The Wicked Witch Is Dead

One wicked witch, anyway. Margaret Thatcher, hailed as “The Iron Lady,” a sobriquet with a dual meaning. To admirers, it means steely determination, someone with “backbone,” an admirable quality in “traditional British values.” To her victims and those with humanist values, she was an ideological fanatic and a cruel, remorseless oppressor who waged relentless class warfare on the British working class and on the welfare of the general public. She was a staunch ally of fascists in other countries, a cheerleader for the crimes of U.S. Imperialism during the regimes of Reagan and Bush the Elder. She screeched with outraged indignation when Augusto Pinochet, poster boy of fascist admirers everywhere, was temporarily detained in the UK after he was officially out of power, pursuant to a Spanish arrest warrant for murdering eight Spanish citizens during his bloody, illegitimate reign in Chile. The UK ultimately let Pinochet go on his way, on the spurious grounds of sovereign immunity. He got a get out of jail free card pursuant to ex-ruler immunity privilege. (1)

Predictably, the BBC (and U.S. media) has strewn her path to Hades with rose petals. “She pursued her vision with vigor,” a “vision” they describe in glowing terms. Her “vision” actually consisted of the destruction of working class power by systematically dismantling unions. The bosses of course loved this, as reflected in their agit-propaganda media. Rupert Murdoch in particular took advantage of the anti-union offensive by freeing himself of pesky newspaper worker unions. Now we have to listen to days of praise for this vicious shrew so beloved by the capitalists she fought for.

Just for ersatz balance, BBC leavened its hosannas to the horrible harridan with political hack Neil Kinnock of the fake “Labor” party saying Thatcher “was not a malicious person,” just someone insensitive to the effects of her policies. Which in addition to being a milquetoast critique is a backhanded if unintentional insult to her intelligence. She knew exactly what she was doing. [David Cameron, the current Tory PM, insists Thatcher “saved” Britain. Saved from what, I have no idea. Saved from workers having some security in their lives, maybe.] So the range of acceptable opinion ranges from Thatcher was a heroine to She Meant Well and was a not a bad person.

A day later, [today], noxious NPR cobbled together a puff piece on the putrescent hussy for Morning Edition, chock full of laudatory cliches like “she changed Britain forever” (without saying in what way, or by what means). They put on some Canadian female pol to make the point that she “opened doors” for other women politicians to become country bosses.

Then the young male NPR morning dweeb who did the piece (they all sound the same to me, and they all are the same, just interchangeable cogs in a propaganda machine) asserted approvingly that Thatcher “could be tough and feminine all at once.” She asked some female UK toff to validate the statement, which this woman did by saying Thatcher was “flirtatious,” which surprised foreign country bosses. [Aka "heads of state."]

In other words, she was manipulative and tried to throw other country bosses off balance by behaving inappropriately with them in a sexual manner.

So playing the coquette the essence of feminity. I guess if you're stuck in the 19^th century it is. Is that where your head's at, NPR? The 19^th century?

Of course the mouthpieces of a system of corporate oligarchy would hail one of their class warriors. Thatcher was an aggressive political warlord for capital who went on the offensive against the working class, smashing their organizations and reducing them to isolated, powerless individuals. She emboldened the ideological system to push the parameters of acceptable discourse farther right.

By disempowering the working class, and attempting to discredit the idea that an economy should serve people and not vice versa, she set the stage for social disintegration. As more and more people are discarded by capitalist society as superfluous, they become an alienated, unorganized, inchoate mass with an ideological framework of understanding, prone to outbursts of rage that manifest in mindless crime and occasional bouts of rioting and looting. Yet the capitalists and their politicians have convinced themselves that they are heading into a brighter future. In fact, they are driving society into a black hole of social malaise and despair and an economic dead end of where capitalism grinds to a halt, as in Spain. At that point their only card left to play is overt fascism to stay in power.

Thatcher infamously said “there's no such thing as society,” an Ayn Randian vision of human existence as a dog eat dog struggle of all against all, the most selfish being the winners. In practice, it means a highly organized upper class of the rich and power crushing and exploiting a mass of disorganized individuals who are helpless to defend themselves. Destroying their organizational structures, such as unions, of course abets this condition, a throwback to earlier centuries. Thatcher's point was that there was no obligation to help others, no obligation of society- which doesn't exist, remember- to provide medical care, housing, any kind of security against the ravages of capitalism red in tooth and claw. (The BBC forgot to mention that remark of Thatcher's. Odd, that.)

The sickest part if that anti-human creatures like Thatcher and Rand insisted that this nightmare vision in fact is the most moral way to organize society, that attempts to interfere with its realization are in fact immoral. Thus they totally invert morality, and by basing their economic and political credo on a perverted morality, attempt to cement it as an irreversible and immutable condition of our species. This is pathology on a level that threatens humanity, and their ideology should be treated as an infectious mental disease.

1) On the other hand, ex-African nation-bosses (I reject the aggrandizing media term “world leaders”- they don't “lead” anything, they rule, they command, they boss. They control swaths of territory) get put on trial in Europe. They don't seem to get the ex-ruler immunity privilege.

SHHH! Quiet! Don't say it! Don't say “racism.” Europe loves human rights! How could they be racist? For example, they love human rights so much that Dutch troops handed over 8,000 or 10,000 Muslim men and boys (they care so much they don't even know how many it was) to the Serbian military for extermination, and sat on their hands while Saravejo was under murderous siege for four years, and while the Serbs set up rape camps and “ethnically cleansed” what was once Yugoslavia and generally rampaged for a decade while the governments and “leaders” of Europe occasionally cleared their throats and wrung their hands.

But yeah, they did put Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of the ruination of Yugoslavia, on trial. A trial that dragged on for so long- a year, with no end in sight- that Milosevic died before it reached a verdict. I guess they love trials so much in Europe that they don't want them to finish.

Oh, speaking of Pinochet, Chile is currently exhuming the body of Nobel Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda, to confirm that Pinochet had him murdered days after the coup. Neruda had revealed that he was going abroad to organize opposition to the fascist putsch. Subsequently Pinochet sent death squads as far away as Rome and Washington, D.C., to murder opponents of his regime. But Thatcher wasn't malicious! Why, all the UK's toffs agree on that, even the “Labor” ones! By the way, she was the nost ersatz of that fake class, aristocrats, having been born into the petit bourgeoisie and later made a “Baroness.”