I have to say that I grew up surrounded by people who hated this woman. She was our first female prime minister, but she did nothing to advance the status of women. She ruined our industry and made us dependent on fuel imports. On the plus side she stood up for Britain in the Falklands and Europe. She was booted out of office just a few months before I was born, but her legacy lives on, for good or ill.
Didn’t she kill a ship full of men or something?
That’s called war.
I don’t know much about Thatcher other than she was in office roughly around the time as Reagan, and they had similar views…
I honestly don’t know how to interpret her as I gotta rely on second hand information from the English radicals that populate the internet… I think Hobbes may infact be the first English Nationalist I’ve ever come across, and he spews entrenched hatred oriented propaganda, using slang that when I google it it takes me to links to The Daily Mail… so it’s damn difficult for me to make a assessment of her.
I’m opposed to Obama for example… and the country is deeply politically decided, but I have this understanding none the less that he is ‘A American Presidient’ in the same ways during the Roman Empire people in either the eastern or western empire knew the emperor of the parallel empire was indeed ‘a roman emperor’ and so I acknowledge certain things as given about him in a non-partisan manner… but that’s quickly evaporating. The media is mostly partisan and is given to it’s end political end game at any cost… and I see the end result of what is to be expected in Europe, including England, of things to come for us when one side nearly obliterates it’s opposite… anyone holding a view not worded to the rhetoric of the victorious party get’s stoned into submission as this god aweful creature.
Margaret, if she had views that are so deeply repugnant to the current ruling parties, was a leader of a different, lost, largely unknown era. Her ideas likely were not that repugnant then, and chances are alot of the slang and saying people attack her with are the hollow lies.
It’s necessary to occasionally go in and study hated leaders, their primary works and sayings… and get a grasp on what they were trying to do. I used to absolutely hate Nixon… but then found one of his old books, and started reading him… he was pretty philosophical, and the very thing that made him leave office is equivalently being done everyday now… he’s comparitively not that bad compared to the sickness of modern politics… but even with this consideration, I still find I can’t support him given what he did. It just seperates and isolates me much more so from the current population.
Studying history does that… it turns the common place of today into a sickening radicalism far removed from the intentions of the past. In the US, we have a natural balance we can stop at, the high point in our philosophy, the founding fathers. I can’t imagine what a archeology of England would offer, where is the high tide of authentic Englishness in history? ALFRED THE GREAT, CROMWELL?
Probably something lame like controlling a fifth of the world, like the UK did just short of 100 years ago. At some point they were involved in sending people over to make your country what it is today - sorry about that.
Back to Thatcher though, instead of this questionable England-hating you’ve got going on, I lived through a few years of her but not really in an area that she messed up. Having said that, I’m not about to hate the woman herself - she was just a product of this system we’ve got going on. Like all leaders, it’s not like she sprung out from nowhere and completely changed a significant bunch of people’s minds around to her completely original point of view, she was just another rich person with a privileged upbringing, with lots of training and education in sounding educated and trained, but ultimately with no knowledge or sympathy for poor people without a privileged unbringing. Of course she fucked up a huge number of people’s lives by pushing the kinds of policies that result from the mentalities of those who had her kind of life, just like many before her did and many after her will, and that sucks. But let’s just hope that people learned that little bit more about what not to do and that her family and friends find peace after her death.
Elvis Costello
Tramp The Dirt Down
I saw a newspaper picture from the political campaign
A woman was kissing a child, who was obviously in pain
She spills with compassion, as that young childs
Face in her hands she grips
Can you imagine all that greed and avarice
Coming down on that childs lips
Well I hope I don’t die too soon
I pray the lord my soul to save
Oh I’ll be a good boy, Im trying so hard to behave
Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live
Long enough to savour
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
Ill stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down
When England was the whore of the world
Margaret was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as
The black tarmacadam
Well I hope that she sleeps well at night, isnt
Haunted by every tiny detail
Cos when she held that lovely face in her hands
All she thought of was betrayal
And now the cynical ones say that it all ends the same in the long run
Try telling that to the desperate father who just squeezed the life from his only son
And how it’s only voices in your head and dreams you never dreamt
Try telling him the subtle difference between justice and contempt
Try telling me she isn’t angry with this pitiful discontent
When they flaunt it in your face as you line up for punishment
And then expect you to say thank you straighten up, look proud and pleased
Because youve only got the symptoms, you haven’t got the whole disease
Just like a schoolboy, whose heads like a tin-can
Filled up with dreams then poured down the drain
Try telling that to the boys on both sides, being blown to bits or beaten and maimed
Who takes all the glory and none of the shame
Well I hope you live long now, I pray the lord your soul to keep
I think I’ll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep
I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap
Cos when they finally put you in the ground
They’ll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down
This woman changed Great Britain from a country to a business, where a minority elite used the former citizens as money-making fodder.
“There is no society” M Thatcher.
She came from the lower middle classes. Her father was a shopkeeper. She was definitely not part of the aristocratic, ruling elite.
That’s where she ended up, though.
I’m not sure that’s even true. Doesn’t stop her from being fundamentally wrong, though.
Out of all the kings of England, Alfred the Great is the only one who deserves unqualified respect.
She was a populist - obviously not to be confused with popular - leader and was used because such a leader could, at that time, rip the social support system apart and set in motion a privitizing ‘free market’ catastrophe that is still reachign parts of the world and messing them up. Once a populist was no longer a good thing for the elite, they got rid of her. She was, a populists are, a nationalist, and this was a problem for the agenda of the elites. Out the back door lady. She did a lot of damage, but she was a front. A side effect of all this is it might have made it easier for a woman to be taken seriously in the West as a leader. But notice the women who are getting anywhere near the thrones.
Well I am sure the Guardian will write a headline page saying something like “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”
Margaret Thatchers contribution to 20th century politics is however more complex than that, she came into power when the country was basically a socialist state and rightly overturned the powers of the unions. The issue I have is that when she had rebuilt the parliamentary process into something that could work she then went too far. What she did to the NHS though is unconscionable, even the Conservatives have always held it up as a paragon of virtue, and tried to preserve it, she basically destroyed it. That more than the miners strikes, the poll tax and all the other scorched Earth policies she made was the most egregious thing I have ever seen done by a government in England or the UK.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2DnW5uC1_A[/youtube]
This kinda satyr or should I say satire at the time, really was rather damaging.
Not so sure about that although we know he saved us from the ravages of the Vikings (Danes) and rebuilt an Anglo Saxon nation, he was far from being perfect, but then no king is. His Christian values, often set him back far further than he needed to be, and sometimes he was really making gains into territory he had lost by his bad strategy and poor diplomatic advance, in short he made bad choices of enemies on the basis of his convictions. That said, I think there are several kings who are deserving of mention and one Queen Elizabeth the I. She was truly a genius of diplomacy, trade and war although likewise her reign was as flawed as any other single dictator.
Alfred deserves the epithet of Great, but there is a lot more to the story than the idolising treatment we are exposed to.
As i see it that is not a plus side. Although the Argentineans were wrong in the way they went about taking the Falkland’s, the whole thing was just a reflection of grandiose empire past ~ pitiful really, a diplomatic solution should have been found prior to those events ~ or at least now. Equally we shouldn’t ‘stand up against Europe’ as we are part of it, the future belongs to larger confederations of states [china/Russia/usa etc], and we would be fools to think we can go it alone.
I would hate to be so hated, one has to ask what kind of person would accept that in their minds. Also i can remember her as i was a teenage punk back then, and i remember e.g. the way she organised the police to wear blue overalls with no numbers on them, and attacked the hippies who just wanted free festivals at Stonehenge. I knew some of the people attacked ~ women and children included, it was little short of what the Nazis did [well ok, quite a lot short of that], and i sincerely hope she rots in hell [if only there was a hell for people like her].
She was nothing more than a ghastly unintelligent manipulative person. I hope one day we will be free of politicians like her.
Please accept my apologies, those emotions were not directed at you but her.
Common ruse, dirty face
Pretty nose sells pretty hate…
Anyways, the time I’m talking about was some sort of sacrificial thing where she allowed a ship to be bombed, or she secretly bombed them or something. Then she was on TV pretty much straight face saying, “Yeah, that happened.” I can’t remember this one very well, just that she did something pretty extreme and was more than fine with it. I remember nodding to myself that she was a total psychopath crazy person.
That’s nice and clear then.
Contra-Nietzsche
Frost/Nixon ~ we got it all wrong?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nixon_Interviews
"In Part 3, Frost asked Nixon about the legality of the president’s actions. Nixon replied: "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”.
Personally, i think Nixon was playing his last hand here ~ and rather cleverly. He made it far more difficult for future presidents to have so much power ~ nor anyone. In fact if we scroll forwards to recent times, what would our argument be against dictators if we had them ourselves? Call me a conspiracy theorist but maybe the whole thing was planned out, and frost wasn’t as clever as he assumed. …i mean who would walk right into that?
I am saying, “calling it war doesn’t make it less than murder.”
But I felt like quoting Soundgarden.
Speaking of confusing, do you have braille in your signature?
Well spotted, you’re only the second person to mention it.