John Lennon at 80: One Man Against the Deep State ‘Monster’
- By John W. Whitehead - October 05, 2020
“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”—John Lennon (1969)
John Lennon, born 80 years ago on October 9, 1940, was a musical genius and pop cultural icon.
He was also a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, and a high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.
Long before Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was Lennon who was being singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.
For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Years after Lennon’s assassination it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.
As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”
Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution.
For all of these reasons, the U.S. government was obsessed with Lennon, who had learned early on that rock music could serve a political end by proclaiming a radical message. More importantly, Lennon saw that his music could mobilize the public and help to bring about change. Lennon believed in the power of the people. Unfortunately, as Lennon recognized: “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.”
However, as Martin Lewis writing for Time notes: “John 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.”
For instance, in December 1971 at a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., Lennon took to the stage and in his usual confrontational style belted out “John Sinclair,” a song he had written about a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Within days of Lennon’s call for action, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released.
What Lennon did not know at the time was that government officials had been keeping strict tabs on the ex-Beatle they referred to as “Mr. Lennon.” Incredibly, FBI agents were in the audience at the Ann Arbor concert, “taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song.”
The U.S. government, steeped in paranoia, was spying on Lennon.
By March 1971, when his “Power to the People” single was released, it was clear where Lennon stood. Having moved to New York City that same year, Lennon was ready to participate in political activism against the U. S. government, the “monster” that was financing the war in Vietnam.
The release of Lennon’s Sometime in New York City album, which contained a radical anti-government message in virtually every song and depicted President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung dancing together nude on the cover, only fanned the flames of the conflict to come.
The official U.S. war against Lennon began in earnest in 1972 after rumors surfaced that Lennon planned to embark on a U.S. concert tour that would combine rock music with antiwar organizing and voter registration. Nixon, fearing Lennon’s influence on about 11 million new voters (1972 was the first year that 18-year-olds could vote), had the ex-Beatle served with deportation orders “in an effort to silence him as a voice of the peace movement.”
Then again, the FBI has had a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures. Most notably among the latter are such celebrated names as folk singer Pete Seeger, painter Pablo Picasso, comic actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, comedian Lenny Bruce and poet Allen Ginsberg.
Among those most closely watched by the FBI was Martin Luther King Jr., a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.
While Lennon was not—as far as we know—being blackmailed into suicide, he was the subject of a four-year campaign of surveillance and harassment by the U.S. government (spearheaded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), an attempt by President Richard Nixon to have him “neutralized” and deported. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”
As Lennon’s FBI file shows, memos and reports about the FBI’s surveillance of the anti-war activist had been flying back and forth between Hoover, the Nixon White House, various senators, the FBI and the U.S. Immigration Office.
Nixon’s pursuit of Lennon was relentless and in large part based on the misperception that Lennon and his comrades were planning to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention. The government’s paranoia, however, was misplaced.
Left-wing activists who were on government watch lists and who shared an interest in bringing down the Nixon Administration had been congregating at Lennon’s New York apartment. But when they revealed that they were planning to cause a riot, Lennon balked. As he recounted in a 1980 interview, “We said, We ain’t buying this. We’re not going to draw children into a situation to create violence so you can overthrow what? And replace it with what? . . . It was all based on this illusion, that you can create violence and overthrow what is, and get communism or get some right-wing lunatic or a left-wing lunatic. They’re all lunatics.”
Despite the fact that Lennon was not part of the “lunatic” plot, the government persisted in its efforts to have him deported. Equally determined to resist, Lennon dug in and fought back. Every time he was ordered out of the country, his lawyers delayed the process by filing an appeal. Finally, in 1976, Lennon won the battle to stay in the country when he was granted a green card. As he said afterwards, “I have a love for this country.... This is where the action is. I think we’ll just go home, open a tea bag, and look at each other.”
Lennon’s time of repose didn’t last long, however. By 1980, he had re-emerged with a new album and plans to become politically active again.
The old radical was back and ready to cause trouble. In his final interview on Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon mused, “The whole map’s changed and we’re going into an unknown future, but we’re still all here, and while there’s life there’s hope.”
The Deep State has a way of dealing with troublemakers, unfortunately. On Dec. 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman was waiting in the shadows when Lennon returned to his New York apartment building. As Lennon stepped outside the car to greet the fans congregating outside, Chapman, in an eerie echo of the FBI’s moniker for Lennon, called out, “Mr. Lennon!”
Lennon turned and was met with a barrage of gunfire as Chapman—dropping into a two-handed combat stance—emptied his .38-caliber pistol and pumped four hollow-point bullets into his back and left arm. Lennon stumbled, staggered forward and, with blood pouring from his mouth and chest, collapsed to the ground.
John Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He had finally been “neutralized.”
Yet where those who neutralized the likes of John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and others go wrong is in believing that you can murder a movement with a bullet and a madman.
Thankfully, Lennon’s legacy lives on in his words, his music and his efforts to speak truth to power. As Yoko Ono shared in a 2014 letter to the parole board tasked with determining whether Chapman should be released: “A man of humble origin, [John Lennon] brought light and hope to the whole world with his words and music. He tried to be a good power for the world, and he was. He gave encouragement, inspiration and dreams to people regardless of their race, creed and gender.”
Sadly, not much has changed for the better in the world since Lennon walked among us.
Peace remains out of reach. Activism and whistleblowers continue to be prosecuted for challenging the government’s authority. Militarism is on the rise, with local police dressed like the military, all the while the governmental war machine continues to wreak havoc on innocent lives across the globe.
For those of us who joined with John Lennon to imagine a world of peace, it’s getting harder to reconcile that dream with the reality of the American police state.
Meanwhile, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, those who dare to speak up are labeled dissidents, troublemakers, terrorists, lunatics, or mentally ill and tagged for surveillance, censorship, involuntary detention or, worse, even shot and killed in their own homes by militarized police.
As Lennon shared in a 1968 interview:
“I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives… I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means. If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government and the Russian… Chinese… what they are actually trying to do, and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing. I think they’re all insane. But I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”
So what’s the answer?
Lennon had a multitude of suggestions.
“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”
“War is over if you want it.”
“Produce your own dream…. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders…. You have to do it yourself. That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”
Fake Musical "Rebels" Cash in on Orange Man Bad - #NewWorldNextWeek
Welcome back to New World Next Week — the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Story #1: Billionaires' Combined Wealth Has Reached Record $10.2T, Thanks to Covid-19
https://bit.ly/352WlZK
McDonald’s, Domino’s Booming While Your Neighborhood Restaurant Struggles
https://bit.ly/2SWcmv2
While the Poor Get Sick, Bill Gates Just Gets Richer
https://bit.ly/2SRYxhf
‘Covid-19: The Great Reset’ by Klaus Schwab
https://bit.ly/2HaPvJi
Eli Lilly Pauses Its COVID-19 Antibody Trial Due To Safety Concerns
https://bit.ly/2GQqdAL
Johnson & Johnson Pauses COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Over “Unexplained Illness”
https://bit.ly/37kdzVx
Story #2: FBI Informant 'One Of The Most Active Leaders' Pushing 'Crackpot' Kidnap Plot
https://bit.ly/2Ftsd0T
Defense Says Gov. Whitmer Kidnap Plot Was Just ‘Big Talk Between Crackpots'
https://bit.ly/355hOS6
The FBI Fosters, Funds and Equips American Terrorists
https://bit.ly/2GZ5qLg
How To Foil Your Own Terror Plot
https://bit.ly/3lRDPKz
Episode 266 – The Terrorists Have Been Identified
https://bit.ly/352Wpss
Story #3: Jello Biafra Says Trump Is the G.G. Allin of Presidents
https://bit.ly/355hVx0
What Would Jello Do? Part 85: Vote Defense!
https://bit.ly/3j1sKEW
Jello Biafra and GSM Release First Song In 7 Years
https://bit.ly/3j4fPlD
Ministry’s New Song “Alert Level” Samples Teen Activist Greta Thunberg
https://bit.ly/33YkX6y
Jourgenson, Biafra Want You to Vote For the Same NWO They Used to Rail Against
https://bit.ly/3iXH41u
Stone Roses’ Ian Brown Claims COVID Was “Planned Designed and Executed to Make Us Digital Slaves”
https://bit.ly/316QUId
John Lennon at 80: One Man Against the Deep State ‘Monster’
https://bit.ly/3nR3Bka
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G. Edward Griffin - Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Bolshevism, Agenda 21 are All the Same
The Church of the Holy State – Worship Service
11/10/2020
Politics is a rigged game staged by the banksters the corporations and their cronies to distract the public from the forces that are really running the world. When fully grown adults believe in the political puppet show and even invest their identities in it to the point where they are cheering the heroes and booing the villains it is every bit as pathetic as fully grown adults believing in professional wrestling. If you view it either politics or professional wrestling as a cheesy soap opera like entertainment fair enough but if you genuinely believe that the staged conflicts and phony dramas are real and truly reflect the governing process of the country let alone the world then I don’t know what to say to you? You are so far detached from reality that you are probably beyond all hope I hate to break it to you but your favorite political figures are marionettes the only reason they exist on the political stage at all is because the political puppet masters have decided that they are effective spokespeople for this or that agenda or that they are good at distracting you from this or that agenda newsflash Trump runs nothing Hillary wouldn’t have a career if she didn’t literally follow the lead of Soros or go to the CFR mother-ship for her foreign policy marching orders real quote look it up.
If sanders became president it would be exactly the same ditto for whoever is your personal choice for dream president tulsi supporters I am looking at you yes people who believe in the political puppet show are like the prisoners in plato’s cave watching the shadows on the wall before them and mistaking those shadows for reality but it’s even worse than that if only this were a corrupt rigged system then the answer would be straightforward if not easy to implement simply clean up politics once we have a fair election that really represents the will of the people you know fifty percent plus one of the population then everything will be peachy keen right wrong because government itself is immoral no I don’t want better elections I don’t want to clean up the system I don’t want to get the money out of politics and make sure every vote is counted and drain the swamp so we can make America or any other geographical location great again.
The state is not a benevolent force despite what the most brainwashed of status believe. It is not even a neutral tool that can be used for good or ill as those who consider themselves pragmatists believe it is force, it is aggression, it is people believing that what is wrong for any individual to do is perfectly okay if an agent of the state does it. If I steal it is theft if the state steals its taxation. If I kill it is murder if the state kills it is warfare. If I force someone to work for me involuntarily it is slavery if the state does it it is conscription. If I confined someone against their will it is kidnapping if the state does it it is incarceration.
Nothing has changed but the label what binds us to the state is the belief that there is a different morality for anything that has been sanctified through the political process of 50 plus one of the population voted for forced vaccinations, then I guess we have to comply if you scoff at that sentence how about if the vote was one hundred percent minus one would that change the morality of resistance how about if forced vaccinations were mandated by the constitution then would you be compelled to submit? Does the ballot box transform the unethical into the ethical? Of course not, but I will tell you what it does do it makes everyone who casts their ballot a part of the process that legitimizes the murder and violence committed by agents of the state.
No I am not an efficiency manager for the state I do not want to help it do its job of inflicting aggression and violence on peaceful people. I want the state to perish, not through violence, or bloodshed, but by removing the mystical superstition from the minds of the general public that makes them believe that government is anything other than a gang of thugs with a fancy title. This is the point that in my experience as a communicator of voluntarist ideas I start butting up against the brick wall of incomprehension when talking to the normies in the crowd they start having mental breakdowns frothing at the mouth.
Votes need to happen as if voting elections positions of responsibility and other things that exist under sadism could not exist under voluntary association, as if voluntary association itself was such a bizarre and bewildering concept that no one could possibly wrap their head around it let alone heaven for fend crack open a book or two on the subject, no, no, no, much easier to go back to the comforting political wrestling match, red versus blue, now that is something I can get behind, that is a travesty really, because the truth is not a complicated message it is actually remarkably simple and remarkably hopeful, the truth is that there is only one vote that matters you would think that a message like this would be all doom and gloom oh sure James say the statists in the crowd twirling their handlebar mustaches and fingering the I voted sticker proudly displayed on their chest but what is your solution sitting around and not voting is not going to change anything.
Now I am tempted to say why ask for one solution when I provided dozens but more seriously I would say you are right, no really, you are right, sitting around and not voting is not going to change anything yeah by all means lets vote. But you knew there was a but, coming I am not talking about voting in some phony baloney selection to anoint some political puppet as president of this, or that geographical area, I am talking about the only vote that matters hmm if only I had a way to explain this to the normies oh, I do the political system itself is just another form of enslavement an enslavement that is all the more insidious because it asks us to buy into it all we have to do is push a button or pull a lever, or touch a screen, once every four years and we are now absolved from our moral responsibility.
Ironically this realization is in itself liberating and puts the world into focus with crystal clarity we are not cogs in some machine called society to be dictated by nebulous entities that we have been taught to call the government, or the authorities we are free individuals freely interacting with those around us bound by the moral injunction not to initiate force against others, or take things from others against their will.
We are responsible for our actions and their consequences, both positive and negative. We are responsible for what we do, or don’t do to help those in our community and to make this world better, or leave it to rot there is no political messiah that will descend from the heavens to tell us what to do, or to protect us from the bad men, all we have is our self and our choices, we vote every day not in some meaningless election but in who we choose to associate with, what we choose to spend our money on what we choose to invest our time and energy doing this is the essence of freedom for us it is painful to watch our brothers and sisters getting swept up in the election cycle hype we watch the sad spectacle not with a sense of scorn or derision but with sadness for those who have not yet woken up to the reality of their mental enslavement.
That sadness however is tempered by hope, hope that one day those poor voters who are trudging off to that booth well my dear flock it is come to that time where we will end today’s sermon but I am going to end today’s sermon with something of a revelation ah you see this particular piece of apocrypha is not anonymous I have located and discovered the author and he is in our midst thank you yes and I will reveal him to you hold on yes yes yes yes you all thought you were getting a sermon from the reverend status to him but no I am his evil twin brother, or his good twin brother James Corbett. And I am not an adherent to the church of the state and I hope you are not either.
But if you are and there may be people in the crowd whom are as well, I would once again suggest challenging your faith in the state by subjecting it to a bit of question, seeing if your ideas are really in line with what you believe? And I hope you understand the point of today’s sermon it is not to do with religion, the religions, it is to do with the religion of statism, it is how state-ism the state has replaced the realm of religion in society so that people are worshiping government without even really understanding or knowing it.
They are simply in a system where they are giving over their own personal sovereignty to some entity through some process that happens every few years. Lets not think about it, what are you talking about James, but well I hope, I hope, I am not the only one who underneath is really an anarchist and I hope we all understand that this is actually an empowering message, it is not a message of doom and gloom and sadness, it is a message of hope, because once you have that realization once you break the chains of the status to dogma, you realize that we hold all the power it is ours it is not them, it is us all we have to do is walk away ~James Corbett (CorbettReport.Com)
Wealth Concentration Drives a New Global Imperialism
- By Peter Phillips
Regime changes in Iraq and Libya, Syria’s war, Venezuela’s crisis, sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Russia, and North Korea are reflections of a new global imperialism imposed by a core of capitalist nations in support of trillions of dollars of concentrated investment wealth. This new world order of mass capital has become a totalitarian empire of inequality and repression.
The global 1%, comprised of over 36-million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, employ their excess capital with investment management firms like BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase. The top seventeen of these trillion-dollar investment management firms controlled $41.1 trillion dollars in 2017. These firms are all directly invested in each other and managed by only 199 people who decide how and where global capital will be invested. Their biggest problem is they have more capital than there are safe investment opportunities, which leads to risky speculative investments, increased war spending, privatization of the public domain, and pressures to open new capital investment opportunities through political regime changes.
Power elites in support of capital investment are collectively embedded in a system of mandatory growth. Failure for capital to achieve continuing expansion leads to economic stagnation, which can result in depression, bank failures, currency collapses, and mass unemployment. Capitalism is an economic system that inevitably adjusts itself via contractions, recessions, and depressions. Power elites are entrapped in a web of enforced growth that requires ongoing global management and the formation of new and ever expanding capital investment opportunities. This forced expansion becomes a worldwide manifest destiny that seeks total capital domination in all regions of the earth and beyond.
Sixty percent of the core 199 global power elite managers are from the US, with people from twenty capitalist nations rounding out the balance. These power elite managers and associated one percenters take active part in global policy groups and governments. They serve as advisors to the IMF, World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Bank of Settlements, Federal Reserve Board, G-7 and the G-20. Most attend the World Economic Forum. Global power elites engage actively on private international policy councils such as the Council of Thirty, Trilateral Commission, and the Atlantic Council. Many of the US global elites are members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Business Roundtable in the US. The most important issue for these power elites is protecting capital investment, insuring debt collection, and building opportunities for further returns.
The global power elite are aware of their existence as a numerical minority in the vast sea of impoverished humanity. Roughly 80% of the world’s population lives on less than ten dollars a day and half live on less than three dollars a day. Concentrated global capital becomes the binding institutional alignment that brings transnational capitalists into a centralized global imperialism facilitated by world economic/trade institutions and protected by the US/NATO military empire. This concentration of wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation have reached levels that threaten humanity’s future.
The idea of independent self-ruling nation-states has long been held sacrosanct in traditional liberal capitalist economies. However, globalization has placed a new set of demands on capitalism that requires transnational mechanisms to support continued capital growth that is increasingly beyond the boundaries of individual states. The financial crisis of 2008 was an acknowledgement of the global system of capital under threat. These threats encourage the abandonment of nation-state rights altogether and the formation of a global imperialism that reflects new world order requirements for protecting transnational capital.
Institutions within capitalist countries including government ministries, defense forces, intelligence agencies, judiciary, universities and representative bodies, recognize to varying degrees that the overriding demands of transnational capital spill beyond the boundaries of nation-states. The resulting worldwide reach motivates a new form of global imperialism that is evident by coalitions of core capitalist nations engaged in past and present regime change efforts via sanctions, covert actions, co-options, and war with non-cooperating nations—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Russia.
The attempted coup in Venezuela shows the alignment of transnational capital-supporting states in recognizing the elite forces that oppose Maduro’s socialist presidency. A new global imperialism is at work here, whereby Venezuela’s sovereignty is openly undermined by a capital imperial world order that seeks not just control of Venezuela’s oil, but a full opportunity for widespread investments through a new regime.
The widespread corporate media negation of the democratically elected president of Venezuela demonstrates that these media are owned and controlled by ideologists for the global power elite. Corporate media today is highly concentrated and fully international. Their primary goal is the promotion of product sales and pro-capitalist propaganda through the psychological control of human desires, emotions, beliefs, fears, and values. Corporate media does this by manipulating feelings and cognitions of human beings worldwide, and by promoting entertainment as a distraction to global inequality.
Recognizing global imperialism as a manifestation of concentrated wealth, managed by a few hundred people, is of utmost importance for democratic humanitarian activists. We must stand on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and challenge global imperialism and its fascist governments, media propaganda, and empire armies.
____________________________________________________________________
Peter Phillips is a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University. Giants: The Global Power Elite, 2018, is his 18th book from Seven Stories Press. He teaches courses in Political Sociology, Sociology of Power, Sociology of Media, Sociology of Conspiracies and Investigative Sociology. He served as director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010 and as president of Media Freedom Foundation from 2003 to 2017.
Giants: The Global Power Elite - By Peter Phillips
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