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by Rory » Sat Apr 13, 2013 3:36 am
by justdrew » Sat Apr 13, 2013 4:20 am
Morrissey has released a statement attacking the personality and political beliefs of the late Margaret Thatcher.
The singer, 53, said that Baroness Thatcher, who died yesterday from a stroke aged 87, was “barbaric”, “hated the arts” and “hated the English poor”.
The statement said:
“Thatcher is remembered as The Iron Lady only because she possessed completely negative traits such as persistent stubbornness and a determined refusal to listen to others.
“Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the Ivory Trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own Cabinet booted her out.”
He went on to criticise Lady Thatcher’s role in the British invasion of the Falklands in 1982, and claim that she had impeded the progress of women in politics.
“She gave the order to blow up the Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone – and was sailing away from the islands.
“When the young Argentinian boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs up sign for the British press. Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes.
“She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women’s movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a Prime Minister could actually be female. But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it.”
Margaret Thatcher, who yesterday died from a stroke aged 87.
He concluded: “Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death.
“As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.”
Lady Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party in 1975, and was elected as the first ever female British Prime Minister in 1979. She led the country until she resigned in 1990.
Morrissey has been a long-standing critic of Lady Thatcher and the Conservative party. In 1988 he released the song Margaret on the Guillotine, which featured the lyrics “Margaret on the guillotine / Cause people like you / Make me feel so tired / When will you die?”
by conniption » Sat Apr 13, 2013 3:59 pm
RT
Anti-Thatcher protesters gather in Trafalgar Square (PHOTOS)
April 13, 2013
An effigy of late British former prime minister Margaret Thatcher is carried during an anti-Thatcher party celebrating her death in Trafalgar Square in central London on April 13, 2013. (AFP Photo)
A banner representing the National Union of Mineworkers is carried through the crowd at a party to celebrate the death of the late former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in central London April 13, 2013. (Reuters)
>snip<
“She destroyed our communities, she destroyed our villages, she has destroyed our pits and she tried to destroy our dignity,” David Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners Association, told the Guardian.
Tony Smith, a former miner from Nottinghamshire, said that any feelings of the inappropriateness of celebrating an old woman’s death were overridden by the damage she caused.
“The strength of feeling is so deep it overrides any reservations. We’ve lived under Thatcher’s shadow for many years. It split families right down the middle and that resentment is still going on,” he said.
As well as the protest in Trafalgar Square, Facebook sites have been set up calling for parties to be held to celebrate the former Prime Minister’s death. The Maggie’s Good Riddance Party said it will hold a “right jolly knees up” outside St Paul’s Cathedral on the day of her funeral, which is scheduled for Wednesday, and turn their backs on the funeral procession as it passes by.
But most activists are concentrating on events on Saturday and are aware that if they turn up at the funeral they are likely to get arrested, according to Val Swain spokesperson for the police monitoring group Netpol.
>snip<
by MacCruiskeen » Sun Apr 14, 2013 3:26 pm
by FourthBase » Sun Apr 14, 2013 5:24 pm
MacCruiskeen wrote:This is a beautiful, deeply felt and perfectly-judged obituary:
Two years ago, I started a thread with another post by Wayne Kasper:
"Full-Spectrum Surface" (on rampant unreality)
It's good to see him emerge from blogging-hibernation with maybe the best single article I've read on this difficult topic all week. I recommend it especially to non-Brits and to anyone under thirty, many of whom may have been taken aback at the sheer vehemence of so many responses to the passing of an exhausted old woman.
by Simulist » Sun Apr 14, 2013 5:30 pm
MacCruiskeen wrote:This is a beautiful, deeply felt and perfectly-judged obituary:
Two years ago, I started a thread with another post by Wayne Kasper:
"Full-Spectrum Surface" (on rampant unreality)
It's good to see him emerge from blogging-hibernation with maybe the best single article I've read on this difficult topic all week. I recommend it especially to non-Brits and to anyone under thirty, many of whom may have been taken aback at the sheer vehemence of so many responses to the passing of an exhausted old woman.
), and it is an altogether different thing to judge another person. Too often I've been less about the former because I've gotten myself lost along the vapid course of going about the latter.
by semper occultus » Sun Apr 14, 2013 7:35 pm
by blankly » Mon Apr 15, 2013 4:21 am
by kenoma » Mon Apr 15, 2013 6:21 pm
Simulist wrote:Because no matter how good or bad any or all of us might judge someone else to be, even when our judgment is based upon all the available evidence, there are still multitudinous other factors my intellect (and theirs) will remain incapable of even perceiving, much less fully considering.
by Simulist » Mon Apr 15, 2013 7:26 pm
kenoma wrote:Simulist wrote:Because no matter how good or bad any or all of us might judge someone else to be, even when our judgment is based upon all the available evidence, there are still multitudinous other factors my intellect (and theirs) will remain incapable of even perceiving, much less fully considering.
What rot, what a little blancgmange of quivering futile indecision you are. You clearly didn't even read the posted link.
by conniption » Tue Apr 16, 2013 7:49 am
The Guardian
Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children'
The actor and comedian recalls a bizarre recent encounter with the Iron Lady, and how it prompted him to think about growing up under the most unlikely matriarch-figure imaginable
Russell Brand
April 9, 2013
comments (2575)
Margaret Thatcher, the year she became leader of the Conservatives, and the year Russell Brand was born. Photograph: Keystone France
One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.
My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.
When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Margaret Thatcher visits Falkland Islands Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken from picture library
Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.
Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.
When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.
When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.
Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.
The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy
"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.
It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.
I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud.
There were sporadic resurrections. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.
Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness?
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.
I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.
by justdrew » Tue Apr 16, 2013 10:21 am
by justdrew » Tue Apr 16, 2013 9:16 pm
by conniption » Wed Apr 17, 2013 7:45 am
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