[ricechex]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

It's all crap for fuck's sake.As if John Lennon really is important enough to bother the american government in any shape or form!

i think the idiot has already been exposed..and didn't u read the link? all u need to do is read a few lines u fuckin ignoramus.

[porkmarras]

John Lennon a communist?What fucking planet do you live on?

[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

It's all crap for fuck's sake.As if John Lennon really is important enough to bother the american government in any shape or form!

Oh, but you are wrong.
http://www.lennonfbifiles.com/
Strom Thurmond and many other people of high position wanted to deport Lennon for years.
I've heard that this documentary actually doesn't delve all that deep into the actual facts. The Imagine: John Lennon (1988) documentary put together with the help of Yoko, is a great film.

 

[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

John Lennon a communist?What fucking planet do you live on?

John Lennon, certainly, as you pointed out, wasn't a communist. But he also wasn't a narrow-minded individual either, and thus he was interested in communism quite a good deal. He felt that in pure philosophy, communism was fairly instructive and a Yin to capitalism's Yang.

Tariq Ali: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?
John Lennon: I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere.
I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system.
In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 or '66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit - religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?'
But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around.
I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us - it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from reality for a time.
TA: What did you think was the reason for the success of your sort of music?
JL: Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realise in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That's the choice they allow you - now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working Class Hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit.
Of course, there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.
Robin Blackburn: Of course, class is something the American rock groups haven't tackled yet.
JL: Because they're all middle class and bourgeois and they don't want to show it. They're scared of the workers, actually, because the workers seem mainly right-wing in America, clinging on to their goods. But if these middle class groups realise what's happening, and what the class system has done, it's up to them to repatriate the people and to get out of all that bourgeois shit.

[ricechex]

What is so hard to understand here. Whether anyone feels he would be a threat is besides the point. the U.S govt apparently did.

[m^a(t)h]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

John Lennon a communist?What fucking planet do you live on?

i dont believe he would have considered himself a communist but the US would certainly have (since the US was always worried about foreign ideas-ie. Palmer Raids, Sacco and Vanzetti). The government tended to group anarchists, communists, and atheists into one group so you could see why they would be view Lennon as a threat. The song "Imagine" certainly takes some views that would be similar to communists' views. Im not going to write out the lyrics for you. im sure you know them or can find themmm

his belief in no god, no divisons or class,(that these steps would lead to peace, hunger, etc.) would certainly agree with communism

also the song "working class hero"....

[Tokolosh]

When John Lennon announced a US tour in 1971, the White House set out to stop him. But, as John Patterson discovers, he wasn't the first musician to have the The Man on his case - and he wouldn't be the last.
Read more

[porkmarras]

You all got to get reality checks,my friends.John Lennon was as inoffensive as a bar of soap to the great unwashed.

[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

You all got to get reality checks,my friends.John Lennon was as inoffensive as a bar of soap to the great unwashed.

Dude, although it may seem that way now, you're a freak with blinders on that knows nothing about history.

To this day, many Bible-thumpers in the South still regard The Beatles as The Devil.

It is a fact that the U.S. government (LBJ, Nixon admins) wanted him out of the U.S. and mounted several campaigns to accomplish that goal. Although Lennon was hated by many, he was also beloved by many people of considerable intelligence and he did have quite a bit of political influence. He had also demonstrated a propensity for being fairly politically vocal during his time living in the United States.

[porkmarras]

Dude,we live on different planets.My days are your nights and your nights are my day.

[Tokolosh]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

To this day, many Bible-thumpers in the South still regard The Beatles as The Devil.

On July 29, 1966, the teenybop magazine "DATEbook" published an excerpt of an earlier John interview where he stated that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." From that day on, the Beatles were seen as the antichrist by those so-called Bible-thumpers.

[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

Dude,we live on different planets.My days are your nights and your nights are my day.

Just spare us next time you don't know what the hell it is you're writing about, okay?

Questions are okay, but don't make statements of unequivocal fact unless you're quite certain.

[porkmarras]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

Just spare us next time you don't know what the hell it is you're writing about, okay?

Questions are okay, but don't make statements of unequivocal fact unless you're quite certain.

All i have to say to you is:
'Got this feeling when i've heard your name the other day..........'

[atari 2600]

http://students.ceid.upatras.gr/~pir...les/jesus.html

"I should have said television was more popular than Jesus, then I might have got away with it..."

John Lennon


On March 4, 1966, in an interview printed in the London Evening Standard, John Lennon made the following statement:

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

The statement, being part of a two page interview, went unnoticed in Britain at the time.
John had said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus meaning that Christianity (and religion in general) were getting so weak and unpopular that a rock 'n' roll group (the Beatles) were more popular than it at the time. He just said it as an example to make his point, that Christianity was not popular among young people, and he certainly didn't want to compare the Beatles with Jesus or to show off himself as being better or greater than Jesus. But when the above statement was printed out of context in Anerican teen Magazine "Datebook" a few months later, great uproar broke out.
American radio stations banned Beatles records. Some even went so far as to organize burning of Beatles records and photographs, and there were scenes of boys and girls jumping on Beatles records, holding burning Beatles photographs and grinning and holding banners that said "Jesus died for you John Lennon" and "John Lennon is Satan"!!!(We hear to this day that the Beatles were "antichrists", but it seems like God was more like on the Beatles side, because one of the radio stations that organized the record burnings was hit by lightning the very next morning, which caused great damage to the stations equipment and reportedly knocked their news director unconscious!) A member of the Ku Klux Klan said that the Beatles had probably "been brainwashed by communists". With the Beatles American Tour only days away, Beatles manager Brian Epstein told the American Press that John's statement had been completely misinterpreted. But the people who were burning the records did not, or would not, listen and understand. As soon as they arrived in America, the Beatles had a press conference. For once there were no daft questions about their haircuts or when they were going to get married. John and the other Beatles sat down and answered questions on John's "Jesus" statement, trying to explain the whole thing to the American reporters. The outraged public still failed to understand(as is proven by religious people's still holding this against John Lennon and considering his statement "blasphemous"), but as the newspapers generally printed that John Lennon had apologised(which he had, in a way), the people calmed down a bit. Still the uproar gave the coup de grace to the Beatles rapidly declining interest in touring.

[Tokolosh]

Originally Posted by atari 2600

The full quote is even more abrasive than that; According to DATEbook he said: "Christianity will come and go; we are more popular than Jesus."

On top of that, he opposed the Vietam war, and was automatically placed him in Hoover's black book.

[atari 2600]

Yes, and John Lennon would be under investigation if he were alive now and many groups that reference Lennon are under investigation to this day!

Although London's The Catholic Herald called Lennon's apology "arrogant," the Vatican accepted it.
However, the Catholic Herald did note that Lennon's original claim "is probably true."

[porkmarras]

There you go.

[atari 2600]

http://www.beatlesagain.com/bapology.html


We may never fully understand the incredible power of Beatlemania to sweep people away in a sea of emotions. But at the height of their popularity in the spring of 1966, a segment of the American public demonstrated how that overpowering love could turn to hate very quickly.

 

Maureen Cleave in 1964 On March 4, 1966, this quote of John's was printed in an interview by reporter Maureen Cleave in the London Evening Standard:

"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

He was, as she reported, reading extensively about religion. It was a small part of the article. No notice of it was taken in Britain. Read the entire original article here.

 

John remembers the original interview.

[atari 2600]

Then, almost five months later, on July 29, a teen magazine in the US, Datebook, reprinted the quote out of context, not submerged in an article, but as a part of a front cover story entitled "The Ten Adults You Dig/Hate The Most".

 

All hell broke loose. Radio stations in the south banned Beatles music. There were rallies of boys and girls stomping on their records and bonfires of Beatles material.

 

[atari 2600]

 

radio station WACI in Birmingham, Alabama, announces their boycott


Commenting on the uproar over the article in America, Maureen Cleave in London said, "John was certainly not comparing the Beatles with Christ. He was simply observing that so week was the state of Christianity that the Beatles were, to many people, better known. He was deploring, rather than approving, this." And at a press conference in New York, to try and head off the growing controversy, Brian Epstein told reporters, "The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist has been quoted and misrepresented entirely out of context of the article, which was in fact highly complimentary to Lennon as a person."

 

Brian Epstein speaks to the American press on August 6, 1966.
It did no good. The upcoming US tour was now only days away. Amidst threats on his and the other Beatles' lives, and the possible cancellation of the tour, John, notorious for never apologizing, condescends and has a news conference in Chicago on August 11, 1966: