Michael Pugliese wrote:
>
> In the early seventies, Ramparts reprinted the Tariq Ali interview with
> Lennon. From that I've always assumed John would've supported the IMG,
> rather than the WRP. International Marxist Group was Tariq's group if I
> recall.
Ali recalls the Lennon interview in his memoir *Street Fighting Years* (a fun and interesting book as memoirs go.)
"Towards the last days of my Black Dwarf I had started receiving phone calls from John Lennon. He would ring me once or twice a month and talk about the state of the world. We had published , critique of his song 'Revolution' and Lennon had replied in very angry terms. In the Beatles versus Stones line-up at the time I was a partisan of Mick Jagger and not just because he marched with VSC. I preferred the music, though I did not agree with the critic Richard Merton who defended the narcissism of the Stones and justified their sexism by pretending that'Under My Thumb','Stupid Girl', 'Back Street Girl' were hymns designed to expose sexual exploitation. This was certainly a novel point of view, which Merton argued as follows:
The enormous merit - and audacity - of the Stones is to have repeatedly and consistently defied what is a central taboo of the social system: mention of sexual inequality. They have done so in the most radical and unacceptable way possible: by celebrating it. The light this black beam throws on the society is too bright for it. Nakedly proclaimed, inequality is de facto denounced. The ,unmitigated triumph' of these records is their rejection of the spurious world of monadic personal relationships.
This was a bit like arguing that wife-battering, if carried out on the streets, would, in reality, be nothing more than a simple activity designed to raise feminist consciousness. Merton's craven apologia notwithstanding, the rhythm of the Stones' music captured the spirit of '68 much more than did that of the Beatles. I did not say all this to Lennon, but I did hint at it and he was shrewd enough to get the message. On one occasion I told him that I had hoped that he would come on the VSC demos and sing for us. 'But you know,' he replied, 'I didn't like the violence.' These conversations were open-ended, but one day when he and Yoko turned up at my tiny flat in North London with Japanese food, we talked into the early hours. He was a reader of The Red Mole and when I suggested that we interview him for the paper he agreed immediately, but wondered whether he was 'high-powered enough'. I suggested that Robin Blackburn, who had recently joined the IMG and was an editor of The Red Mole, might join us and he agreed.
One morning in his custom- built limousine arrive out side ourside our offices and transported us to Lennon's large mansion in the country, Tittenhurst, near Windsor. We talked on tape for the best part of a day and returned exhausted. It had been a stimulating occasion and marked a shift in John Lennon's politics. The major influence on him was yoko Ono. She introduced him to feminist concepts and the general reaction to her in British society made Lennon very aware of the chauvinist and racist poison which he insisted ran very deep in the ruling classes. He told us that 'I've always been politically minded 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've been satirizing the system since my childhood and have always been very conscious of my class, they would say with a chip on the shoulder.'
He had just finished writing 'Working Class Hero' and he read some of the verses, among the most radical that he was to compose. He was very critical of American rock groups for their failure to tackle the question of class and repeated many times what was then an obsession of the New Left, namely, the crucial importance of building links with workers: 'All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel, a Marx, a Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand they were in a repressed state. They haven't woken up here yet ... You should get these left-wing students out to talk with the workers, you should get the schoolkids involved with The Red Mole.' He was equally intransigent on the subject of women and acknowledged his debt openly: 'Of course Yoko was well into liberation before I met her. She'd had to fight her way through a man's world - the art world is completely dominated by men - so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met. There was never any question about it: we had to have a fifty-fifty relationship or there was no relationship, I was quick to learn. She did an article about women in Nova more than two years back in which she said "Woman is the n-word of the world".' After we had edited the interview into shape we took it to Abbey Road, where he was recording and he interrupted a session to read it through and muttered about not understanding why we wanted to publish it in the first place." Street Fighting Years p250-1
And at least the London Times didn't say , "Trotskyites."! The late
> Congressman Larry McDonald had it in his fevered mind that the SWP here was
> part of an int'l. terror apparatus. Once at the Hoover Institute I had a
> good laugh over reading some report he had authored. BTW, what ever happened
> to the files of Western Goals, the private intelligence gathering
> organization he founded?
I know the ADL files ended up in the hands of the Mossad. The late Ace Hayes did some excellent work on these scandals. You can get his work by contacting pfp at teleport.com. There's a webpage at www.portlandfreepress.com The ADL collected information on everybody.
Sam Pawlett