“War Is Over! If You Want It”: John and Yoko, 40 Years Later

"War Is Over! If You Want It": John and Yoko, 40 Years Later

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/509502/war_is_over_if_you_want_it_john_and_yoko_40_years_later

by Jon Wiener
12/27/2009

"War Is Over! If you want it" ­ a full page ad in the Sunday New York
Times Dec. 27 must have puzzled many readers. The ad marked an
anniversary: it was 40 years ago today that John Lennon and Yoko Ono
launched their "War Is Over!" campaign, with billboards in New York,
London, Hollywood, Toronto, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens and Tokyo
proclaiming the message in giant black letters on a white field ­ and
in much smaller type at the bottom, "Happy Christmas, John and Yoko."
The message was repeated on posters, leaflets, and newspaper ads.

The war in Vietnam was reaching a climax that month as American
deaths reached 40,000. And the anti-war movement also reached a
climax: Nov. 15, 1969, 250,000 people marched in Washington D.C. in
the largest anti-war demonstration in the nation's history. At the
Washington Monument, Pete Seeger led the demonstrators singing
Lennon's new song, "Give Peace a Chance."

Now that the US is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the campaign is
being brought back to life by Yoko ­ with a new twist: "War Is Over!"
will be appearing, among other places, on the ad displays on top of
160 taxis in New York City for the month of January -- a project of
the nonprofit Art Production Fund.

And Yoko also posted a 1969 "War Is Over" video at YouTube -- and
online, downloadable do-it-yourself posters in 60 languages.

Lennon's 1969 campaign began with a "War Is Over!" benefit concert
for UNICEF at the Lyceum Theater in London, John's first live
performance in England in four years. George Harrison, Eric Clapton,
Billy Preston, and Keith Moon of The Who joined him onstage.

Not everyone understood John and Yoko's "War Is Over!" campaign. John
Sinclair, the Michigan antiwar activist and White Panther leader who
would soon be sentenced to ten years in prison for selling two joints
to an undercover cop, declared, "You are going to sound awfully
fucking stupid trying to tell the heroic Vietnamese people that 'the
war is over if you want it' while they are being burned and bombed
and blown out of their pitiful little huts and fields."

Sinclair of course had missed the point; the campaign was directed at
the American people, not the Vietnamese. "You've got the power,"
Lennon told young Americans in an interview. "All we have to do is
remember that: we've all got the power. That's why we said 'war is
over if you want it.' . . . . Don't believe that jazz that there's
nothing you can do, 'just turn on and drop out, man.' You've got to
turn on and drop in. Or they're going to drop all over you."

Dec. 31, 1969 ­ 40 years ago this week ­ BBC-TV featured John as a
"Man of the Decade." "The sixties were just waking up in the
morning," he said. "We haven't even got to dinnertime yet. And I
can't wait! I can't wait, I'm so glad to be around."

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