When Power is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few world war is our fate.

June 5th 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of Harry’s Last Stand. Considering that the world has become much shittier over the decade since my father’s book was published, you would expect to see a reprint of that work. But it is doubtful as the publisher told me last year, “The world has moved on from Harry.” Naturally, the person who told me this went to Cambridge in the 1980s, whilst my dad left school at 14 in 1937 to do his part to keep the entitled wealthy through low-wage labour. It is what it is.

But while the mainstream publishing world or news media won’t commemorate Harry's Last Stand or the other five books of Harry Leslie Smith. I will on Substack because his past became our future thanks to neoliberalism and those who appeased it. 

 In many ways I feel like a scribe in a monastery during the Dark Ages, trying to preserve the history of the ancient world in a time when the past was in danger of being forgotten.

Below is a small excerpt from Harry’s Last Stand. Over the next month I will publish more of these excerpts along with the my other essays and the 2nd part of the my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land a book he was working on up until his death in November 2018.

When I was a teen, our Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased a tyrant and championed class division through his government’s legislation. Today most politicians, regardless of the slant of their ideology, are in the business of appeasement; but now instead of feeding

the lust of tyrants, they bow to the monsters who rule the corporate world.

In September 1938, few understood that Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement irrevocably doomed us to war with Hitler. Ultimately the failure of Western democratic institutions to act concurrently and decisively against the dictator doomed our world to a war that saw over 60 million casualties.

It is lamentable that lessons about the dangers of appeasement have not been learned. Modern political institutions are quick to build moral equivalents for wars against the tyrants of our political epoch if it suits our ideology or economic aims. Suez, the Falklands, Grenada, Panama and Iraq are prime examples of wars conducted and justified by drawing erroneous parallels to Hitler and his very real threat to democracy.

In this day and age, presidents and prime ministers say too often for the television cameras that they ‘will not appease dictators’. Perhaps not, but those who sit in Whitehall or rule at the White House are very apt to pacify presidents of hedge funds and corporate board directors by offering bailouts to banks too big to fail. 

Governments have mollified giant corporations like McDonald’s and Walmart by subsiding their company’s paltry minimum wage payments with food stamp programmes. Politicians appease Google, Apple, Amazon and other megaliths act like medieval city-states by not creating stringent, irrefutable tax codes that target those companies or wealthy individuals who seek to bury their wealth offshore.

In Canada and the US, the oil and gas lobby is given free rein by all political parties to overwrite environmental protection legislation when it comes to the extracting, refining and transportation of crude oil from the toxic Alberta tar sands. 

In Britain, despite the documented dangers to wildlife, the water table and human beings, fracking has been given the green light to drill in environmentally and seismologically sensitive areas.

Each time governments offer tax breaks and environmental deregulation – without due diligence, proper oversight, reasonable checks and balances, or financial subsidies – to corporations whose sole objective is profit, social democracy is placed in jeopardy.

Every instance, every example, every precedent where governments have turned a blind eye to corporate maleficence or allowed their social services to be monetised and put into the absolute control of private enterprise repeats Chamberlain’s folly at Munich. There can be no peace or economic equality in our times if power is concentrated in a handful of individuals or corporations.

It is terrifying that in a world of 8 billion souls, fewer than a hundred men and women control half its wealth, thereby having an enormous influence on its politics. In Britain, wealth is similarly concentrated at the top because according to Oxfam five families control 20 per cent of this nation’s wealth.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John.