John Lennon: Gimme Some Truth!

December 12, 2010
Issue 

This year marks the 30th anniversary of rock star John Lennon’s assassination. Lennon was also an anti-war activist and, in the most radical period of his life in the early 1970s, an unashamed socialist. (You can read an interview given by Lennon and his partner Yoko Ono to British revolutionary socialist magazine Red Mole in 1971 here.)

Lennon sung “Gimme Some Truth” on his 1971 album Imagine. Thirty years after Lennon’s death, the song is more relevant than ever as Wikileaks proceeds to give us some badly needed truth — and the “uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites” try their hardest to shut the whistle-blowing website up.

“I'm sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

I've had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth”

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