VLADIMIR PUTIN AND JOHN LENNON: FIFTY YEARS AFTER IMAGINE

VLADIMIR PUTIN AND JOHN LENNON: FIFTY YEARS AFTER IMAGINE

By Professor Duncan Richard Shaw

Madrid, 18 June 2022

Fifty years ago, John Lennon added his massive moral weight to the worldwide global campaign to end the appalling Vietnam War, which President Nixon had cynically extended to hapless Cambodia.

Although Yoko Ono was not everyone’s cup of tea (blamed by many, probably unfairly, for the breakup of the Beatles), her oriental mystique certainly helped the clever video  to become the first global music video phenomenon – with the legendary white piano and the enigmatic French windows opening.

Imagine, of course, has become the world’s favourite ‘peace anthem’, played at a thousand anti-war rallies and Beatles tributes since 1972. At our English grammar school in 1975 my friend Andrew Simpson and I brought the house down by playing Imagine in assembly – accompanied by pictures of the US ambassador and his entourage escaping from Saigon in helicopters.

Has any other song had such a profound political impact (in the western world, at least) as Imagine?  Possibly Sam Cooke‘s Change Is Gonna Come or Move On Up by Curtis Mayfield – or even Everything To Lose by the wonderful Style Council?

My vote for the most impactful all-time political song would go to Imagine because it is not only an extremely eloquent denunciation of the horrors of the Cold War but also a Miltonesque sketch of a clearly better world – without militarism, materialism, capitalism and (most controversially at the time) organized religion.

In order to support my above claim, I need to cite all four version’s of Lennon’s masterpiece (simple, straightforward, concise, accesible, captivating, inspiring):

“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 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
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one”

Has a global political statement ever been clearer and easier to understand? Probably not.

Did it contribute to ending the Vietnam War? Almost certainly yes.

Lennon – who had not always been a dove of peace (rumour has it he killed a drunken sailor in a dockside brawl in Hamburg in 1961) – was understandably proud of his masterpiece, when it quickly shot to number one in practically every western country.

“Anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted … Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey.”

Imagine’s popularity soared in the early 1990s, when it seemed (at least to some of us optimists) that the swords of the military-industrial complex might finally be turned into post- Cold War ploughshares; how very naive we were.

That particular opportunity for world peace and disarmament (like so many before, eg 1919, 1945, 1953, 1962) was not taken, for reasons that I will leave for another column. Practically every country in the world has actually increased rather than decreased its military spending in real terms since 1991, and the profits of Dylan’s much-villified Masters of War (armaments manufacturers) have soared in the past 30 years.

Did Lennon’s Imagine have any impact on the 19 year-old Vladimir Putin back in 1972? He was finishing his law degree at the University of St Petersburg and desperately trying to enter the KGB.

Putin is a Machiavellian cynic, a callous realist and a convinced bellicist, trying to put the old USSR back together by brutal means – without any regard whatsoever for the wishes of the people in former Soviet republics like Georgia, Belarus and, of course, Ukraine.

He is also trying to use the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine to distract the Russian people from their poor living standards, falling life expectancy and scrappy public services, all of which have declined calamitously since the west started to impose economic sanctions in 2014 after his annexation of Crimea.

Poor Lennon would turn in his grave if he could hear how Putin has threatened the west with World War III for daring to send Ukraine weapons to defend itself from his merciless onslaught:

“To anyone who would consider interfering from outside: If you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history. All the relevant decisions have been taken. I hope you hear me…Russia is today one of the most powerful nuclear powers.”