Harry's Place

By Dave Dudley, Leninist Vanguard (personal capacity)
Coming on the back of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan is a blow for the organised left in this country, but socialists must defend fellow anti-imperialists come what may, writes Dave Dudley.
So the so-called charismatic Scottish socialist leader Tommy Sheridan’s media career as the presentable face of Celtic Trotskyism has [...]

This is a cross post by Potkin

On Sunday most people in the free world will be recovering from celebrating the festive season. Quite right too, life is all about working, contributing, loving, resting and enjoying its moments. The terror machine of the Islamic Republic, knows no such things however. Its one efficiency, bringing death and [...]

Guest post by amie
Have you ever penned a complaint to a kitchen fitting company you regret having chosen, painstakingly setting out your issues with their service and flagging up the legal, not to mention moral reasons why you are holding them responsible, only to get a bland boilerplate response, failing to address any of the [...]

Thuy Mai, a former teacher at the Ho Chi Minh City Comprehensive University in Vietnam, recounted a visit he had made to a factory in Communist Vietnam:

When a [Communist] party member in my team asked a worker how many wheels were produced a day by each person, he replied that before April 30, 1975 [the day Saigon, [...]

I spent Xmas Eve morning preparing a surfeit of parsnips for pickling, with the televisual device playing in the background. First there was the rural bliss and adventure of The Fox and the Child: although when we thought Lily the Fox had died, my mind raced back to a childhood book called Abandoned which [...]

by Joseph W
The Guardian reports:
Assange defended one of WikiLeaks’ collaborators, Israel Shamir, following claims Shamir passed sensitive cables to Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko has arrested 600 opposition supporters and journalists since Sunday’s presidential election. The whereabouts and fate of several of the president’s high-profile opponents are unknown.
Of Shamir, Assange said: “WikiLeaks works with hundreds [...]

This is a guest post by Kevin Higgins
An argument in which there was no
such place as Switzerland;
time to do unto others
and have it done to you.
Some woke up with their
throats cut; others
never came back
out of the bathroom.
But mostly the punishments were road signs
that read: Topeka 560 miles,
or Welcome to East Sussex, as we scattered
to become [...]

While some parts of the world endure a bitter cold spell, in Venezuela it’s apparently so hot that the National Guard is spraying folks with water cannons to cool them off.

And if that isn’t good enough, they shoot plastic bullets at them.

AP reports from Caracas:
Police and soldiers fired water cannons and plastic bullets Thursday as [...]

This is a guest post by Houriya Ahmed
Earlier this week I wrote a piece, which was posted on this blog, on the dangers of denying terrorism in the UK. In that piece I referred to Kamel Bourgass, convicted for his role in the ricin terrorism plot.
In response, one Harry’s Place commentator stated that Bourgass “was [...]

Guilty.
Lucy Lips adds:
Over at Socialist Unity, John Wight – a male model and soft porn author with a preoccupation with “International Jewry” – has this to say:
Shocking, terrible, disgraceful, sad…
Let those who colluded with the police and the News of the World hang their heads in shame.
Solidarity with Tommy Sheridan, his family and his many [...]