What causes did John consider himself affiliated to? What were his broader political values?
John was involved with European Nuclear Disarmament (END) and was vehemently against the existence of nuclear weapons. During a discussion on Iran’s nuclear programme a colleague of ours stated that the USA was right to fear the ‘imminent’ Iranian capability, whilst John reminded him that the only country to ever use nuclear weapons was the USA on Japan in 1945. John was broadly speaking a Socialist, although surprisingly perhaps, John had never read a great amount of Marx, which was a great shame because there is no doubt that he would have related to Marx’s ideas, particularly on ‘alienation’. In that sense I would say that he was a ‘humanist’ in the Marxist use of the term. He admired Gandhi and Mandela for fighting against oppressive forces but there wasn’t a ‘political philosophy’ so to speak, but there’s no doubt that in conversations I had with John, he had a ‘sense’ of justice and equality that equated with Socialist thought. What did John think a good media would be like, in t
