R.I.P. Margaret Thatcher

[Karl Henning]

And it's a richer America, post-Nixon. He brought the term rat-fuck into general currency . . . .

(Not sure there need be a hyphen there, but, hey . . . .)

[springrite]

Surely a good composer can come up with a jazzier title 

Sarge

Devils' Summit?

Dick Squared?

[Karl Henning]

But the title as is has a nice Gluck-ly resonance.

[Sergeant Rock]

Devils' Summit?

Dick Squared?

Tea with Turandot? (He did met Madame Mao, didn't he?)

Sarge

[vandermolen]

Why on earth would anyone actually revile an elected politician, or contemplate something like leaving one's country for, presumably, someplace better?  They're politicians.  I can think of few, if any, major American politicians that I actually despise*, living or dead.  If they get elected, or their party wins election after election, they are the people's choice.  Granted, in the US we have never had a Hitler or Mao or Lenin or Stalin or Ceausescu, or <insert least favorite blood thirsty ideological tyrant here> at the helm, or at least not since Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln, depending on one's view, so that colors my view, I suppose.  Even corrupt old Nixon had his virtues and did a variety of good (or bad) things, both domestically and in foreign policy, though many may want to ignore them - opening relations with China, signing into law the EPA, breaking the shackles of the gold standard, and so on.



* One example is more local.  Neil Goldschmidt, former mayor of Portland, cabinet member under Carter, and governor of Oregon, always struck me as an insufferable prick, though he was not a tyrant.  And I thought that before it was learned that he was, in fact, a child rapist while in office, for which he did no time.   

Re: Leaving the country. I was 18 or 19 at the time so please make allowances for my youthful radicalism - now I just listen to Miaskovsky 

[Florestan]

I have views on her, but I shut up since opinions on her mainly are for GB citizens to have....

I beg to differ. She didn't limit her influence to GB only but was actively involved in international affairs too. Anyone can, therefore, assess her merits (or lack thereof).

As a PM in GB her main concern should have been to do the best for British citizens, however oppressed you were behind the Iron Curtain

I imagine that someone who has won 3 elections in a row and was the longest-serving British PM in the 20th century must have done at least a modicum of good things for her country...

. And I won't even start the discussion about how the Iron Curtain ended up where it did.

But that's not the main issue here.

[Karl Henning]

Tea with Turandot? (He did met Madame Mao, didn't he?)

Sarge

I am thinking that The Firesign Theatre drew up a stage play on the theme . . . .

A Firesign opera: there's the ticket!

[springrite]

Re: Leaving the country. I was 18 or 19 at the time so please make allowances for my youthful radicalism - now I just listen to Miaskovsky 

Well, if you are not radical when you are young, you don't have a heart.
If you are still radical when you are old, you don't have a brain.

I am glad you appear to have both! 

[Todd]

the Kent State Massacre

Not quite sure how Nixon is directly responsible for this one.  Lots of protests occurred, but not all governors called out the National Guard.  A terrible episode in history, sure, and one with political ramifications, but to say it was Nixon's doing is inaccurate.  Now, you want to talk about shameless Red Baiting and the superbly well-executed political destruction of Helen Gahagan Douglas, that's another story.  That appears to be a root of at least some institutional hatred of Nixon by some Democrats.

Well, if you are not radical when you are young, you don't have a heart.

I've managed to live a full life with no heart, then.  I have always found youthful idealism bothersome, perhaps more so when I was youthful myself.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Lovers of personal liberty worldwide, especially Eastern Europe (and especially Romania), will always remember and honor her as one of their own.

The irony is, when Eastern Europeans finally got a chance to implement Thatcherite economics in their own countries, a lot of them hated it.

[vandermolen]

Well, if you are not radical when you are young, you don't have a heart.
If you are still radical when you are old, you don't have a brain.

I am glad you appear to have both! 

[Florestan]

The irony is, when Eastern Europeans finally got a chance to implement Thatcherite economics in their own countries, a lot of them hated it.

True. 

[Florestan]

I've managed to live a full life with no heart, then.  I have always found youthful idealism bothersome, perhaps more so when I was youthful myself.

+1.

[DavidRoss]

An assessment from another perspective:

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/09/the-socialist-dragon-slayer

Winston Churchill described socialism as "the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries." He spoke of the "inexhaustible" follies of socialism. But while Churchill often mocked socialism, he did not dedicate his political career to its destruction. That is where the great wartime leader most differed from Lady Margaret Thatcher, Britain's prime minister from 1979 to 1990 — that, and the fact that she came along several decades after him.... which was more than enough time to demonstrate the accuracy of Churchill's sallies against socialism.

Unlike Churchill (either during World War II or in his second premiership from 1951-55), Thatcher did not seek peaceful co-existence with prevailing socialist orthodoxies. She hated the false pieties of leftwing/socialist thinking and she laid Britain's long-term economic decline from the end of World War II to the mid- and late-70s squarely at the feet of the baleful influence of socialism.

In well-chosen words that seem eerily apropos to our time and country (from her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1978), she spoke of how Britain had been undone, not by "unusually wicked people," but those with "enough good intentions to pave the well-worn path twice over":

"The root of the matter is this: We have been ruled by men who live by illusion: the illusion that you can spend money you haven't earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors; the illusion that real jobs can be conjured into existence by Government decree, like rabbits out of a hat; the illusion that there is some other way of creating wealth than hard work and satisfying your customers; the illusion that you can have freedom and enterprise without believing in free enterprise; the illusion that you can have an effective foreign policy without a strong defense force; and a peaceful and orderly society without absolute respect for the laws."

Those open-minded enough to value diversity -- which requires fair consideration of perspectives (and facts!) inconvenient to our prejudices -- might use the link to see the rest of the article.

Others, of course, are free to engage in the usual nasty slander that greets me on this site whenever I suggest that the prevailing orthodoxy espoused by the authoritarians who ironically call themselves "liberals" today might not be entirely accurate.

[Parsifal]

You people west of the Iron Curtain will never know what it meant for us east of it to hear, after decades of appeasement and rapprochement (i.e, pandering to the Soviets), a major European leader taking a sharp stand against Soviet power and hegemony over half of Europe, calling Communism evil and showing willingness to fight and defeat it; you will never understand the ray of hope that shone in our hearts on hearing and seeing her words and deeds and at the thought that after all we were not abandoned forever to Soviets and Communism and one day we might be free again. By her moral courage and strong determination in the name of liberty, and for the leading role she played in the dismantling and fall of the Communist camp, she earned our profoundest respect and admiration. In our neck of the woods she will always be remembered with gratitude (together with two other like-minded Western leaders, equally respected and admired for the same reasons: Ronald Reagan and the Blessed Pope John Paul II).

It always strikes me how much admirers of Reagan (and Thatcher, apparently) attribute the disintegration of the Soviet Union to those tireless windbags.  It was Gorbachev, afterall, who announced in 1988 that the Brezhnev Doctrine would be abandoned and that the Soviet Union would not meddle in the internal affairs of Warsaw pact countries.  It was also Gorbachev who proposed to revise the Soviet Constitution to allow the participation of other parties and drafted a new Union Treaty which would make membership of the republics in the Soviet Union voluntary.  It was on the eve of the ratification of this treaty that the coup was attempted by Soviet hardliners, and it was the unarmed citizens of Moscow that barricaded the streets to prevent tanks from reaching the parliament building the next day.  As to the conditions that led to the instability of the Soviet Union, you can attribute it to the hectoring of  Reagan and Thatcher, or to the overwhelming corruption and economic stagnation of the Brezhnev era,  the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan and Gorbachev's failed attempts at reform, which resulted in economic collapse, with rationing of prosaic items such as eggs and meat.   

[Todd]

As to the conditions that led to the instability of the Soviet Union, you can attribute it to the hectoring of  Reagan and Thatcher, or to the overwhelming corruption and economic stagnation of the Brezhnev era,  the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan and Gorbachev's failed attempts at reform, which resulted in economic collapse, with rationing of prosaic items such as eggs and meat.

The rot and inefficiency of the Soviet system created the conditions of its own demise, but the massive arms buildup Reagan pushed for was instrumental in pushing the Soviet system over the edge.  One can make contrafactual arguments about how the system would have eventually collapsed - in 1995? 2000? 2014? Who knows? - but the events of the 80s were ultimately critical, and the Soviet economic reforms too inconsequential.  People who revere Reagan and Thatcher assign too much credit to them for the collapse of the USSR; those who dislike or hate them assign too little.  What's most important is that the USSR is gone.

[springrite]

#nowthatchersdead# topic on tweeter was mistakenly thought as "Now That Cher's Dead", and lots and lots of people in the US mourned Cher's demise until eventually most of them realised that it was Thatcher (while the rest asked "Who's Thatcher?")

[knight66]

So many points here. You will be glad If i don't attempt even half of them. Thatcher did a number of unpalatable things that needed to be done. But she did them in the brutal kind of fashion that literally destroyed communities. If mining had to go....don't take it away and lazily assume it will be replaced by something or other that will provide jobs. Her thinking was half baked. Removing a seeming problem did not solve the problem, it changed the nature of it.

In Scotland she removed the steel industry, mining, shipbuilding and other heavy industry. This needed done, but she left a wasteland instead of ensuring there could be growth in new industries. By the end of her premiership there was not even one Conservative MP in Scotland. The Scots, Welsh and the Irish pretty much detested her.

She broke public ownership utilities up and what resulted was not competition, but cartels that control prices and produce profits that seem now to substantially escape tax. The public utilities are no longer there as necessities, rather they are a means of exploiting those who need to use them.

She removed exchange controls. There were reasons, but the outcome is that he have no idea how much money flows in our out of the economy, especially...out. We make calculations, but I know these are sophisticated finger in the air estimates subject to regular and alarming revisions. We lost control of our finances by doing this.

Hand in hand with this she started down the road of bank deregulation and we can see where that lead.

She wanted people to be property owning, but sold off the public stock of housing and did not replace it. We now have a housing crisis. I do know that people in the US would see her as simply clearing out socialism; but what has developed means that through the bursting of the housing bubble, young people cannot join the house property owning sector. Private rents have rocketed so they can't save for a deposit. That of course is not all her fault, Labour caused at least some of the damage. But why denude society of an asset of housing stock which would have kept rents to affordable levels?

She had highly suspect business connections with the likes of BAT, arms dealers and manufacturers, tobacco companies, dictators....suspect friends.

She over her entire time promoted only one female to the cabinet, not due to the lack of available talent, but entirely down to ego. Even looking at that one single fact: how could there be a claim that the country was appropriately or well governed when half the population was unrepresented in the decision making?

She broke the power of the unions and that was needed, she was very good on foreign policy, in the main.....but...

Just prior to the Falklands War she had the lowest approval rating of any PM on record. So the war was very handy. She made the unforgivable decision to sink the Belgrano when it was outside of the enforcement limit and sailing away from the islands. Her defence of that was lamentable. It was quite posssibly the act of a war criminal. She was a personal friend of Pinochet!! She refused to join in action against apartide in South Africa and through her influence prevented Nelson Mandella from entering the UK. 

So, how did she lead the party through three elections? Look at who her opposition was, that is one reason. The Labour Party was largely neutralised by internecine battles. They could not bring themselves to deal with the changed landscape, rather to maunder on about the past. They did not construct strong alternative policies.

Poll tax riots, broken communities, greed culture,

Then Todd asks why anyone could feel so personally about a politician.

I will try to simply observe now, as I have written much more than I intended. Bit I imagine I will be pricked into more comment.

Mike

[Todd]

Then Todd asks why anyone could feel so personally about a politician.

And I still ask.  The political system in a democratic country (small 'd', meant in the broadest sense) is not about one voter or citizen, even when that voter or citizen is me.  I don't like the current President or Senate Majority Leader here in the States, or the Speaker of the House for that matter, but why should I personalize my dislike?  (Gibes and jokes don't really count, in my view.)  I cannot change the outcome of an election, nor should I be able to.  I got it, people become dissatisfied with this or that or the other thing about society and politics and so on, and it's great when people push for change that they want to see, but I simply cannot abide actual personal animosity toward people who are, after all, just doing their jobs.  You don't like 'em, vote 'em out.  If they don't get voted out, it may be you who is wrong.

[knight66]

Todd, High minded humbug. I will leave it at that.

Mike