There's no such thing as Margaret Thatcher
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sufi
lala
odd article amongst the top 5 stories on the bbc
1: Former Prime Minister Thatcher dies
2: Reaction to Thatcher death
3: UK retailers ration baby milk
4: Obituary: Margaret Thatcher
5: Margaret Thatcher: A life in pictures
the mission continues...
1: Former Prime Minister Thatcher dies
2: Reaction to Thatcher death
3: UK retailers ration baby milk
4: Obituary: Margaret Thatcher
5: Margaret Thatcher: A life in pictures
the mission continues...
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
The list of people who should know better queuing up to allege that this is a 'sad day' is mind-numbing. Expecting an Arthur Scargill tribute poem right about now.
Sectionfive
bandwagon house
Sectionfive
bandwagon house
The world is a reassuringly derisive place today
Writing to Hayek
How did she feel about the EU finally & explicitly overcoming the pesky democracy thing I wonder?
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Bit of a brainfail from the Grauniad here in an otherwise reasonable article about the fallacy of 'not speaking ill of the dead':
She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends").
Huh?
She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq. She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as "terrorists", something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong. She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto ("One of our very best and most valuable friends").
Huh?
she liked Hussein but hated Iraqi people. simple
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Wot, she liked him so much she supported the war that deposed him and led to his trial and execution? :slanted:
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Patrick Swayze
I'm trying to shut up
she's just a meme to me
D
droid
Guest
Presumably they meant that she was a friend to Saddam when she was in power, which, like Reagan, she was.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
There's a big difference between an alliance of convenience (that vanished in a puff of smoke when Saddam invaded an oil-rich, West-friendly country) and a "staunch friendship". I think it's just the author being a bit lazy (or the editor a bit crap) by throwing in Saddam with Pinochet, whom Thatcher genuinely personally liked and supported, in order to damn her in as many different ways as possible.
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
She had zero compunction about calling anyone her friend, however evil, is all we need to know. Although it's hard to know what a 'staunch friendship' could mean to a withered husk of a human being like that, anyways.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Well there's that of course, but it does seem there were at least some people she genuinely liked and respected, such as Reagan and Pinochet (e.g. calling for the latter's release when he was arrested long after the end of his political career).
What I think is interesting about Thatcher's public image and legacy is that her supporters fall into two camps: those who actually did and are still doing very well out of 34 (and counting) years of Thatcherism of one shade or another, and the probably much larger group of people who are beguiled by Thatcherite rhetoric without realizing how badly the majority of the country, including them, were/are screwed over by that ideology. What's ironic is that many of the things about modern British society that are undeniably a bit shit are the direct or indirect result of her policies and the policies of those that followed in her footsteps but have been blamed in one way or another on the Left. Like how kids failing to engage with education are blamed on feckless parents or 'trendy teaching methods', rather than a dry, prescriptive curriculum intended to turn pupils into efficient little producer-consumers and not much else. (Which is not to say feckless parents don't exist, but, y'know.) Or how kids whose values are based mainly on the ownership of stuff are blamed on the 'culture of entitlement' supposedly bred by the social state, rather than the soul-crushing omnipresence of aspirational advertising.
I guess this is all of a piece with a commonly made observation about Thatcher(ism) that it's inherently contradictory to promote economic liberalism on one hand and social conservatism on the other, since the commercialization of everyday life leads to the decay of exactly the values (small-c) conservatives prize so highly.
What I think is interesting about Thatcher's public image and legacy is that her supporters fall into two camps: those who actually did and are still doing very well out of 34 (and counting) years of Thatcherism of one shade or another, and the probably much larger group of people who are beguiled by Thatcherite rhetoric without realizing how badly the majority of the country, including them, were/are screwed over by that ideology. What's ironic is that many of the things about modern British society that are undeniably a bit shit are the direct or indirect result of her policies and the policies of those that followed in her footsteps but have been blamed in one way or another on the Left. Like how kids failing to engage with education are blamed on feckless parents or 'trendy teaching methods', rather than a dry, prescriptive curriculum intended to turn pupils into efficient little producer-consumers and not much else. (Which is not to say feckless parents don't exist, but, y'know.) Or how kids whose values are based mainly on the ownership of stuff are blamed on the 'culture of entitlement' supposedly bred by the social state, rather than the soul-crushing omnipresence of aspirational advertising.
I guess this is all of a piece with a commonly made observation about Thatcher(ism) that it's inherently contradictory to promote economic liberalism on one hand and social conservatism on the other, since the commercialization of everyday life leads to the decay of exactly the values (small-c) conservatives prize so highly.
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crackerjack
Well-known member
That's politics, baby!
crackerjack
Well-known member
Oh that Russell Brand piece in the Guardian is brilliant.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Not the kind of politics I have the slightest bit of respect for. But yeah, for a lot of people, it is. In Thatcher's particular case, she stood up for/defended monsters and monstrous regimes she had no need to stand up for, even as a realpolitik (sp?) move. Loathsome human being.
Agreed on the Russell Brand piece. He tends to be good when writing seriously.
@Tea - Agreed about the number of people who don't realise what her policies have done to the things they value. As much of a shit as Thatcher was, she couldn't have done anything without the often blind support of millions. She would have been out had the Falklands War not happened, as her opinion poll ratings were through the floor for the first couple of years of her term - it's a sad testament to moronic nationalism that this declaration of war (in support of islands for which she had been steadily running down British economic support for a number of years prior to 82) changed everything.
Blair is equally loathsome though. New Labour are/were c8nts, perhaps even more so than Thatcher for their pretence of being even vaguely 'Left'. At least she had the decency not to hide what she was (well, in certain respects).
But - The kind of democratic politics that we have in Britain seems to entail that most PMs will effectively be sociopaths (either that or sad, dead, broken husks in the case of Major and Brown, and maybe, god help us, Miliband), as a normal human being would never want to take up the post or be allowed to by a media dealing almost solely in irrelevant bullshit rather than policies.
Agreed on the Russell Brand piece. He tends to be good when writing seriously.
@Tea - Agreed about the number of people who don't realise what her policies have done to the things they value. As much of a shit as Thatcher was, she couldn't have done anything without the often blind support of millions. She would have been out had the Falklands War not happened, as her opinion poll ratings were through the floor for the first couple of years of her term - it's a sad testament to moronic nationalism that this declaration of war (in support of islands for which she had been steadily running down British economic support for a number of years prior to 82) changed everything.
Blair is equally loathsome though. New Labour are/were c8nts, perhaps even more so than Thatcher for their pretence of being even vaguely 'Left'. At least she had the decency not to hide what she was (well, in certain respects).
But - The kind of democratic politics that we have in Britain seems to entail that most PMs will effectively be sociopaths (either that or sad, dead, broken husks in the case of Major and Brown, and maybe, god help us, Miliband), as a normal human being would never want to take up the post or be allowed to by a media dealing almost solely in irrelevant bullshit rather than policies.
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Yep, and I'm sure there must be more moderate conservatives who disliked Thatcher for making a conservative party into a neoliberal one. It's not only Labour supporters who saw the goalposts changed forevermore.