he says some remarkable things that indicate a very different John Lennon than the song portrays. The interview (quoted below in a secondary source) seems largely forgotten since Lennon’s murder wholly changed the conversation and froze his image as the “60s radical.” It would seem he was far from that when he died. I am only here quoting a small part of the article, which you can read in its entirety here: Stop Imagining
Here are the pertinent excerpts:
In his definitive song, “Imagine”….[Lennon] famously dreams of a world with “no possessions.” The mature Lennon explicitly disavowed such naïve sentiments:
I worked for money and I wanted to be rich….What I used to be is guilty about money. … Because I thought money was equated with sin. I don’t know. I think I got over it, because I either have to put up or shut up, you know. If I’m going to be a monk with nothing, do it. Otherwise, if I am going to try and make money, make it. Money itself isn’t the root of all evil.
The man who famously called for imagining a world with “No religion” also jettisoned his anti-theism.
“People got the image I was anti-Christ or anti-religion,” he said. “I’m not at all. I’m a most religious fellow. I’m religious in the sense of admitting there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m certainly not an atheist.”
Even more shocking to the idea of Lennon as a secular leftist, or a deep thinker, the man rejected evolution.
“Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way,” he insisted. “That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t’ve come from anything—fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage.”
……His final interviews make clear he was above all concerned with his family.
“I’m not here for you,” he said, speaking to his fans. “I’m here for me and [Yoko] and the baby.” He revered the institution of marriage, explaining how much it meant to get the state approving his union with Ono. “[R]ituals are important, no matter what we thought as kids. … So nowadays it’s hip not to be married. But I’m not interested in being hip.” [1]
So there it is, the revolutionary, it would seem, either reconsidered, or never fully embraced the radicalism of the song “Imagine.” Elsewhere in the article he is quoted as saying,
“It’s easier to shout ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the people’ than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. That’s the hardest one.”
I do not hold John Lennon up as anything other than he was, a singer and composer, and quite a good one at that. I personally cannot stand it when we elevate movie stars, and entertainers to the status of cultural and political experts. But given the fact that others do, it is worth noting that one of the icons of the secular humanist movement and the radical left, made something of a journey back to traditional values, family, faith, and personal accountability.
I do not sanction everything Lennon says in the article, I only note the journey he made and claim the hope that Lennon did not die the radical atheist some thought him to be. I pray too others will and are making the journey he apparently did.
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Interesting! I’ve always thought the major appeal of this song is the title and the lovely, lyrical music.
So very original at these Olympics and at every Olympics since at least 1996. Any bets on the next?
I had never heard any of this from Lennon, but to be fair, I had never been looking for it either.
As I got older, I found him less and less interesting, which is understandable.
But given that most of us did get most of our knowledge about him from the Media or Leftist authors, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they made him a hero in their own image.
Or maybe the interviews in which he said those things caught him on a lucid day. I don’t know.
Well...I admit to having liked the melody itself, but...even at a younger age, I never got any inspiration from those lyrics.
I have never been someone to follow what those lyrics seemed to indicate to me, and even as a teenager, the “counter culture” anti-government, anti-religious, and anti-wealth/class warfare tone of it turned me off.
As the years went by, I became unable to disassociate the melody from the lyrics, and began to feel anger every time I heard it.
Especially given that that people who usually embraced the apparent meaning and played it as a theme in situations they wanted to back up with the song were people with philosophies I felt extreme distaste for.
“Imagine there’s no possessions.”
A line written by a guy who left an estate worth hundreds of millions 40 years ago. Worth well over a billion in today’s dollars. Imagine there’s no possessions!
Olympics. World stage. Children. They got us by the short hairs my friends. Won’t let go will they?
Don’t know if this is true but I heard that John Lennon was a registered Republican at the time of his death.
He’s been voting democrat since then but...
I prefer Pink Floyd’s:
We don’t need no education;
We don’t need no thought control;
No dark sarcasms in the classrooms;
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
HEY, TEACHER, LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE!!!
Apparently, lyrics writer, Roger Waters, actually thought the schools would indoctrinate the kids with CONSERVATIVE values.
So a competition that has people competing for their own countries, has a theme song that says, “Imagine there’s no countries.”
The film, THE KILLING FIELDS, about the Khmer Rouge holocaust in Cambodia, ended with a refrain from that song which was idiotic because those communist believed (officially) in no possessions and no God and yet set a per capita record in national murder.
When I was a sophomore in HS back in ‘70, one of the ‘liberal’ priest in my Catholic HS allowed one of our student rock bands to play during Mass, and they played “Imagine” during Communion. The principal freaked out after he heard the lyrics and never allowed them back.
Could never stand that song ... and I was around in the music scene when it was released. Had a girl break a date with me when I told her I thought Lennon was tokin’ when he wrote it.
Probably not, but all these misty eyed kids listening to Imagine need to be told how Lennon really lived and how many "possessions" he accumulated during his life. The lyrics express some of the most unrealistic nonsense ever put to song.
The lyrics for National Lampoon's "Magical Misery Tour" were an amalgamation of his thoughts he expressed in an interview with either Creem or Rolling Stone. And he was allegedly lucid.
Lennon was a serial wife beater who also beat his road manager to the ground and kicked him until his spleen exploded. He died.
Not a man of peace.
I wonder if the kids knew how truly empty, dark, unrealistic, and dystopian the world they sang of was.
Fantasy author Larry Correia, known to his fans as "the International Lord of Hate", put out a pretty good rant put out a pretty good rant about Imagine. You should be able to see it riiight here.
He suggests a cover version by Perfect Circle as a good alternative. See here.
The only good cover of it is the super ominous dark version from Perfect Circle that makes the lyrics actually sound like the oppressive statist garbage that it would be. You can actually hear the gulags....
"Imagine is a song primarily played by flaccid gassy atheists who think it makes them “edgy”. It’s “that guy” in song form. You know the one who won’t shut up, who has a skinny little beard, and who wears a trilby. That’s Imagine, only Imagine isn’t on the sex offender registry. "
enjoy.
And as you accurately divine, FRiend...THAT is no coincidence.
It is why many of us see the direction we are going (as do immigrants from countries who have done these things which they actually lived under) and are trying to make our voices heard.
Governments that actively replace God with Man are capable of great evil.
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