George Galloway On Thatcher


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLbFWivsfFE&feature=player_embedded

Brilliant and true.

Discussions on the passing of Great Britain’s first female head of state, Margaret Thatcher, crystallize the partisan prism through which we view political leaders.

Thatcher was neither all angel nor devil. She was beloved by many and loathed by many – both inside of her country and around the globe. What is astonishing to me is that many who eulogize her accomplishments utterly fail to show any balance in their remarks that she, like other politicians, took problematic positions.

I can’t help but see the stark contrast of media discussions about the “Iron Lady” with late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who was depicted as a tyrant and utter madman. He too was neither all devil nor all angel, but many of his political accomplishments were buried while his perceived problematic policies and jeering speech directed towards President George W. Bush were highlighted.

While Thatcher is being praised, I must mention a few points regarding her career from a foreign policy vantage point that will most likely be white-washed in mainstream television news.

Many anti-oppression activists had serious issues with Thatcher’s stance towards the South African resistance to apartheid, which was led by Nobel Peace Prize and U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Nelson Mandela. She bestowed upon them the same label as the White Afrikaners did – i.e. that they were “terrorists” – and she opposed sanctions against the racist South African apartheid regime.

Thatcher approved covert arms for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein – as did U.S. President Ronald Reagan – to do the West’s dirty work pertaining to the illegal attack and invasion of Iran. Saddam used chemical weapons to gas Iranians and later gassed his own Kurdish population. She backed one of the world’s most infamous dictators and has more blood on her hands than the reviled boisterous Chavez.

I also have Irish friends who were none too pleased about Thatcher’s escalation of armed troops in the occupied counties of Northern Ireland. She was not a model stateswoman on human rights to put it mildly.

In order to make the world a better place, we have to be honest about history and the political legacies of world leaders. Their past decisions have an impact on our current global socio-economic environment. And in order to improve the lot of humankind, positive and negative aspects of famous political personalities must be critically critiqued.

Thatcher’s legacy should be thoroughly probed as well – save ethnocentric affinity and ideological bias.

http://blogs.detroitnews.com/politics/2013/04/10/dont-make-thatcher-into-a-political-saint/

I still don't celebrate anyone's death, unless it is at a wake.

Everyone has their place in the world, rather friend or foe.

kudos to you

BS on that. What was said about her a month ago before her death applies the same today.

She was a horrific woman vile and without remorse for any of the suffering she created. The world would have been a better had she never existed.

BS on that. What was said about her a month ago before her death applies the same today.

She was a horrific woman vile and without remorse for any of the suffering she created. The world would have been a better place had she never existed.

There will always be someone to take her place, so her passing won't really make the world a better place. The damage she has done will not be reversed. But it makes me sick that she is being buried at the tax payers expense with a STATE FUNERAL when she cost so many people their jobs and destroyed so many businesses. I certainly would not be one to mourn her death.

I would like to know what morality standards that you are judging Margaret Thatcher by.

Margaret Thatcher
The lady who changed the world
Apr 8th 2013, 12:35 by Economist.com

ONLY a handful of peace-time politicians can claim to have changed the world. Margaret Thatcher, who died this morning, was one. She transformed not just her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Her enthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingness to stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “ism”.

The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom—odd, since as a prim control freak, she was in some ways the embodiment of conservatism. She thought nations could become great only if individuals were set free. Her struggles had a theme: the right of individuals to run their own lives, as free as possible from the micromanagement of the state.

In Britain her battles with the left—especially the miners—gave her a reputation as a blue-rinse Boadicea. But she was just as willing to clobber her own side, sidelining old-fashioned Tory “wets” and unleashing her creed on conservative strongholds, notably the “big bang” in the City of London. Many of her pithiest putdowns were directed towards her own side: “U turn if you want to”, she told the Conservatives as unemployment passed 2m, “The lady’s not for turning.”

Paradoxes abound. Mrs Thatcher was a true Blue Tory who marginalised the Tory Party for a generation. The Tories ceased to be a national party, retreating to the south and the suburbs and all but dying off in Scotland, Wales and the northern cities. Tony Blair profited more from the Thatcher revolution than John Major, her successor: with the trade unions emasculated and the left discredited, he was able to remodel his party and sell it triumphantly to Middle England. His huge majority in 1997 ushered in 13 years of New Labour rule.

Yet her achievements cannot be gainsaid. She reversed what her mentor, Keith Joseph, liked to call “the ratchet effect”, whereby the state was rewarded for its failures with yet more power. With the brief exception of the emergency measures taken in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-08, there have been no moves to renationalise industries or to resume a policy of picking winners. Thanks to her, the centre of gravity of British politics moved dramatically to the right. The New Labourites of the 1990s concluded that they could rescue the Labour Party from ruin only by adopting the central tenets of Thatcherism. “The presumption should be that economic activity is best left to the private sector,” declared Mr Blair. Neither he nor his successors would dream of reverting to the days of nationalisation and unfettered union power.

On the world stage, too, Mrs Thatcher continues to cast a long shadow. Her combination of ideological certainty and global prominence ensured that Britain played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union that was disproportionate to its weight in the world. Mrs Thatcher was the first British politician since Winston Churchill to be taken seriously by the leaders of all the major powers. She was a heroine to opposition politicians in eastern Europe. Her willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with “dear Ronnie” to block Soviet expansionism helped to promote new thinking in the Kremlin. But her insistence that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom the West could do business also helped to end the cold war.

The post-communist countries embraced her revolution heartily: by 1996 Russia had privatised some 18,000 industrial enterprises. India dismantled the licence Raj—a legacy of British Fabianism—and unleashed a cavalcade of successful companies. Across Latin America governments embraced market liberalisation. Whether they managed well or badly, all of them looked to the British example.

But today, the pendulum is swinging dangerously away from the principles Mrs Thatcher espoused. In most of the rich world, the state’s share of the economy has grown sharply in recent years. Regulations—excessive, as well as necessary—are tying up the private sector. Businessmen are under scrutiny as they have not been for 30 years. Demonstrators protest against the very existence of the banking industry. And with the rise of China, state control, not economic liberalism, is being hailed as a model for emerging countries.

For a world in desperate need of growth, this is the wrong direction to head in. Europe will never thrive until it frees up its markets. America will throttle its recovery unless it avoids over-regulation. China will not sustain its success unless it starts to liberalise. This is a crucial time to hang on to Margaret Thatcher’s central perception—that for countries to flourish, people need to push back against the advance of the state. What the world needs now is more Thatcherism, not less.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/04/margaret-thatcher

How Thatcher Changed Hearts and Minds Behind the Iron Curtain
The Iron Lady's effect on one Russian teen.

by
Oleg Atbashian

April 12, 2013 - 12:28 pm
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It wasn’t just Margaret Thatcher’s steadfast economic and foreign policies that helped to defeat the Evil Empire and to bring down the Iron Curtain. She also changed hearts and minds — and this PJ Media author, who grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, has a personal story to tell.

As many Soviet kids did in the 1970s and 1980s, I occasionally tuned my shortwave radio to Voice of America or the BBC Russian Service, hoping to hear their alternative take on world events and, if I was lucky, get the latest rock-music updates. One of the functions of the Iron Curtain was to keep us, the “builders of communism,” blissfully unaware of the outside world. All our news had to be processed by the state-run media filter and approved by the formidable censorship apparatus.

In contrast, foreign Russian-language radio broadcasts, courtesy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, gave us unfiltered news and commentary. These programs were to the Soviets then what Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are for many Americans today — a gasp of fresh air for some, enemy propaganda for others, and an object of demonization for the official state-run media.

Produced mostly by ex-Soviet exiles, these broadcasts never failed to satisfy my curiosity. The problem was that our government was mercilessly jamming their signal. I learned that this radio jamming was more costly than the actual broadcasting, but no expense was spared to maintain our ideological purity, paid for by our own tax rubles. Oh well, at least we knew the Motherland cared.

At times the broadcast quality was almost undecipherable: imagine trying to watch a movie while your neighbor mows his lawn. The noise occasionally trails off to the other end of the property, but mostly it hovers below your window, and you know that the lines you missed had to be the best.

A few times my friends and I tried to tape these programs simultaneously in our homes, so that later we could combine salvageable parts from two or more reels. That resulted in a much clearer compilation. We mostly did this for rock and roll programs, but political commentary would get into the mix as well — and it was just as fresh and exciting.

If we had ever been caught, we could have been easily expelled from our state-run schools (paid for by our tax rubles) and become marked for life as “politically unreliable.” But we were too young and too reckless to think about it.

Whenever tuning to Voice of America or the BBC Russian Service produced nothing but the made-in-the-USSR rattling chatter, I would switch to English broadcasts. These were coming through clearly, mostly because the government couldn’t jam every single frequency. They also helped me with my English studies.

Apart from music tapes, radio was my only source of authentic spoken English. The Iron Curtain made sure that even if a real English-speaking person were to visit my Ukrainian city, he or she would be supervised at all times by authorized personnel. Similarly, foreign travel for the “builders of communism” was out of the question: even if we could make it past the border alive, we would have no means to move around, since almost all of our earned income went to the government so it could provide us with our basic needs — such as, ensuring our ideological purity by jamming radio broadcasts for our own good.

One night — it had to be late 1982, when Margaret Thatcher was running for her first re-election — my shortwave radio caught a BBC broadcast of the Iron Lady’s campaign speech.

To be sure, all my prior knowledge about Margaret Thatcher was limited to her unflattering portrayal in the official Soviet media. She busted the unions, privatized the economy, and was a sworn enemy of the USSR and socialism in general. In fact, the very moniker — the Iron Lady — was given to her by the Soviet Army newspaper Red Star in 1976, before she even became prime minister. Later I also learned that she readily took it on as her own, telling parliamentary constituents a week later that she was proud to wear a “Red Star” evening gown and to serve as “the Iron Lady of the Western world.”

Listening to Thatcher speak confirmed everything the Soviet media was reporting about her, and more. In a deep, powerful voice, she accused her socialist opponents of destroying the British economy through nationalization and presented the proof of how privatizing it again was bringing the economy back to life. The free markets worked as expected, making Britain strong again. The diseased socialist welfare state had to go, to be replaced by a healthy competitive society.

To the average consumer of the Soviet state-run media, that didn’t make any sense. When exactly had Britain become a socialist welfare state? That part never passed the Soviet media filter. Our media had made it explicitly clear that all Western nations, especially Britain and the United States, were officially governed by the ideology of anti-communism and unfettered capitalism. Their ruling classes had established the ultimate police states in order to protect the sanctity of private property — a criminal misconception which allowed the few rich, cigar-smoking, top-hat-wearing fat cats to brutally exploit the powerless masses.

So if everything had always been in private hands, what exactly did Thatcher privatize? And where did the free, cradle-to-grave government services come from?

Gradually, the news sank in: if Britain was indeed a socialist state, then everything we were told about the outside world was a lie. And not just any lie — it was an inconceivably monstrous, colossal lie, which our Communist Party and the media thoroughly maintained, apparently, to prevent us from asking these logical questions: if the Brits also had free, cradle-to-grave entitlements like we did, then why were we still fighting the Cold War? And what was the purpose of the Iron Curtain? Was it to stop us from collectively surrendering to the Brits, so that their socialist government could establish the same welfare state on our territory — only with more freedom and prosperity minus the Communist Party?

The next logical question would be this: if Great Britain wasn’t yet as socialist as the Soviet Union, then didn’t it mean that whatever freedom, prosperity, and working economy it had left were directly related to having less socialism? And if less socialism meant a freer, more productive, and more prosperous nation, then wouldn’t it be beneficial to have as little socialism as possible? Or perhaps — here’s a scary thought — to just get rid of socialism altogether?

And wasn’t it exactly what Margaret Thatcher was doing as a prime minister?

What started with me listening out of curiosity ended up with a sudden realization that she was right on all points. I instantly became Thatcher’s fan. The experience was inspiring. I remember how on the following day in school I described that speech to my friends, argued the prime minister’s points, and even attempted a voice impression, emphasizing the confident manner in which the Iron Lady spoke. Never before had I heard a speaker so full of conviction.

I then began to suspect that all the unorthodox things the Soviet reporters attributed to Ronald Reagan — his radical positions on the economy and fighting the Cold War — might be true as well. The same reporters earlier described Jimmy Carter as an evil imperialist warmonger, so I initially doubted their coverage of Reagan. What government official would ever advocate for a smaller government? It seemed too fantastic to be true. But this time the media got it right — which, by my newly discovered standards, made Reagan a good man and a wise leader. It’s those whom the Soviet media praised that were the real trouble.

After I moved to the United States years later, I also discovered Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. But Thatcher was one of the earliest prominent guideposts in my intellectual journey, for which I am forever grateful.

Recently I had a rare opportunity to repay my debt.

Unlike the current U.S. president, Thatcher didn’t have a well-oiled propagandistic social media organization in the style of OFA. Nor did the “progressive” world media advance and reverberate her message; that free service is reserved for the political left only. For Thatcher, it was quite the opposite.

And yet she exerted great influence over people. She did it merely by being who she was: informed, unwavering in the face of adversity, brave in defending the truth, and confident in her belief that the free markets are a force for good, while socialism is a force for evil. A few Western leaders may have agreed with her in private, but they didn’t have the courage to say it openly in the twisted moral climate brought on their countries by the false promise of socialism.

What Thatcher showed to these men is that when one has no fear of speaking the truth and possesses enough moral conviction to push back, miracles happen. Britain’s resurrection as an economic powerhouse was one of them.

Her message came through despite all the hostile efforts to jam it around the world, shattering not just the Western establishment’s media filters, but the Iron Curtain itself.

It still resonates; if only today’s leaders could listen.

More at,

http://pjmedia.com/blog/how-thatcher-changed-hearts-and-minds-behind-the-iron-curtain/?singlepage=true

Biography

Margaret Thatcher's political career has been one of the most remarkable of modern times. Born in October 1925 at Grantham, a small market town in eastern England, she rose to become the first (and for two decades the only) woman to lead a major Western democracy. She won three successive General Elections and served as British Prime Minister for more than eleven years (1979-90), a record unmatched in the twentieth century.

During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination.

In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill.

By successfully shifting British economic and foreign policy to the right, her governments helped to encourage wider international trends which broadened and deepened during the 1980s and 1990s, as the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, and the growth of free markets strengthened political and economic freedom in every continent.

Margaret Thatcher became one of the world's most influential and respected political leaders, as well as one of the most controversial, dynamic, and plain-spoken, a reference point for friends and enemies alike.

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/essential/biography.asp

So, the chief complaint that Lady Thatcher's critics have against her is that she was a fiscal conservative who promoted free enterprise instead of socialism.

And she was buddies with a mass murderer.




Really? Would you classify Pinochet as a tyrannic leader?

actually she sent him back to Chile,a bit late,but he went!
Besides,Allende wasn't any better!

Indeed buried at public cost, the public she had such disdain for. Why did the free market not pay for her burial?

I think sometimes Unions can be damaging and they can cause companies to go broke. That happened to the Steel Mill where my father worked.

It would be nice if we were able to find a balance between slave labor, and a living wage and regulations on working conditions.

well,you don't have to pay for it,neither does your precious Union!

And apartheid South Africa