IMAGINE PEACE

“Henry Ford knew how to sell cars by advertising. I’m selling PEACE. And Yoko and I are just one big advertising campaign. It may make people laugh, but it may make them think, too. Really, we’re Mr and Mrs Peace”
John Lennon

The WAR IS OVER! campaign was originally launched by John and Yoko on 15th December, 1969. Billboards with the inscription “WAR IS OVER! (IF YOU WANT IT) Happy Christmas from John and Yoko” were placed in 11 cities worldwide: New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Along with these billboards leaflets were distributed, posters plastered up, newspaper advertisements placed and radio announcements made.

When John was asked how much the billboards cost, he replied “I don’t know- but it is cheaper than someone’s life.”

2009 Holiday Message From Yoko Ono:

Dear Friends

The WAR IS OVER! campaign was once a tiny seed, which spread and covered the Earth. John and I believed it helped many people to stop their wars. Since then, every WAR IS OVER! campaign has impacted the world as powerfully as the first one.

Start yours tomorrow, and you will see that it spreads and covers the world very fast and, meanwhile, makes you a Small Pebble Person.

Small Pebble People are people who know that small pebbles, when they’re dropped in the ocean, will immediately affect the ocean of the whole wide world.

Don’t throw a big stone. It scares people and creates repercussions.

Just drop a small pebble.
We’ll keep doing it. Together.
That’s how the world gets changed…by Small Pebble People.
We change, and the world changes.

Happy Holidays.

I love you!
yoko

Yoko Ono Lennon
Christmas 2009

All you marvellous people have been sending in translations of…

WAR
IS
OVER!
IF YOU WANT IT
Happy Christmas from John & Yoko

(NB please email further translations, corrections & refinements to admin [at] IMAGINEPEACE.com)

…we’ve made multilingual hi-res poster versions, which you can DOWNLOAD FROM FLICKR HERE (see instructions below) and print & display in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season, and send as holiday season postcards to your friends.

Thanks for all your comments and suggestions.
The response has been amazing.

We have been working round the clock, conversing on email with hundreds of kind and helpful contributors who have been helping us to continually refine each translation to closer define John & Yoko’s original intention. Special thanks go to those from Oxford University, UK & the European Parliament in Brussels who have helped out enormously.

We now have translations in Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Belarus, Brazilian Portugese, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Cebuano-Bisaya, Chethlonian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Croatian, Cyrillic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hiligaynon-Ilonggo, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilokano, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kamakawi, Khmer, Klingon, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian, Pangasinense, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, South Sotho (South Africa), Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German (Rheintaler), Tagalog, Thai, Tok Pisin, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu, Vasc, Waray-Waray & Welsh.

We still need some help with some of the non-Latin scripted languages, as they often don’t copy and paste well, and the correct formatting & layout of these scripts can be very tricky to the uninitiated eye.

If there’s any designers that have script fonts that look closer to the original (Franklin Gothic) and can email us a similarly laid-out 3000×4000 pixel pdf, that would be fantastic!

We received the Burmese translation this way – as a preformatted pdf file – so thrilling as we are especially concerned about the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi and the struggle in Burma, and have been campaigning for her release here.

We would particularly like to find Dari (persian), Pashto, Kurdish, Aramaic & Turkmen.

We’re also looking out for Amharic, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Cantonese/Yue, Fula/Fulfulde, Gan, Georgian, Gujarati, Hakka, Hausa, Igbo, Inuktitut, Javanese, Kannada, Madurese, Maithili, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Min, Nepali, Oriya, Oromo, Punjabi, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Sunda, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, Uzbek, Wu, Xiang, Yoruba & Zhuang and many others.

We were very happy to receive Klingon, Chethlonian, Kamakawi and Lojban and welcome more esoteric submissions.

Also great to have Handsigns & Braille, Morse, Semaphore & Flags.

We hope this project will continue to evolve and grow worldwide in the spirit in which it was first intended by John & Yoko in 1968.

Yoko said:
“This is what we wanted to do, and did, in a way at the time.
John would have been delighted.”

The main page to follow for progress is here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/sets/72157622834909233/

Please keep sending in your contributions & refinements to admin [at] IMAGINEPEACE [dot] com

Special thanks to the following essential contributors: Alexandra, Amelie, Anna, Anne, Antonia, Arabella, Ashwin, Ashwin, Aung Moe Win, Berm, Bermlee, Brainspore, Canoben, Cara, Carlo, Cefeida, Chris, Creede, Cristina, Deana, Denis, Dennis, Dori, Ed, Emily, Emur, Enkel, Fyodor, Gabriel, Ian, Ibrahim, Iman, Isaiah, Jaeyoon, James, Jason, Jennifer, John, Jordana, Jordi, Jorge, Kalinka, Khalil, Khalil, Kiryl, Lynne, Lucienne, Madzia, Maralalala, Mark, Marta, Menelaus, Mikaela, Moti Z, Muffin, Nevide, Nicolas, Pamela, Peppa, Peter, Quifengguoer, Ramey, Robert, Ruth, Sarune, Simon, Sonia, Steven, Susan, Svanhildur, Tetsuo, TetsuRo, Tiffany, Tina, Tumi, Tumid, Vadim, Victor, Vlasta,Yanit & Yonit.

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Download the poster from HERE.

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WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It). War is over NOW.