“John Lennon’s”
Greatest Hit
There was some excitement in my friend’s
voice. He had just stumbled upon what he
described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music. Even more interesting, it had been up on
YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400
views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it,
because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more. The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s
rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called
“Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1]
The songs are ostensibly taken from the
soundtrack of an obscure little 2009 movie out of Toronto, Canada, entitled,
suggestively, Let Him Be. The lead
singer is ostensibly “John Lennon impersonator and tribute artist,” Mark Staycer, who is the person ostensibly playing a
long-in-the-tooth performer named “Noel Snow” in the movie, and credit for all
the songs as well as for the writing and directing is given to someone named
Peter McNamee.
Here is the Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
summary of the movie:
Let Him Be is a fascinating film about two undergrad
film students Tim Bennett & Kathleen Joyce who discover a long thought to
be dead rock icon living in a remote part of Canada. It all begins when Tim
discovers a clip of an old man playing guitar on a tape found jammed inside an
old video camera his father gave him. The man in the video is older now but the
resemblance to John Lennon is uncanny. Could it be him? It's an absurd idea and
one that Tim might have pushed aside were it not for the fact that the man also
sounds so much like him. Kathleen thinks the whole concept is ridiculous. Was
it possible that Lennon survived the assassination? Tim decides to document the
whole story so that no one could question or doubt what he finds. He has to
find out if it really is him. If it is he would have
to have absolute proof. That would mean convincing Kathleen to help him and it
would need lots of different cameras - hidden body cameras, wireless cameras,
and surveillance cameras.[2]
As soon as I heard “Don’t Believe,” I agreed
completely with my friend. Both in its
music and in its message, it’s very powerful.
I couldn’t think of anything in rock music that quite compares to
it. What jumped out at me right off the
bat were the 18 repetitions of “Don’t believe,” each time with a different
object in the sentence.[3]
The next thing I noticed was the summarizing
sentence in each of the six verses, “It ain’t a
revolution just to fight for the truth.”
In the word “revolution,” itself, there’s an apparent reference to the
Beatles’ 1968 song by that name, and it also seems to reflect Lennon’s arm’s-length
view toward revolution as expressed in the earlier song. It shouldn’t be a revolutionary act just to
stand up for the truth, something that, demonstrably seems to be in very short
supply as practiced by the powers that be these days.
Just at first blush, the lyrics come across
as a good deal timelier today even than when they were written. In the introduction to his popular 2021 book,
The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism, Fox News’s Tucker
Carlson notes that the objectivity and credibility of the mainstream press have
declined rather precipitously since 2009, when “Don’t Believe” was recorded.[4]
The public apparently agrees with
Carlson. In January of 2021, national trust
in the media was reported to be at an all-time low.[5] An even more recent poll found that only
10.2% of the public trust the news media when it comes to the subject of
COVID-19.[6]
Not only is the song extraordinarily timely,
but when it comes to journalism historically, the lyrics are considerably more
timeless than the average person might realize.
The Catholic monk, philosopher, and poet Thomas Merton wrote in 1966, “Nine tenths of the news, as printed in the
papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten
tenths.”[7]
The unreliability of our primary source of information actually
goes back a lot farther. John Swinton,
editorial writer for the New York Sun, is famous for having said in a
speech at a press dinner in 1883, “The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out
on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is
to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the
feet of Mammon…You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an
“Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the
scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and
we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the
property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”[8]
Immediately, I wanted to know more about the song and its
provenance. Even though the singer’s
enunciation is quite good as rock performers go, my hearing isn’t what it used
to be, so I went searching for a copy of the lyrics online and came up with
nothing. My curiosity about the movie
had also been piqued, so I went to Amazon to see if they had copies of the DVD
for sale, but I drew a blank there, as well.
There are little clips from the movie on YouTube, but generally it seems
to have gone down the public memory hole.
I recalled having read a very intriguing piece by Miles Mathis
some years ago that concluded that John Lennon’s assassination had been faked
and that he was still alive performing sporadically as an “impersonator” of
himself out in the Midwest somewhere.
That essay is still easy enough to find.[9]
I had not recalled how much of Mathis’s analysis is based upon an
analysis of that movie. He does spend
some time picking apart the lyrics of some of the other songs to show, as he
believes, that it almost had to have been Lennon’s work, but, curiously, he
steers clear of “Don’t Believe.” One
would have thought that he would have wanted to call attention to it if for no
other reason than that it reinforces what most of his writing is about, that
is, that there are a number of important things that the media have told us
through the years that are not true.
With no help from the Internet—not even from Miles Mathis—I set
about to performing the public service of transcribing the lyrics. I must admit that I had to enlist the
services of a couple of friends with younger and sharper ears and possibly with
better audio equipment. Here is what we
came up with:
Don’t Believe
Don't believe what you see.
Don't believe what you read.
Don't believe the TV,
‘Cause there's nothing that's real.
Listen up, I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution
just to fight for the truth.
Don't believe what they say.
Don't believe what they sell.
Don't believe what they push.
It's all lies, can't you tell?
Listen up, I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution
just to fight for the truth.
All right.
Let’s fight.
It’s time to get some answers;
Yeah, it’s time for a change.
You're either a solution or get out of the
way.
Stand up and be counted and get into the game.
The truth we took for granted has been taken
away.
What'd I say?
Don't believe what you hear.
Don't believe in their fear.
Don't believe they’re sincere,
'Cause they really don't care.
Listen up, I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution
just to fight for the truth.
Don't believe that you’re safe.
Don't believe in their hate.
Don't believe in their game.
You're just a number to play.
Listen up, I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution
just to fight for the truth.
🎼
Don't believe what they preach.
Don't believe what they teach.
Don't believe that you're free.
'Cause they're killing your dreams.
Listen up, I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution
just to fight for the truth.
It’s time to get some answers;
Yeah, it’s time for a change.
You're either a solution or get out of the
way.
Stand up and be counted and get into the game.
The truth we took for granted has been taken
away.
What'd I say?
Don't believe what you see.
Don't believe what you read.
Don't believe in their pills,
‘Cause they’re all made to kill.
Listen up, I'm talking to you.
It ain't a revolution
just to fight for the truth.
🎼
Is that prescient or what?
It’s enough to send a cold chill down your spine. Notice that not until the last verse is any
specific area of concern mentioned, but here he really brings down the hammer:
“Don’t believe in their pills, ‘cause they’re all
made to kill.”
Where did that come from in 2009?
But he didn’t say “vaccinations,” you say, only “pills.” One could well argue, though, that the rhyme
and meter requirements forced him to be more cryptic. And what “pills” that are “all made to kill”
could he be singing about, pills that it’s clear are being pushed by the powers
that be, the “they” and “their” of the song?
Up to now, this punch line, as it were, of the song seems to have
gone right past everyone. It certainly
went past me, even after I had listened to it several times, and until we had
taken the trouble to listen carefully and transcribe the lyrics, it had apparently
even gone past my friend who had excitedly introduced me to the song.
Now that we have called attention to the words in this last verse,
we have to wonder how much longer YouTube will permit the album to stay
up. Aren’t they super sensitive to
President Biden’s repeated calls for censorship of medical “misinformation” on
the Internet?[10]
A Spook Production?
Even if it might be conceded that I am reading too much into that
concluding verse, quite a few major questions about that song and the movie
remain. To my mind, the song is a work
of rare musical genius. It sounds very
much like a Beatles song with an older John Lennon as the singer. Can you imagine it being played on the
airwaves enough times for it to lodge in people’s heads? Even if it might have been deemed a good deal
less appropriate for the times than it is today, had it been presented to the
public as a Beatles song when they were in their prime, or just as a John
Lennon song, say, in the wake of “Imagine,” surely it would have shot right to
the top of the charts, and it would have been a major topic of conversation, as
well.
Of course, quite a bit of imagination is required even to conceive
of the notion that such a song would have ever been permitted on the national
airwaves at any time, either then or now, when it is so poignantly critical of
the people who control those national airwaves.
And now, even with the limited attention that the movie received
in the first place, it has now been effectively “disappeared.” What happened to the profit motive? Why go to the trouble to make such a movie
and to write and perform such remarkable songs if you’re not going to do
anything to sell them to the public, in fact, after a short period of time, to
hide them from the public? Something
very odd is going on here.
But, then, even as the standard “lone, crazed gunman” explanation
goes, Mark David Chapman’s shooting of John Lennon in New York City on December
8, 1980, makes no sense whatsoever. It’s
not hard to see why many have concluded that Chapman had to have been a
mind-controlled subject of the CIA, on the order of Robert Kennedy’s supposed
assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. With the danger of what he might expose
about his brother’s assassination and his threat to their Vietnam War
ambitions, it’s easy to see why they would have wanted to take out RFK, but why
kill a guy who seemed to be little more than a pop music icon and long after
the end of the Vietnam War, at that?
Here is one explanation:
The Beatles were
also part of the mass experimentation that contemporary society was being
subjected to by the CIA, Britain's MI6 and the Tavistock Institute utilizing extraordinarily powerful mind-altering
psychedelic/psychotropic drugs.
More than most of the other boys in the
band, John Lennon became
increasingly aware not only of the extent of corruption, co-opting and
infiltration of the counterculture -- most CERTAINLY including the rock music
scene -- by these same covert government intelligence elements.
Lennon was also aware than one of
the "big guns" in the CIA/Tavistock/MI6
arsenal, LSD, had been having effect upon the population groups to
which it had been funneled so extensively that was most unexpected on the part
of the social manipulators--and to a large extent the effect was rather positive
and beneficial.
Shortly before Lennon's death at the hands of
what beyond the faintest glimmer of a shadow a doubt was a mind-controlled,
"Manchurian Candidate" type
assassin deployed by Tavistock/CIA/MI6, Mark Chapman to terminate a "loose cannon", Lennon
had the audacity to massively and blatantly "out" the aforementioned
consortium in a Playboy interview -- in which he made note of LSD's completely
unforeseen liberating impact upon human society and civilization--pretty much
thumbing his nose at the whole bunch and their whole trip; AND indicating as
well that he was aware of the extent to which he and other pop musicians had
been set up--to be used as dupes in massive social manipulation
scheme.[11]
More than anything, the lyrics of “Don’t Believe” reflect an
awareness of profound and pervasive corruption at the top, an awareness of the
sort that the writer, John Quinn, attributes to John Lennon. Is it really more believable that the
relative nonentity, Peter McNamee, wrote not just the remarkable words and
music of the song, but also the script of the movie and directed it as well
than that the song’s composer was a surviving John Lennon?
Perhaps neither one of them wrote the song. Maybe the composer is the anonymous person or
persons in the spook community who had a hand in composing songs attributed to
the Beatles and to Lennon all along.
Another possibility is that Lennon composed that song quite a long time
ago, but it sat in the drawer because there was no way he could get it recorded
and played on the air when he was under the thumb of the record industry.
A clue to the theory that Lennon
had been a good soldier who was growing fed up with it all might be found in an
observation in the Mathis essay.
“The masters of
propaganda behind [the Beatles],” he writes, “had made a big mistake with the ‘we're
more popular than Jesus now’ quote. That line had been no accident. Lennon
didn't just say it as a joke, off-the-cuff. It was an important part of the
storyline, since part of the propaganda was the destruction of Christianity.
Intelligence had been trying to destroy Christianity since at least 1875…”
Mathis
also endorses the generally accepted view that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
from the “Sgt. Pepper” album is a promotional song for LSD. He might also have noted, but doesn’t, that
the song that precedes it on the album, “With a Little Help from My Friends,”
also sounds like a promotion for drug use.
How else are we supposed to take that line, “I get high with a little
help from my friends”?
Mathis
goes on to opine that “Sgt. Pepper” is a reference to John Pepper, who was head
of British intelligence in the 1940s, and that many of the people depicted on
the album cover had been intelligence figures in one agency or another through
the years, which sort of ties the spook world’s promotion of dissolute
behavior, denigration of Christianity, and use of rock icons like Lennon and
the Beatles up into one neat package.
He could have
taken it one step further and added in Lennon’s most popular song as a composer
and performer separate from the Beatles, “Imagine.” It’s not a rock song but more like a hymn, or
“anti-hymn” considering its words, which would warm the hearts of the strongest
anti-Christian, anti-Western-tradition, anti-nationalist globalist. “Imagine no possessions” comes pretty close
to prefiguring the “You’ll own nothing and be happy” of the Great Reset.
Permitting
myself to imagine that the writer of “Don’t Believe” is, indeed, an older but
wiser John Lennon, I should think he would want to take those lyrics back and
replace them with something crafted for his adopted country like “Imagine, the
Remake”:
Imagine there’s a free press.
It’s easy if you try.
No talk of “conspiracy theories.”
How did those people die?
Imagine no corruption. That means the language,
too.
Imagine there’s no Deep State.
It isn’t hard to do;
No three-letter agencies;
No Bilderbergers, too.
Imagine an establishment of complete
transparency, you
You may say I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one.
If more folks would join us,
My work would be done.
Imagine a reversion;
I wonder if you can;
To our founding principles,
To the natural rights of man.
Imagine a great country back on the freedom
road, you
You may say I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one.
If more folks would join us,
My work would be done.
David Martin
January 24, 2022
David
Martin is the author of The Assassination of James Forrestal, The Murder of
Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair, and co-author with Hugh
Turley of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation.
To
comment, go to Heresy
Central.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpoaloSnYE&t=1957s (Click on “SHOW MORE” and then click on “Don’t Believe” to go straight to the song.)
[3] It put me in mind of my poem, “The Lies,” inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Bells,” with its repetitions and also with its message, https://www.dcdave.com/poet1/p030698d.html.
[4] Threshold editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. One must wonder how Carlson got by with his short acknowledgment: “I’d like to acknowledge Jonathan Karp of Simon & Schuster, whose descent from open-minded book editor to cartoonish corporate censor mirrors the decline of America itself. It has been a sad education watching it happen.”
[5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9173711/American-trust-media-hits-time-low.html#:~:text=Trust%20in%20the%20media%20is%20at%20an%20all-time,hit%20an%20all-time%20low%20of%20just%2027%20percent.
[6] https://www.zerohedge.com/political/poll-finds-only-10-americans-trust-media-covid-30-trust-fauci
[7] See David Martin, “Is the American Press the Enemy of the People?” January 18, 2018, https://www.dcdave.com/article5/180118.htm.
[8] Enrico Carotenuto, “John Swinton’s Speech – The Twilight of the Independent Press,” January 6, 2020, https://consciousnet.org/john-swintons-speech/.
[9] “Proof that John Lennon Faked his Death,” August 3, 2014, with later addenda, http://mileswmathis.com/lennon.pdf.
[10] See New York Post, July 20, 2021 https://nypost.com/2021/07/20/bidens-attempt-to-rope-big-tech-into-censorship-is-downright-sinister/ and Free Speech America, January 13, 2022 https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/alexander-hall/2022/01/13/president-biden-demands-big-tech-deal-misinformation.
[11] John Quinn, “Why Bush & the CIA Had John Lennon Killed,” October 10, 1999, https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_tavistock03.htm. There’s lots more where that came from. See “The Manufactured Invention of the Beatles, Stones, Grateful Dead, and the Birth of Rock n’ Roll by the Tavistock Institute; a Jesuit Corporation,” December 26, 2015 https://tabublog.com/2015/12/26/the-manufactured-invention-of-the-beatles-stones-grateful-dead-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll-by-the-tavistock-institute-a-jesuit-corporation/ and Russ Winter, “The Tavistock Institute’s Ties to the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” October 21, 2021, https://www.winterwatch.net/2021/10/the-tavistock-institutes-ties-to-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll/. More reinforcement of the role of the spook community in the promotion of drug use can be found in “CIA Social Control through Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll,” December 30, 2013, though it takes a considerably more jaundiced view toward LSD than John Quinn attributes to John Lennon, https://21stcenturywire.com/2013/12/30/cia-social-control-through-sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll/.