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 Jon Wiener on John LennonPosted on Sep 12, 2006
John Lennon historian Jon Wiener discusses the soon-to-be-released documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” which recounts President Richard Nixon’s campaign to deport the Beatle because of his antiwar activism. Wiener, a contributing editor at The Nation and a professor at UC Irvine, is the author of “Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files,” the definitive account of the U.S. government’s persecution of the singer-activist, and Wiener both appears in the film and served as a technical consultant. He speaks here with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer about the story behind the story and the eerie historical parallels between Nixon’s pronouncements about Vietnam and Bush’s statements about Iraq.
Partial transcript: Robert Scheer: Tell us why this is important. J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon, they went out to destroy John Lennon? They were threatened by his popularity? Jon Wiener: This is really a story about the Nixon White House abuse of power and Nixon’s enemies list. But in this case the enemy targeted by the White House was John Lennon. Really, all he was doing was saying was “Give Peace a Chance,” but Nixon found out about a plan Lennon was making with some of his friends, who included Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, ’60s antiwar organizers, and their plan was to bring Lennon on a national concert tour of the United States, which would coincide with the 1972 election season. Lennon wanted to combine rock music with antiwar organizing and voting registration. The key fact here is that 1972 was the first year that 18-year-olds were given the right to vote, so there were going to be 11 million new voters. It was widely assumed they were all John Lennon fans and most of them were antiwar. The Nixon administration found out about Lennon’s plan from an unlikely source: Sen. Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, who had done many bad things in his life. He wrote a letter to the Nixon White House outlining Lennon’s plans for this voter registration tour, and the Strom Thurmond letter concluded that deportation would be a “strategic counter-measure.” A couple weeks later the Nixon White House ordered Lennon deported, and that’s the subject of the film. Podcast producer Josh Scheer: What are the connections between then and now?
The film is all about the ’60s and the ’70s, but the echoes to the present are unmistakable and quite deliberate on the part of the filmmakers. In the film, they have footage of Nixon’s speech where Nixon says he’s going to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam because we’re training the South Vietnamese troops, and as the South Vietnamese stand up, we will stand down; however, he’s not going to set a timetable for this. It’s almost exactly what George Bush has been saying about Iraq for the last couple of months. It’s uncanny. Bush is only mentioned in the film once, and that’s at the end. Gore Vidal, who’s of course a wonderful talker and thinker, has some great lines, where he says, “Lennon represents life, and that is admirable  LISTEN TO THIS ITEMLike Audio? Get the Truthdig Podcast SHARE THIS TRUTHDIG ARTICLE:
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By Travis F. Smith, March 30, 2007 at 7:18 pm #
Hello.
Report thisBy Nick, October 28, 2006 at 7:04 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
My question is “where in the hell is John Lennon now?” We have rewarded a multitude of individuals with vast celebrity over the last 25 years. Many of these folks could easily take on the likes of government, industry, and religion. Yet, in these dire times none of them wish to come forward. Apparently, we not only elected a bunch of phonies, but we have also bought their records and watched their movies. We now have cowards on both sides of the fence, save for the Dixie Chicks, who I rather like to think of as the three wise ones, the harbingers of the next common era.
Report thisBy Wayne Sibilia, October 1, 2006 at 9:23 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Gore Vidal’s last line of the movie is misquoted here. He said, “John Lennon represents life, and that is admirable; Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing.”
Report thisBy Ion Constantine Laskaris, September 13, 2006 at 12:49 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
Truthdig digging up one more truth about Crookie Nixon, and his in bed manouevres with southern white trash, Strommie Thurman, is a useful update
to a whole stream of shut-out tactics used against liberals, progressives and socialists the
reactionary Republican scum have used, at least since 1920 to block out political protests against their evil behaviors.
A whole stream of secular humanists and academic freethinkers from Europe were prevented from entering the USA right after WW II, when the fake red scares were generated by these degenerates to brainwash the American people for the Cold War.
Often the hidden pressure on the Truman and later, gutless Eisenhower puppet administration by these political crooks and their Gestapo scum, J.Edgar Hoover stopped anyone who did not swallow their propaganda. Often the well-publicized rejection was issued under some creep who was named I Shipman, if I recall. In short some zombie bureaucrat was the “Fall Guy!”
Others were, of course, thrown out of the country, like Charlie Chaplin, when little Ronnie Reagan and other assorted Hollywood rednecks were mounting their anti-commie witchhunts with the help of an equally degenerate Catholic Legion of Decency and the Hayes Office censorship trash which survives to this very day with the current
movie rating racket, attacked by the new movie,
“This Film is Not Yet Rated!” (title)
Back in WW I + the Republican rule from 1920 - 1932, socialists, anarchists, and other freethinkers like Emma Goldman were also driven out, and in-migration of anyone Left of Cal Coolidge was denied whenever possible. Here too, the racist Gestapo Scum J.Edgar Hoover, whose name still disgraces the FBI nazi operations building in downtown Washington, D.C. played an ever more powerful role into the 1970s until he finally died.
So this is a long tradition! I hope Truthdig will continue to dig deeper into the past. There are a lot of bodies still hidden down there. It would be great if some progressive writer undertook to provide a sampler of 111 or so. Good luck!
Report thisBy Stephen Borkowski, September 13, 2006 at 6:52 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
Peace,it has been said, is the interval between wars. I prefer Lennon’s lines, “Imagine there’s no heaven and no religion too.” Since many wars use religion as a cause to kill, I believe wars would be shorter and the intervals would be longer if we took the certainty of God and the religions that are built on a belief instead of fact. As long as chance is a factor in evolution and competition is an important inherited trait for the survival of the fittest, I guess that wars will continue without religion. However, to solve the possibility of catastrophic consequence
Report thisof an atomic weapon in the hand of a religious suicide bomber who wants to sit as close to God as possible as a super martyr, I have an agenda of agnosticizing all teaching of God and religions. That is why I always say that I am an Agnostic Deist instead of saying I am a Deist.
I always correct people I talk to about their religion and always get them to agree that they are; Agnostic Catholic, Agnostic Jew, Agnostic Methodist, etc, I haven’t gotten a muslim to agree yet because I don’t get to discuss religion with them. My first question is: Can you prove there is a God empirically? and then.
Can you show me one agnostic religious suicide bomber?. Would you blow yourself up to go to a heaven you KNOW You DON’T KNOW exists. This is where the survival genes kick in and what I believe would extinguish the certainties of dangerous religions and religate them to where Zeus and the others are. I have written a log about a world cruise I was on in 1993 for the purpose of spreading my agenda and have it on a disc that anyone can have free for the asking.
Send a self-addressed envelope to:
Steve Borkowski
9940 So.Ocean Drive
Jensen Beach, Fl
34957
Sincerely, tygowsteve@peoplepc,com