Harry's Last Stand Newsletter

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I don't know if we are too late to stop the construction of fascism as the dominant ideology in our own countries, anymore.
The weather this April felt worse than we deserved. It probably wasn't because even T.S. Eliot called it the cruellest month over a hundred years ago…
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JM Smith
4
Today it is concentration camps for asylum seekers looking for sanctuary in Britain. Tomorrow it will be you if you are poor, marginalised…
Five people drowned in the English Channel last night. They were refugee claimants who sought safety in Britain. The news media labelled them migrants…
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JM Smith
4
If you are poor or working class mental illness will shorten your life by decades.
My brother Peter, has been dead for over 14 years now. His death had a profound effect on both my dad and me. His death, along with my mum’s in 1999 was…
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JM Smith
1
We have lost so much, including our democracy because capitalism insists that poverty is necessary for wealth creation
So much potential, so much happiness, so much living is lost through capitalism's insistence that poverty is necessary for wealth creation. We became…
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JM Smith
3
"In 1937, I despised the empire, the monarchy and the whole rotten system that held it together."
The Harry’s Last Stand project which I worked on with my Dad for the last 10 years of his life was an attempt to use his life story as a template to…
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JM Smith
We are Binge Watching our own apocalypse and didn't notice we have reached the end of the cliff.
Last Monday's total solar eclipse brought night to the daytime skies over my city. When it occurred, street lights turned on, and the air became cold…
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JM Smith
4
The April Rain when another war was being waged.
There is a sense of sitting in purgatory as you wait for the results from a CT Scan. Mine for cancer recurrence was done this past Tuesday. Since 2020…
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JM Smith
2
We live in a new Gilded Age, and we are on the outside looking in.
You do not need to be an economist or a historian to know that our era is an epoch of enormous class inequality. 2024 is a new Gilded Age, where…
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JM Smith
2
If we don't rein in Capitalism by reconstructing a functioning Welfare State- drudgery is the fate for most people.
It’s hard to believe that over thirty thousands words of Harry Leslie Smith’s The Green and Pleasant Land have been published on this Substack, over the…
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JM Smith

March 2024

State Assisted Suicide for the terminally ill in neoliberal economies is another box tick for dystopia, if we don't fix poverty first.
It’s funny how this piece I wrote on State assisted suicide for those with terminal illnesses first draft began with me encountering Esther Rantzen, in…
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JM Smith
10
Socialism in a neoliberal world is a day in the life of Sisyphus.
I think I am posting this to buck up my own flagging spirit. It’s been a tough few years for all of us. I am starting to wonder if any of what I did or…
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JM Smith
1
If you vote Labour or Tory during the next General Election, you are the turkey voting for Christmas.
2024 is only 3 months old but it already feels it has been accepted into palliative care. Things are breaking down. I feel it and it scares me because…
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JM Smith
© 2024 JM Smith
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