ABOUT
PEBBLE PEOPLE
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
WAR IS OVER!
by Antony Fawcett, PA to J&Y, from his book ‘One Day At A Time’.
After the M.B.E. event, John and Yoko put all their energy into organizing the “War Is Over” campaign. They had decided on a special Christmas message: “War Is Over – If you want it – Happy Christmas from John & Yoko,” that was to appear on huge billboards erected in twelve cities around the world, and on thousands of posters distributed in the suburbs. Yanou Collart, a top Parisian public relations person, arranged to have the French billboards placed in prominent positions on the Champs Elysees and in several other Paris locations. Similar arrangements were made for Rome, Berlin, Athens, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, and Port-of-Spain in Trinidad.
To launch the campaign, on December 15, 1969 John played at a “Peace For Christmas” charity concert, held at the Lyceum Theatre on behalf of the United Nations Children’s Fund. Behind the stage a huge “War Is Over” billboard was erected. John had got together the nucleus of the Plastic Ono Band-Alan White on drums and Klaus Voormann; bass, and he had asked George Harrison, who had been performing with Delaney and Bonnie, to come join them. Right up to the last minute we didn’t know if he would come. From the miniscule upstairs dressing room at the Lyceum, I called to find out what was happening, and was informed that everybody was on the way. Ten minutes later George appeared along with Eric Clapton, the complete Delaney and Bonnie Band, Billy Preston, and Keith Moon.
“War Is Over” was an effective campaign and the culmination of John and Yoko’s attempt at media saturation. Its very internationalism was impressive and the billboards drew positive response from the public in every city.
John & Yoko interview
with Marshall McLuhan, Missisauga, Ontario, December 19th 1969.
Q: “Can you tell me? I just sort of wonder how the ‘War Is Over,’ the wording… the whole thinking. What happened?”
JOHN: “I think the basic idea of the poster event was Yoko’s. She used to do things like that in the avant garde circle, you know. Poster was a sort of medium, media, whatever.”
YOKO: “Medium.”
JOHN: “And then we had one idea for Christmas, which was a bit too vast, you know.”
YOKO: “We wanted to do it.”
JOHN: “We wanted to do it, but we couldn’t get it together in time.”
YOKO: “Maybe next year.”
JOHN: “And to do something specifically at Christmas. And then it got down to, well, if we can’t do that event…”
YOKO: “We did this.”
JOHN: “…what we’ll do is a poster event. And then how do you get posters stuck all around the world, you know. It’s easier said than done. So we just started ringing up and find it out. And at first we’re gonna have… we had some other wording, didn’t we, like, ‘Peace Declared.’ And it started up, there’s a place in New York, where you can have your own newspaper headline, you know. There’s a little shop somewhere in Times Square. And we were wondering how to, sort of like, get it in the newspapers as if it had happened, you know. And it developed from that. Well, we couldn’t get the front page of each newspaper to say war was over, peace declared or whatever.”
YOKO: “We thought maybe just one newspaper, you know.”
JOHN: “Well, in the end it worked. It worked like that. But we wanted, remember the Orson Welles thing, where he did something like that, you know. Like, on TV or something but it was too hard to get together.”
YOKO: “Telstar, we’re thinking.”
JOHN: “Yeah, try and get live Telstar and then bam. But maybe next year.”
YOKO: “Oh yeah.”
Q: “You aren’t gonna tell us what next year is.”
YOKO: “No, no, we can’t. We can’t tell you that.”
JOHN: “No, no, we can’t even think that far ahead. I mean, July is about the furthest I ever thought ahead. And that’s six months.”
Q: “When did all this happen? This sort of the War Is Over idea. In the fall or…”
YOKO: “No, no. It was sometime around summer, just late summer.”
Q: “So you’ve been working on it quite a while.”
JOHN: “Yes, yes.”
Selection of interview excerpts:
JOHN: When we stick posters ’round saying, “War is over if you want it”, what we’re trying to promote is an awareness in people of how much power they do have and not to rely on Government, or leader, or teacher so much that they’re all passive or automatons, and that initial after effect of the drug scene has to be regenerated. They have to have new hope, but everybody’s looking for goals and answers, and youth especially, and what we’re trying to tell them is that, “You are the goal. Nobody on earth can do it for you. Whatever it is you want, you must do it yourself”, and what we’ve been promoting for just under a year and only now through our contacts is it coming — people beginning to think, “Oh well, it is my responsibility”, again. People were thinking, “This is the answer” — “Drugs is the answer”, but there is no answer, as we know. The answer is within and you’ve got to get on with it, and that’s what we’re promoting, and it takes time but there’s a lot of people like us and thinking like that and they will be pushing and promoting as well to get the people out of the grass and dropping in to change it, rather than dropping out and expecting rewards for that.
JOHN: The thing is we have this poster that says War Is Over If You Want It. We all sit around pointing fingers at Nixon and the leaders of the countries saying, “He gave us peace” or “They gave us war.” But it’s our responsibility what happens around the world in every other country as well as our own. It’s our responsibility for Vietnam and Biafra and the Israel war and all the other wars we don’t quite hear about. It’s all our responsibility and when we all want peace we’ll get it. I support humanity, I don’t belong to any left wing, right wing, middle wing, Black Panthers, white Christians, Protestants, Catholics, or nothing People have said we’re naive for trying to sell peace like a bar of soap. But I want to ask you, is Mr. Ford naive? Or is the soap powder factory naive? They’re selling the same old soap that’s been around for two thousand years, but suddenly it’s new blue soap. So we’re selling new blue peace and we hope some of you buy it. The war is here now and there’s two ways of looking at it. Some people say, “Why did you spend your money on posters or peace campaigns? Why didn’y you give it to the Biafran children, or something like that?” And we say, “We’re trying to prevent cancer, not cure it.”
Q: What kind of a response did you get to the “War Is Over” poster?
JOHN: We got a big response. The people that got in touch with us understood what a grand event it was apart from the message itself. We got just “thank you’s” from lots of youths around the world— for all the things we were doing — that inspired them to do something. We had a lot of response from other than pop fans, which was interesting, from all walks of life and age. If I walk down the street now I’m more liable to get talked to about peace than anything I’ve done. The first thing that happened in New York was just walking down the street and a woman just came up to me and said “Good luck with the peace thing,” that’s what goes on mainly — it’s not about “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And that was interesting — it bridged a lot of gaps.
IMAGINE PEACE by Yoko Ono
What is wrong with war, is as Gandhi said: ”An eye for an eye will make us all blind”.
I’d like to see the human race wake up to the danger and futility of war as soon as possible.
At the time, in the 60s, we thought we could change the world just like that! But it’s taking a little bit more time!
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
I think that that’s a very strong thing to do.
It might be a very controversial thing to do.
Because it’s a very powerful thing to do.
But I think it’s all right to say that.
I don’t think that goes against the policy of this country or anything like that.
I think, in the end, all people in this country really want peace.
But how to get there, some people are thinking in a different way of course.
But imagining, that’s something that we can all do, even when we have different opinions about how to get there.
Imagining peace, imagining peace.
That’s okay.
That we can all do without feeling the conflict.
War is over if you want it
War is over NOW
Yoko Ono Lennon
