#johnsmith — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #johnsmith, aggregated by home.social.
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Harry's Last Stand
Their Marriage Wasn’t an Easy Ride. But It Had Been Their Ride.
JM Smith"Today would have been my parents’ 79th wedding anniversary. They lived together as man and wife for 51 years, and considering the generation they came from, it was a good stretch. Mum died from cancer when she was seventy-one, in 1999.
Her last living act was to kiss my Dad before dying."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #history #WorldWar2 #politics
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Harry's Last Stand
Hamburg, the city in the shadow of the Michel
JM Smith"Love Among the Ruins was Harry Leslie Smith’s second volume in his The Green and Pleasant Land trilogy. It is a portrayal of his life as an ordinary occupation soldier in Hamburg following the Second World War."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #history #WorldWar2
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Harry's Last Stand
A Sign Hung Around His Neck Which Read: Coward
JM Smith"There are no working-class memoirs from Britain’s occupation force in Germany’s second-largest city, Hamburg, apart from my dad’s Love Among the Ruins. It’s a brilliant read about life observed from the lower ranks when hope was reborn from the ashes of war."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #politics #WorldWar2
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Harry's Last Stand
A Summer in the Ruins of Troy
JM Smith"Love Among the Ruins was Harry Leslie Smith’s portrayal of his life as an ordinary occupying soldier in Hamburg following the Second World War. It is the second volume of his The Green and Pleasant Land trilogy.
In the first volume of the trilogy, my father writes about his early memories from the slums of Yorkshire."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #history #WorldWar2 #politics #fascism
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Harry's Last Stand
Content Creation: A Marathon Where Nothing, Not Even You, Endures
JM Smith"If you haven’t got the memo yet, this is dystopia, and it’s worsening by the day. Neoliberalism requires us to believe there is a rational off-ramp from all of this — genocide in Gaza, war with Iran, the starvation blockade of Cuba, a perpetual cost-of-living crisis, the environment dying, the monetisation of every human interaction,"
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Harry's Last Stand
It Takes Grit and Luck to Survive History
JM Smith"My grandmother, Maria Theresa Edelmann, born 131 years ago today, survived the worst of the 19th and 20th centuries by the skin of her teeth. She was the illegitimate daughter of a rope maker who wanted nothing to do with the family he created in Paderborn, Germany. He abandoned them, but Maria’s mother found another man willing to marry her,"
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Harry's Last Stand
She Exhaled Racism Like Cigarette Smoke
JM Smith"It was a few days ago, in an afternoon’s summer heat, that I walked across a grocery store parking lot. I have done it hundreds of times before, incident-free. This time, there was commotion: a middle-aged grocery store manager was shooing away a homeless man at the curbside."
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Harry's Last Stand
"It's going to kill this land," he said.
JM Smith"I have the insomnia again, so it is early morning when I write this. There are only a few swigs of July left in its bottle. Its dregs are brackish on the palate from the heat domes and wildfires in northern Canada, as well as across Europe. Much of England is in drought, and Europe’s rivers are so parched"
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Harry's Last Stand
Staying On
JM Smith"Late last week, I became aware of the class action lawsuit against Anthropic in the United States over its harvesting of millions of books, more than a decade ago, without the permission of their authors or publishers.
Curious, I searched the database of works listed in the lawsuit. To my astonishment, I found my dad’s first book, 1923, among the titles that had allegedly been scraped."
https://open.substack.com/pub/jmsmith/p/staying-on?r=12u3ju&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Harry's Last Stand
Conditions of Surrender: At the Dawn of the Welfare State
JM Smith"I am always very appreciative of my Substack subscribers. People only have so much spare time, and the fact that you spend some of your leisure moments reading excerpts from my father’s writing and life, or my own, is deeply humbling.
This platform has been a good place to store and share these writings, especially because my health is problematic."
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Harry's Last Stand
Chasing Fool's Gold at the End of Neoliberalism's Rainbow
JM Smith"I was in my early forties twenty-one years ago. My beard was spotted with grey as if I’d been painting and the brush spattered. But I didn’t feel old because I had boundless energy for work. I was in the spirits industry and chasing a diminishing pot of gold promised at the end of neoliberalism’s rainbow."
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Harry's Last Stand
Neoliberalism Bins Everything of Value
JM Smith"During the Brexit referendum, I once saw the Liberal Democrat life peer and political commentator Paddy Ashdown on an overcrowded weekend train to Cornwall during a June heatwave. It was standing room only with weekend holidaymakers and foreign tourists. My dad was in a mobility wheelchair, pushed up against luggage stacked against a wall."
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Harry's Last Stand
"Socialism Won Not by the Bayonet but by Being the Better Argument"
JM Smith"It’s not even August, and I already feel summer is slipping out the door. The weather is still hot, the wildfires burn, and people still faff about. But it just feels over. I guess it was the installation of the Burnham government yesterday that reminded me of autumn rain and the damp that makes your bones ache."
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Harry's Last Stand
The Road To Hamburg
JM Smith"I received an email yesterday morning that changed my plans, for Friday.
The email was from an acquisitions editor at an American publishing house who had “revisited” Harry’s first book, 1923. The book, written sixteen years ago, is unwieldy and raw. It bends and weaves through its narrative arc with an amateur’s disdain for discipline."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #history #WW2 #politics #fascism
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#HarrysLastStand
The 1945 Hunger Winter: Then and Now
JM Smith"In Chapter Forty of The Green & Pleasant Land—The Hunger Winter—Harry Leslie Smith came face to face not with abstract evil, but with its consequences: starving children, collective punishment, vengeance masquerading as justice, and the understanding that returning to the old systems of government and commerce would never be enough to prevent a return of Nazism."
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Harry's Last Stand
"Stay alive. It's almost over."
JM Smith"February 1945. Harry Leslie Smith and his RAF unit had been transferred from England to war-torn Europe. My father turned twenty-two that month and knew the war was nearing its end. If he survived, he understood that the peace following Nazism’s defeat would not resemble the peace his father’s generation had inherited in 1918."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #history #WW2 #fascism #politics
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Harry's Last Stand
Lacking Moral Fibre
JM Smith"Dad was haunted for much of his adult life by the story of Sam described in this chapter from The Green & Pleasant Land. I know this because he told me the story of Sam when I was a small boy. I think he felt he had no one else to tell, so he confessed it to me. Looking back, it wasn’t appropriate to burden me with this story when I was seven because it terrified me."
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Harry's Last Stand
"Poverty Made Me a Socialist, but Also a Realist."
JM Smith"We are living through a different kind of war than my father’s generation did from 1939 to 1945. But we are in a war. It is a vast political and military conflict that, in the West, pits ordinary citizens against increasingly authoritarian states governed for the benefit of oligarchs."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #politics #war #history
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Harry's Last Stand
July 5, 1945: When Britain Chose Socialism
JM Smith"In the summer of 2018, it was more difficult to find a positive newspaper opinion piece on Jeremy Corbyn than an empty sun chair poolside in Corfu. During his last months of life, my dad still pitched pieces to the newspapers, especially the Guardian warning that neoliberalism ensured his past would become our future."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #politics #socialism
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Harry's Last Stand
Twenty-Seven Years Gone
Memory, authoritarianism and the last years of the analogue age
JM SmithElfriede Gisele Smith: October 20, 1928 – July 2, 1999
"Twenty-seven years ago today, in a world long past, my mother died. In that final year of the twentieth century, humanity was still mostly living in an analogue reality as the internet was in its infancy." -
Harry's Last Stand
"It's a Nightmare I Can't Wake From"
JM Smith"Today, the Heat Dome is in full force over my city. It’s only 10 a.m., and the temperature is already 30°C, but because of the humidity, it feels more like 40°C. I have a small air conditioner that keeps my living room, if not cool, at least survivable. The bedroom, not so much, because last night I felt like a rasher of bacon frying over a medium heat."
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Harry's Last Stand
Searching for Home on Canada Day
JM Smith"I hold two nationalities: British and Canadian. Neither of them inspires me with any sense of pride or patriotism, and never did. And yet if I am away from them, I feel homesick for the geography and the people. Right or Wrong those two countries helped forge what I have become. Like a stray cat, I can reject them every day, but they will keep following me."
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Harry's Last Stand
Our Factory Default Setting Is Now Fight or Flight
JM Smith"Everybody now lives in fight-or-flight mode. I am tired, you’re tired, and the people we walk past while going about our day are tired. I wouldn’t want to be young again, but I’d happily borrow their natural energy.
As I’ve written before, I’m doing a temporary gig that won’t last much longer."
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Harry's Last Stand
Integrity on Neoliberalism's Hot Tin Roof
JM Smith"At around four in the morning, the heatwave arrived like a much-delayed flight. Last year and in the years before, heat domes sat over my city by early June. Although tardy in 2026, it hadn’t forgotten how to sit on top of the air in my bedroom like a weighted blanket."
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Harry's Last Stand
Chapter Thirty-Four: Keep The Effing Load Light
JM Smith"This final clean-up of The Green and Pleasant Land manuscript has had its swings and roundabouts. It’s certainly worth the effort, but it has also been emotionally exhausting. I believe Harry Leslie Smith deserves his final say from beyond the grave, helping to preserve not so much his legacy as the lives he lived before, during, and after the Welfare State."
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Harry's Last Stand
Society in the Dog Days of Capitalism
JM Smith"It hasn’t come here to Canada yet, but the heat will reach 40°C within the next week. The dog days of summer have already come to Britain and the rest of Europe, which has been sweltering under a heat dome for four days. It arrived like a guest a day early for a party, and the hosts weren’t prepared."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #ClimateCrisis #neoliberalism #politics #capitalism
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Harry's Last Stand
Brexit Was the Symptom, Not the Disease
J M Smith"Introduction
Today was the tenth anniversary of the Brexit Referendum. It would be nice to think all our troubles stemmed from it. But the ruin of ordinary people in Britain has less to do with Brexit and more to do with neoliberalism that created the conditions for Brexit."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #politics #Brexit
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Harry's Last Stand
#Starmer : Undertaker to the Welfare State and the Greatest Generation's Legacy
JM Smith"Across the years, I have met enough hollow men to know Keir Starmer is a hollow man. He’s not empty of the animal intelligence necessary for success in politics or business, but hollow of compassion, depth and vision. Starmer is a technocrat, an apparatchik to whatever ideology fits his ambition for power, prestige and wealth."
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Harry's Last Stand
The Awfully Big Adventure of Being
JM Smith"It’s been eight years since my dad was alive for Father’s Day. I think he knew it was his last, but we didn’t talk about it. He drank a shandy with the roast dinner I made him. Later, Dad tucked into a strawberry flan and watched television before nodding off in his chair.
Five months later, my father died because that’s what 95-year-old bodies do." -
Harry's Last Stand
"I Walked All the Way From My Prison in Africa to This Prison in France"
JM Smith"Everyone does it when they take a ferry from England to France; they look out of the observation window.
The sea is indifferent to how we voyage across it, whether in large vessels or small boats; it is all the same to the surrounding water: ride on me at your peril."
#HarrysLastStand #HarryLeslieSmith #JohnSmith #refugees #fascism