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John Whitehead's Commentary

Gimme Some Truth: John Lennon Tells It Like It Is [SHORT]

John Whitehead

“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”—John Lennon (1969)

Long before Bette Midler was roundly condemned for tweeting “Women, are the n-word of the world,” John Lennon—never one to pull his punches—proclaimed in song “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.”

Yet Lennon didn’t just use the “n” word—he wrote a whole song about it and included it on his 1972 album Some Time In New York City.

Titled “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” the song—with lyrics inspired and co-written by Yoko Ono—has Lennon’s brand of truth-telling stamped all over it:

Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is, think about it
Woman is the nigger of the world
Think about it, do something about it.

Blackballed by most radio stations, the controversial song was widely condemned as racist and anti-woman.

The song was neither.

Initially released as a single in April 1972, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” was Lennon’s way of calling out the hypocrisy of a world that claimed to recognized women as equals while treating them as less worthy of equal rights.

That hypocrisy is still playing out today.

As African-American civil rights activist Congressman Ron Dellums noted in his defense of the song, “If you define ‘nigger’ as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, the good news is that you don’t have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are niggers.

All these years later, not much has changed.

Women are still treated like the niggers of the world: used, abused and conveniently discarded.

And in the eyes of the American police state, most of the citizenry are still treated like slaves: brutalized, dehumanized, branded, chained, bought and sold like chattel, and stripped of their basic rights and human dignity.

Truth is rarely comfortable. Nor is it palatable, or polite, or politically correct.

For that matter, John Lennon, born on October 9, 1940, was rarely polite or politically correct.

Lennon never shied away from telling it like it is, and neither should we.

Lennon dared to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, and as a result, he became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government, his phone calls monitored and data files collected on his activities and associations.

Until the day he died, Lennon continued to speak up and speak out.

In honor of what would have been Lennon’s 78th birthday, here are some uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state:

  1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”
  2. We no longer have a government that is “of the people, for the people and by the people.”
  3. The U.S. is on the brink of bankruptcy, with more than $21 trillion in debt.
  4. No matter which party is in control, the police state will continue to grow.
  5. There is virtually no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
  6. The government is concerned with three things only: power, control and money.
  7. The U.S. government has become a greater menace to its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us. 
  8. The U.S. government gets away with wrongdoing because the courts allow it.
  9. America’s shadow government—which operates beyond the reach of the Constitution with no real accountability to the citizenry—is the real reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.
  10. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
  11. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms, the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights. 
  12. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
  13. Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police.
  14. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
  15. The U.S. is following the Nazi blueprint to a “t.”
  16. The only real war being fought by the U.S. government today is the war on the American people.
  17. And finally, as Lennon shared in a 1968 interview: “I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives… I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means. If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government and the Russian… Chinese… what they are actually trying to do, and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing. I think they’re all insane. But I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”

These are truths about looming problems that cannot be glibly dismissed by political spin.

These problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. 

After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

Yet while Lennon believed in the power of the people, he also understood the danger of a power-hungry government. “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people,” observed Lennon. “It controls them.”

Stop being controlled.

For the moment, the power, as Lennon recognized, is still in our hands.

“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people,” concluded Lennon. “The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.”

For the moment, the choice is still ours: slavery or freedom, war or peace, death or life.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the point at which we no longer have any choice is the point at which the monsters—the maniacs, the powers-that-be, the establishment, the Police State, the Deep State—win.

WC: 1093

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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