Bed-in for peace | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

The fact that people are still talking about it 40 years later suggests that it wasn’t stupid. 

And, yes, ultimately, to use publicity to sell peace as a brand was pretty clever at the time – especially at a time when the major media was still largely in support of the war effort. It’s no wonder that those who had a monopoly on the information at the time moved very quickly to try to delegitimize what John and Yoko were doing.

Into the Sky with Diamonds said
I don’t recall it that way.

No one ever called it stupid, just ineffective and/or counterproductive.

There was already a large peace movement in a very polarized United States. No pro-war person was ever going to have their mind changed by a no-longer-attractive-or-amusing non-American rock star hanging out with a none-too-appealing Asian woman. In fact, the pro-war group could point to the now weirded-out Lennon and say, ” You see, THOSE are the type of people against the war…”

Hard to say – the fact is, for the first time, a huge anti-war public was being mobilized that hadn’t been before and part of it was thanks to symbolic leaders like Lennon (and many others, I should add). Clearly many, many, many people were taking a strong anti-war stance who had never thought to do so before.

Well, again, I don’t think Lennon was necessarily a forerunner, but the truth is, the Vietnam War was years in before there was any vocal opposition. And it was years after that before any of the vocal opposition was being represented in the mainstream media.

I’m not entirely sure I concur that “The threat of communists taking over the world was real” – in fact, I think a more plausible argument is that the opposite is true and that it was much more apparent that Western capitalism was actively attempting to maintain or further a position of hegemony. That Lennon’s point of view was simplistic was very much by design. If you wanted “clear arguments” there were plenty of them at the academic level – most notably Noam Chomsky who made remarkably cogent and extraordinarily well researched arguments (youtube his interview with William Buckley, from the time, for an example). The problem was, as Lennon himself mentioned at the time, nobody read him. And while I would suggest that Chomsky provided a much stronger argument against the war, I can’t deny that Lennon probably connected to a much wider cultural group at the time by giving a very straightforward message. 

When you are anti-establishment, the most crucial thing that you need is communication and collective action. I would say that all the people who got together to fight the war, singing Give Peace A Chance was an example of this, far more than a collection of academic articles.