This man's personal transformation helped change the world. On October 9 this year, he would have been 70. Sadly, some people stayed the same, and he was murdered at the age of 40. But he lives on as a member of one of the most popular rock bands ever. You probably guessed by now that the man is John Lennon, the talented musician, singer, composer, artist, writer and founder of the Liverpool Fab Four - the Beatles.
But Lennon was also a troublemaker, rebel and nonconformist, unfettered by the social conventions of the prim and proper West. He did what he wanted. He revealed his true nature to the world as early as 1963, when he yelled at a concert attended by the Royal Family: "Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry."
He was no fan of the church either. In 1966, he said: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink... We're more popular than Jesus now-I don't know which will go first, rock and 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 Vatican pardoned him only 42 years later, after deciding the remark was a joke.
In the second half of the 1960s, both Beatlemania and the Vietnam War were raging. Lennon's most scandalous move was made in protest of this war. He returned his Order of the British Empire to the Queen in 1965, four years after accepting it. In the accompanying note, he wrote: "Your majesty, I am returning this in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts. With love, John Lennon of Bag."
It is no surprise that by the end of the decade he was an established icon of the hippie movement, and his songs, especially "All You Need is Love", had become anthems of the flower children, who helped move society forward in many countries.
The writer Vasily Aksyonov remembers the first time he saw hippies in London in 1967: "At that time, their movement was just getting started. It was the most eccentric expression of the new youth culture. This culture arose spontaneously; it was not imposed. It was born in the pubs of Liverpool where John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr first played their music, and in Mary Quant's boutiques on Chelsea's famous King's Road."
This was a time of revolutionary romantics, when a generation of children protested against the ossified values of their parents. In France, students were flipping cars and burning them, while chanting the slogan: "It is prohibited to prohibit!" They were protesting the policies of President Charles de Gaulle, who was eventually forced to resign. At the funeral of the student Benno Ohnesorg in West Germany, who was killed by a policeman, Gudrun Ensslin, one of the future founders and leaders of the notorious terrorist group Red Army Faction, made her famous pronouncement: "They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can't argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven't. We must arm ourselves!"
The antiwar movement was gaining momentum in the United States, and young people (including future President Bill Clinton) took to the streets to protest the U.S. military presence in Vietnam. War veterans were discarding their medals on the steps of Congress. It was during this time that John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono held their famous Bed-In interview in a hotel in Amsterdam. Lying together in bed in their pajamas, surrounded by a group of journalists, they demanded that the United States end its aggression in Vietnam (which eventually happened several years later, when the U.S. government became convinced that the war effort was doomed).
Young pacifists and hippies adopted another famous Lennon song as their anthem, "Give Peace a Chance", which he wrote during the Bed-In. Lennon said the best moment of his life was when he saw protesters singing it on news broadcast.
Lennon's anti-imperialist rhetoric appealed to the Soviet government, which had a favorable attitude toward the Beatles in general, despite the attacks of some musical critics and party functionaries. From 1967 to 1984, the Soviet record company Melodiya released 35 records with their songs, and many Soviet bands started trying to imitate their style. The Beatles were even invited to perform in Moscow in the fall of 1968, but the visit was cancelled after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August. But it was the British government, not the Soviet Union, that barred them from visiting to the Soviet Union at that critical time.
The Soviet government's benevolence toward the Beatles did not extend to Soviet hippies, who appeared about the same time as hippies in the West, primarily because of the hippies' reluctance to participate in social life and their close ties to dissidents. Soviet people were free to campaign for the liberation of Angela Davis but not for political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Soviet people were supposed to be engaged in public life; but they were not supposed to live in communes and practice free love. These were signs of "the decaying West," which we heard about periodically on the Central Television program "International Panorama."
There are still hippies in Russia and other countries, despite the decline of the movement and the rise of other youth subcultures, like hip-hop, goths and roleplayers. The hippies deserve credit for creating a society that wants to be considered democratic, racially tolerant, pacifist and eco-friendly, with alternative army service and hitch-hiking all over the world. And part of this credit goes to John Lennon, who was gunned down by a madman on December 8, 1980.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
