And you, what do you imagine?

Elide Siviero

I really want to protest when I listen to young people singing with emphasis the song “imagine” by John Lennon. They do it thinking they are pacifists and very human but frankly speaking I want to express publicly my disagreement with this song: I think that the music is very beautiful but its words worry me.

Let me point out: John Lennon himself said that the text of Imagine is closer to the Manifesto of the Communist Party than to an Ode to peace: it celebrates the lay society not dominated by materialistic values, the utilitarianism and of Hedonism. In an interview John Lennon affirmed that the text was “anti-religious, anti-nationalist, anti-conventional and anti-capitalist and that it was accepted because “it was covered with sugar”. Yoko Ono, his wife, said that the message of Imagine could be synthesised as “we are all one world, one country, one people” and maybe this sentence may mislead us.

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