I first got to know and work with John Berger in 1971 when he helped with the launch of 7 Days, a short-lived revolutionary weekly, by becoming a ‘trustee’. He contributed a dramatic essay on Mayakovsky, which he co-wrote with Anya Bostock. From then our friendship developed, as described in Tom Overton’s new biography. The photo above, taken by Jean Mohr, dates from around late 1977 in my flat in Covent Garden. I’m trying to show John how to unravel a roll of Sellotape while he fingers a packet of Gitane he was not allowed to smoke. More important, for me at least, was that his example taught me how to write.
Fast-forward two decades and he became a contributor to openDemocracy. There was no formal relationship but he was a spiritual trustee of its commitment to openness, honest argument, international solidarity and opposition to the lies of the US and UK governments headed by Bush and Blair. His interview about the decisive importance of the 2004 US election, which we run here, focuses on the terrible mendacity of the Bush administration. Bush won the election and we can see today that there is a direct inheritance from his triumph that leads to Trump.
John’s powerful and demanding Ten Dispatches about Endurance in the Face of Walls, is in part a response to the creation of the so-called ‘Separation Wall’ then under full construction by Israel along the West Bank.
One of the most notable of John’s achievements in the later part of his life was his commitment to the cause of Palestine and resistance to Israeli occupation and expansion. The short statement that opens our trilogy is worth thousands of words and stands today as a simple moral instruction. We must go on refuting the actions of the Israeli state and the appalling support, material and verbal, that it receives, as it seeks to crush its Palestinian neighbours in a fashion that is “viscerally racist”. It opens the three contributions.
John Berger
John Berger
John Berger
