When Verso Books first released John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance anthology in 2007, George W. Bush was in his second term as President; the United States and the United Kingdom, Berger’s native country, were embroiled in catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the Second Intifada in Palestine had recently come to a close.
Hold Everything Dear, reissued by Verso in March, has come off the bench in a moment when Berger’s reflections on war, poverty, art, and language have only grown more resonant. “The visionary political vocabulary of three centuries has been garbaged,” he writes in “Wanting Now,” the opening essay. “The economic and military global tyranny of today has been established.”
Throughout the 16 essays in the collection, Berger returns frequently to the notion that language is a casualty of our warped politics. In “Ten Dispatches About Endurance,” he says the words democracy, liberty and productivity “have been rendered meaningless.” However, this is not primarily a linguistic issue, but rather a political one. The loss of meaningful language obscures reality and justifies the unjustifiable.
In the 2003 essay “Let Us Think About Fear,” Berger confronts how the Iraq War was sold to the American people. The claim that it was necessary to protect the United States from “weapons of mass destruction” turned out to be a cynical lie. And what did “liberating” the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein look like? “Baghdad has fallen,” Berger wrote shortly after the U.S. invasion. “The city has been taken by the troops who were bringing it freedom. Its hospitals are wailingly overcrowded with burnt and maimed civilians, many of them children, and all of them victims of the computerized missiles, shells, and bombs launched by the city’s liberators.”
That chasm between language and reality, “the ravine between declared principles and real aims,” obscured both the atrocities of the war and the real motivations for the invasion. To Berger, those aims were to “seize control of one of the world’s richest oil reserves, to test out new weapons,” to enrich weapons manufacturers and war profiteers, and above all, “to demonstrate to the present fragmented but globalized world what ‘Shock and Awe’ is!”
Perhaps no topic covered in Hold Everything Dear is more resonant today than the several essays that discuss Israel and Palestine. Whether or not Berger — who died in 2017 in France, where he spent most of his life — could have anticipated Israel’s transition to all-out colonial massacre as a response to the Hamas-led slaughter of Israeli civilians in October 2023, his analysis of the asymmetry of the so-called conflict is devastatingly pertinent today. “Any comparison between the weapons involved in these confrontations returns us to what poverty is about,” he writes of the Second Intifada. “On one hand Apache and Cobra helicopters, F16s, Abrams tanks, Humvee jeeps, electronic surveillance systems, tear gas; on the other hand catapults, slingshots, mobile telephones, badly used Kalashnikovs and mostly handmade explosives.”
Berger admits that “a gap between declared principles and realpolitik may be a constant throughout history.” However, he sees something new and disturbing about how the gap is constituted today, with “small words and evasive silence.” Berger quotes an Israeli “refusenik,” someone who has refused to serve in the Army, Sergio Yahni, on why the name “Israel Defense Forces” is a misnomer: “This army does not exist to bring security to the citizens of Israel: It exists to guarantee the continuation of the theft of Palestinian land.”
In his closing essay, “Looking Carefully — Two Woman Photographers,” Berger discusses the work of Ahlam Shibli, a Palestinian photographer of Bedouin descent, and Jitka Hanzlová, a Czech photographer who lives in Germany. Reading Berger’s analysis of Shibli’s work, which he says is concerned with “the impact of an event on a life,” it is difficult not to think of the late Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna.
Hassouna was the subject of Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. The film, which chronicles the genocide in Gaza through video conversations between the two, was selected to debut at ACID, a parallel section of the Cannes film festival. On April 16, 24 hours after its selection was announced, Hassouna, who was in her mid-20s, was killed along with 10 members of her family by an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Touffah neighborhood of Gaza City. Hassouna would have gotten married just days after she was killed. Her 18-year-old brother described her as having “big dreams” and wanting “to travel and participate in international photography exhibitions.” The young photographer saw her documentation of the genocide as a form of resistance. The Israeli government, as it often does, claimed the target of the strike that killed Hassouna and her family was a Hamas combatant but provided no evidence of such. Therein lies the gulf between claims and aims.
Berger, despite his constant recognition of the inhuman horrors of imperial war, reveals himself to have had a stubborn belief that human creativity and tenderness are inextinguishable — and it is instead the masters of war and capital who “are alone on this planet.” He ends “Ten Dispatches on Endurance” with the sentence “Trace with a finger tonight her (his) hairline before sleep.” “Another Side of Desire” concludes with “the sirens wail down the street. As long as you are in my arms, no harm will come to you.”
This desire for tenderness might have something to do with Berger’s frequent turns to the arts to develop an understanding of world politics. While he was a painter, a poet, a critic, and a storyteller, it’s not so much that his only way of understanding politics was through the prism of art, but rather that there is something indispensable about what art can communicate, even under unspeakable conditions, about longing and survival.
It is in eulogizing his late friend Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani political scientist and activist, that Berger most potently brings all this together:
“Eqbal learnt early on that life inevitably leads to separations … . knew and accepted the tragic. And, consequently, he spent much prodigious energy on forging links — of friendship, political solidarity, military loyalty, shared poetry, hospitality — links which had a chance of surviving after the inevitable separations. I still remember the meals he cooked.”
Berger beckons us to forge links that may guide us through our tragic separations. And in his call to hold everything dear, he asks that no people — including those in Palestine and Iraq — be robbed of the right to sustain those bonds.
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Hold Everthing Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
By John Berger
Verso Books, 160 pages
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