Imagine No Countries

John Lennon’s utopian 1971 hit may carry a lovely melody, but its impact today has become an existential crisis for Western civilization

Tomorrow, October 9, 2026, would have been the 86^th birthday of the Beatle John Lennon, a certified musical legend. But he was also a flawed man, and potentially even partially responsible for the existential threat facing Western civilization today.

There is no doubt that Lennon was one of the greatest musicians and songwriters of all time, a man whose works profoundly altered the course of humanity. But he was a massive hypocrite. Today, popular imagination lionizes Lennon as the activist strumming his guitar for peace, love, and justice. However, these authorized biographies do not capture the full picture of the man. While one can highlight his sympathies with the Irish Republican Army (which he only shut up about when the US government threatened to deport him), abusive relationship with his first wife Cynthia Powell, and abandonment of his first son Julian, my personal bête noire is this photo during Lennon’s and his second wife Yoko Ono’s famous 1969 ‘Bed-in for Peace’ publicity stunt in Amsterdam. The caption on the website Snopes phrases it best: John and Yoko waiting for the maid to make the bed so they can protest against the system. Lennon and Ono’s hypocritical stunt would be like, in the era we live in, flying a private jet to a conference on climate change.

Of course, none of John Lennon’s personal failures excuse his tragic murder in 1980. Furthermore, I have no intention to waste my time bashing the man for an entire essay. An entire stadium’s full of writers far more accomplished than I have chronicled every moment of the lives and every personality trait of Lennon and his three fellow Beatles. However, they do open a window to his dangerously quixotic visions.

I have always been annoyed by John Lennon’s 1971 hit Imagine. While the melodious piano riff undoubtedly warms the heart, the lyrics are unabashedly utopian, and when fully implemented— downright dangerous. More than 50 years after the Imagine album was released and 40 years after Lennon’s murder, globalization and instantaneous information have transformed the song’s utopian vision from a pipe dream of the 1960s counterculture to reality. This state of affairs, encapsulated by the lyrics all the people sharing all the world with no countries in a brotherhood of man, has now come to fruition. While the aggressive strategy and deadly mistakes of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement are not only broadly unpopular with the American public but have generated massive outrage, let us imagine a Lennonesque world where immigration enforcement and national identity disappeared.

And we don’t need to wait until Lennon’s 100^th birthday in 2040 or dismiss it as a dystopian nightmare, this world has already arrived. Except this time, Lennon’s cultural dilution has only occurred in one region of the world— the West.

Let’s start by examining John Lennon’s home country, the United Kingdom, where approximate net migration shattered records between 2021 and 2023 with a staggering 1,739,000 net arrivals. According to the UK Office for National Statistics, by the end of June 2023, 2.6% of the UK’s population were new immigrants who had arrived in only the last two years. Unlike 20 years ago, the post-pandemic wave did not consist of so-called “Polish plumbers.” In fact, Britain’s Poles apparently see the writing on the wall and are packing their bags and repatriating to their homeland. This new wave of immigrants instead consists of those hailing from outside the European Union, and thus, those who are far less likely to blend into the local culture. Instead, they seem more interested in imposing their own culture on their new homeland.

Back in February, the British publication Daily Telegraph reported the existence of controversial plans drawn up by the UK Department for Environment, Food, & Rural Affairs (DEFRA). And controversial would be putting it mildly. The English countryside, you know, that old-timey place where a visitor can forget the 21^st century and observe a pastoral, simple life frozen in time, is, according to British bureaucrats, an excessively “white environment” lacking “ethnic and socioeconomic diversity.” Cherished regions such as the Cotswolds would inevitably succumb to an “irrelevant” status in a multicultural society. Not even the iconic English pub is spared DEFRA’s wrath: “Protected landscapes were closely associated with ‘traditional’ pubs, which have limited food options and cater to people who have a drinking culture. Accordingly, Muslims from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi group said this contributed to a feeling of being unwelcome.”

I don’t even know where to start here. Beyond the obvious narrative of wokery and diversity run amok, there’s something even more disturbing in the works. Can anyone imagine the Japanese government releasing guidelines warning that there were too many Japanese people in the dying villages of Japan’s countryside? Or the Indian government claiming a surplus of Hindus in rural India necessitates a greater diversity of inhabitants to make India’s Muslim minority feel more comfortable? Of course not, nor should we expect them to. If a foreigner wishes to relocate to Japan or India, it would be their utmost obligation to adapt, or at the very least, give respect to Japanese or Indian customs. Whether John Lennon would approve today of these Soviet-style guidelines had Mark David Chapman targeted Paul McCartney is irrelevant. The commissars of Whitehall seem eager to actively replace the native inhabitants of the English countryside with groups not only alien but actively hostile to these regions’ centuries-old culture.

If there’s a recipe for national seppuku, the UK Department for Environment, Food, & Rural Affairs is following it.

Neither is Lennon’s beloved Ireland spared from such nihilist folly. You may harbor serious concerns with many of the beliefs of the Irish National Party, whether their maximalist opposition to abortion or their hard-edged nationalism encapsulated by the blood-and-soil slogan “Ireland belongs to the Irish.” However, thanks to a source in the party, I have been made aware how devastating Ireland’s migration crisis has been for the Irish people. Homelessness, once unthinkable, is breaking records every year, straining the state budget. Official statistics from the Irish Economic and Social Research Institute warn of a shortage of 250,000 units even as net migration nears 60,000 per year, nearly as high as the UK on a per capita basis. The rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Dublin has swelled to €2,200 ($2,600) —worse than San Francisco if adjusted for the Irish wages. Yet somehow the Irish government only managed to deport a pathetic 198 people for the entirety of 2025.

So much for living life in peace. The Irish must instead contend with a life of no possessions.

In December 2024, National Party leader Patrick Quinlan, at a regional council meeting in suburban Dublin proposed releasing official statistics of the share of non-natives among new housing applicants. Due to the National Party’s political pariah status, Quinlan’s fellow councilors unanimously rejected the motion. What they won’t tell you is that as far back as 2011, the share in County Fingal was already 51%. According to Irish commentator John McGuirk, no supporter of the National Party, “The point of having an Irish state – the whole reason so many innocent people were blown to pieces to achieve one – was reputedly that such a state would serve the interests of Irish people.” Such is the degree of failure among Ireland’s ruling class that they seem to prioritize open-borders experiments over the welfare of their own people.

Of course, the UK and Ireland are not alone in the Western World in executing John Lennon’s misguided vision. What is unique, however, is how no one else outside the Western world is returning the favor. While we still cling to Lennon’s utopian precept of all the people, sharing all the world in overcrowded, unhoused cities where the quality of life is in freefall, the rest of the world leaps into the 21^st century while gazing on in schadenfreude. Take the People’s Republic of China. China is now a fully developed nation with not only world-class modern infrastructure but more than enough housing to spare. And as for Chinese President Xi Jinping compromising Chinese national identity in the pursuit of a brotherhood of man? Forget about it. Only about 1 million, or less than 1 tenth of 1% of China’s populace were born outside the country.

In fact, there are more than three times as many foreign-born residents in Greater London alone than in the entire People’s Republic of China. Despite collapsing fertility rates, Xi observes the alternative and replies no thanks.

The situation becomes even more stark… and tragic… when observing the Middle East. The lack of reciprocity for Western tolerance is perhaps best exemplified by ever-more precarious position of the region’s communities of Christians. Take Lebanon, a nation whose capital Beirut was once proclaimed the “Paris of the Middle East.” In the 1932 census, before independence from France, Christians comprised 53% of all Lebanese residents— an outright majority. While shockingly there has not been a single official census conducted since then (the concept remains a political taboo), most estimates place the current amount of Christians somewhere between 30-35%. What happened? Higher Islamic birthrates, Palestinian refugees, a 15-year civil war that spawned Hezbollah causing more than half a million Lebanese Christians to brutal sectarian violence, and repeated conflicts between Hezbollah and Israel have rendered Lebanon’s ancient Christian community, one of the oldest on Planet Earth, under siege and in decline.

And we may not even need statistical data when we can just rely on the words of the now assassinated former leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah: “Lebanon was a Christian country, but we took it and now it is ours. We will not stop until every country on Earth is governed by the law of Allah and the people of Islam, as our Prophet promised.” As far as John Lennon is concerned, it’s obvious Nasrallah didn’t get the memo. And even if he did, does anyone seriously believe that a hardened Islamist like Nasrallah or his ghoulish allies would have exhibited even the remotest interest in reciprocating Lennon’s universalist plea? Yeah, neither can I. And if one gazes across the Middle East, it’s not hard to see that the grim trend of Christian persecution is not a Lebanese-only phenomenon. Yet somehow Western dreamers like Lennon still bury their heads in the sand and promote a de facto surrender of Western Civilization.

John Lennon’s Imagine may be a lovely melody. But the world it spawned is not a world where we all live in peace. It’s a world where the West unilaterally self-destructs. The next time you hear someone proclaiming the virtues of Lennon’s utopia, you can remind them how far removed his message is from reality. Maybe this is the world John Lennon dreamed about, but if it isn’t, the Beatle owes us an apology from beyond the grave.