John Lennon — His most beloved song condemns mankind to an unrelentingly cruel, moronic fate. By Lawrence Reed.
Stop the John Lennon worship, please. The guy was a fool, a wife beater, a hypocrite, a serial liar, a homewrecker, a drug abuser, and an awful father. He even enjoyed making fun of people with disabilities, mocking and bullying them time and again. …
Biographies that tell the unvarnished truth about him, such as Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon, are on the market but instead of reading them, the Lennon worshipers prefer to wallow in the very dream world that the singer often drugged himself into.
Lennon was notorious for abusing his first wife Cynthia. He slapped her hard in the face, in public, multiple times. After years of domestic violence, numerous adulterous relationships with other women and a son (Julian) whom John largely ignored, the six-year marriage dissolved in 1968.
Man of peace and love? Count me as a skeptic.
Yoko Ono cowrote the song with John Lennon.
Sadly, the song has suckered millions over the years. Its seductive and devilish allure regularly puts it in the ranks of British favorites. At udiscovermusic.com, Lennon apologist Martin Chilton recently wrote:
“John Lennon described the song as “an ad campaign for peace”, and it is no surprise that his moving anthem is such a beacon for those who long for global harmony. “Imagine,” written in March 1971 during the Vietnam War, has become a permanent protest song and a lasting emblem of hope.”
Consider the vision that John and Yoko ask us in the song to embrace, starting with “Imagine there’s no Heaven; It’s easy if you try; No Hell below us; Above us only sky.”
In plain language, that suggests we should pretend humanity is just an accident. No Creator, no afterlife, no ultimate justice or accountability, simply the here-and-now and that’s it. That’s been the formula for the worst tyrannies and mass murders in world history, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia was the quintessential example. In urging listeners to imagine neither Heaven nor religion (and therefore no Creator), the song defies what science is increasingly debunking, namely, that everything evolved out of nothing and has neither a beginner or a beginning.
“Imagine all the people living for today,” the song urges. That’s what they do in North Korea today and that’s what life was reduced to under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Don’t plan for your future because the dictator will plan it for you. In a free society, living as though tomorrow matters is a powerful incentive to live right today. It’s also the reason people save, invest, have children, and build homes and lives. But not in the utopia John and Yoko dreamed about.
“Nothing to kill or die for,” the song intones. That’s actually one of the features of Heaven, a place the Lennons imagined away a few lines before. On Earth, I can think of a few things that are often worth killing or dying for: self-defense, saving loved ones, ending or preventing slavery, to name a few.
“Imagine no possessions,” the lyrics urge. Now there’s a winning idea. It’s not yours, even if you worked for it, created it, sacrificed for it, bought it, or received it as a gift. It belongs to others, or the fictional “everybody.” This was famously “imagined” by Pol Pot in Cambodia and Mao Zedong in China. This is not some “ideal”; it’s a barbarous, Stone Age relic. It’s a prescription for mass impoverishment.
“Living life in peace,” we’re asked to imagine. But how peaceful do you think a society would be if we don’t let people keep their stuff? And how do you make sure they don’t have “possessions” in the first place? By asking them politely not to acquire any? Good luck.
Now you know why the violent despot Fidel Castro had a soft spot in his heart for John Lennon. …
