One year ago, Jeremy Lester, a son of working-class Glasgow, turned philosopher, poet, and revolutionary Marxist militant of all just causes under the sun, died in the early hours of Tuesday, 10 September 2024 in a hospital room in his native city, where he had arrived only a week before with the aim of opening an exhibition of artwork he had helped create by Palestinian children.
Jeremy was no longer active as a militant of a political organisation, or perhaps never had been, but was a friend and comrade of the Christian Rakovsky International Socialist Centre, which was set up, at the time of the bombing of the former Yugoslav Federation and its capital Belgrade in 1999, as a Balkan centre as a result of the initiative taken by the EEK (the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece) in opposition to the NATO imperialistic military intervention, but was later converted into an International Socialist Centre in 2019 as it had expanded towards Western (Finland, France) and Eastern Europe (Russia, the Baltic countries).
Jeremy was a noble soul who solidarized with all the oppressed of the world. As in many cases of great shock in oppressed nations, after the withdrawal of US imperialism from Afghanistan in 2021, a great many Afghans had to leave their country for a variety of reasons and fled, via Iran, to our native Turkey as their first stop in their odyssey towards safer climes. At the end of that year Jeremy decided to come to Turkey in order to help out Afghan refugees who entered Turkey from the east in the vicinity of Lake Van, which was itself a war-torn zone since it had been, on and off, the battle scene of a struggle between the Kurdish guerilla of the PKK and the armed forces of the Republic of Turkey. This is only one example of Jeremy’s indomitable and selfless quest for solidarity with the wretched of the earth.
Then, in 2023, immediately after the 7 October Al Aksa Flood attack, he volunteered to go to Palestine to show his solidarity with the Palestinian people. He aimed and succeeded to stay in the Dheisheh camp in the West Bank, a very special camp that has historically been a mainstay of revolutionary communist politics in Palestine. He arrived in Palestine in December of that year and organised an art workshop with the children of the camp towards an exhibition of drawings by the children under the title of “Liberating the Imagination: 2023-2048”.
On the 21st of January 2024, freshly arrived back in his chosen home country of Italy, where he lived with his companion Gemma Borriello, he participated in the “Special Session on Palestine” at the end of the online conference titled “Lenin’s Legacy 100 Years On”, organised by the Christian Rakovsky International Socialist Centre and the RedMed web network, in order to make a keynote speech on Palestine and its suffering and resistance.
Back home he organised the exhibition he had worked towards by bringing together the artwork of Palestinian children first in Italy and later in Scotland. (He was also planning to do one each in Athens, Greece and Istanbul, Turkey, which both materialised in his absence after his death.) After a very successful exhibition in Italy, he flew to Scotland, in perfectly normal health, on Tuesday, 3 September 2024, and then suddenly fell ill and was hospitalised on the 5th. His companion Gemma joined him immediately. After several uneventful days, after the two of them spent jolly moments of laughing and giggling, Jeremy died suddenly in an unexpected manner in the early hours of Tuesday, 10 September 2024. The post mortem carried out on 17 September, one week after his death and a fortnight after his hospitalisation, was characterised, astonishingly, “inconclusive”. This strange death inevitably raises the question of whether his recent “subversive” activities in Palestine and the travelling exhibition on the trials and tribulations of Palestinian children titled “Liberating the Imagination: 2023-2048” have any connection to his unfortunate lot.
Jeremy and I met only towards the end of our long lives. I had been hearing of him and his compagna Gemma through group correspondence. Then came his self-chosen mission of assistance, mentioned above, to destitute Afghan refugees in Turkey, which led to collaboration between him, myself, and Şiar Rişvanoğlu, another citizen of Turkey, a lawyer who, in the same vein as Jeremy, has defended an immense number of oppressed people, from Kurdish patriots to women and from workers to human rights defenders. Then came a personal meeting at a café in Istanbul of these three people, indisputably an affair of love at first sight, for all three of us, I believe.
This was to be our one and only time together. Between that encounter and his death, Jeremy and I corresponded very frequently, for both political collaboration and friendly sharing, writing long email messages that really were the equivalent of the much more precious form of correspondence, called letter writing, that we knew from our youthful days and loved. We constantly expressed our mutual wish of meeting for a few days either in Bologna or in Istanbul, together with our compagne, Gemma and Yonca.
Of Jeremy, urgently need to say one thing. The term “renaissance man” is, as is well-known, used for people who are polymath, people who have a deep grasp of many fields of knowledge and of arts. There is no term that corresponds to this for the generation of 1968. Of course, in different languages there are terms such as “68’er” or “soixante-huitard” or “68’li” (the latter in my native Turkish), but these terms only pose a relationship to a person’s being there when the 1968 generation was on the move politically speaking. It does not define a type of personality or character. I think that generation distinguishes itself not only in its fully-dedicated youthful revolutionism. In mature age, the erstwhile man or woman of 1968, the true one, the “1968 person” if I may coin a term, is both fiercely dedicated to changing the world, violently if necessary, and generous and tender to all living beings, both serious, diligent and systematically studious, but also deeply emotional, artistic and kind, will both grumble and groan and roar in the face of exploitation, injustice, and oppression, but is sentimental and soft-spoken when surrounded by the best of what is human.
That, I found, was the kind of person Jeremy was. That is why we miss him and will miss him so much.