Margaret Thatcher Passes Away
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Anonymous
If you really think that Thatcherism is a matter of wanting MORE vs. LESS freedom, you are a political simpleton. |
Anonymous
I am the PP who has been writing admiringly about Thatcher but I don't buy the standard right wing spiel about how Thatcher and Reagan were responsible for bringing down the Soviet Union. In fact, in Europe, people are amused by the claim that Reagan's policies brought about the changes. The reality is that the Soviet Union was literally coming apart economically and Gorbachev realized that the system needed revamping. He let loose a series of steps that even he did not anticipate would bring about the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Can anyone seriously argue that Reagan's policies if they had been in effect when Brezhnev was in power would have had the same effect? The timing was right and Gorbachev was the catalyst that made it happen. Thatcher's achievements were primarily domestic and EU related. The magnitude of her success in reversing the direction the UK was headed can never be overstated. There was no politician in the UK at that time who could have accomplished what she did because it took a rare combination of iron will and an indifference to popularity and whether she would even be re-elected. She achieved domestically what Churchill did in the context of the war. She lost power in a party coup and Churchill was rejected by the British people in the election following the war. |
Anonymous
Well, England originally said they were going to 'disinvest'. That never happened, and was never going to happen. Read your history books and find out the reason why the English even arrived! So instead of 'disinvest', which would have been like 'give back what you stole', there was a whole lot of other 'window dressing' sanctions. If you are interested, the diamond and gold mines are still mainly in British hands. Marikana mine had the 'trouble', and that is owned by Lonmin, a London based mining conglomerate, owned by people not living in Africa. This really is not a nice way to describe the English. But it is what it is. |
Anonymous
| Thatcher and Reagan helped the curtain come down peacefully. Without their support for Gorbachev, it would have been much more chaotic. |
Anonymous
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1008f6b0-a043-11e2-88b6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Pv4TVX3j
Gorby and Walesa both seem to think she helped bring down the Iron Curtain. |
Anonymous
I believe this article offers a fairly objective analysis of the reasons for the fall of the Soviet Uniion http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/soviet_end_01.shtml IMO, history will accord to Thatcher the same respect and recognition in turning around the UK from the morass it had sunk into that historians today ascribe to Churchill in terms of his foresight and role in dealing with Nazi Germany. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
I'm sure they have nice things to say about her. But the fact remains that internal social forces and an inadequate economy brought down the Soviet Union. There was once a belief that the required military spending on the cold war durnig reagan somehow sank the economy, but if you run the numbers it does not add up. |
Anonymous
| No they hate us because of freedom! |
Anonymous
Chernobyl brpught it down. Destroyed farmlands. Thatcher was a friend to the wealthy, not the working poor |
Anonymous
She was not a friend of social welfare. |
Anonymous
More precisely, she tried to reverse unwarranted social welfare. |
Anonymous
All of the colonial powers ravaged the colonies that were under their control to one degree or another. Thatcher's problem was that she espoused a philosophy that the first world knew what was best for the rest of the world. In that sense she was a product of her times. She was opposed to immigration because it was changing the face of Britain - meaning that she did not like the "browning" of Britain. In that sense her views were similar to another politician, Enoch Powell, who predicted "rivers of blood" would result because of resentment by whites to what was happening with the inflow of immigrants. He became a pariah in the process because his views were outright racist. Thatcher was more subtle about it but there was no doubt what she really felt about immigrants from the former colonies and Britain's role in relation to her former empire. Thatcher's views about the changing demographics of the UK is quite similar to the misgivings that Pat Buchanan expresses about the demographic changes in the US and, perhaps, what some within the tea party crowd gripes about when they say "we want our country back". What Thatcher, Buchanan and their ilk don't realize is that ship has sailed. |
Anonymous
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It is not really about what other colonial powers did in Africa, but Margarets and Englands response to what they did. One wrong does not really justify another.
But I agree, the English went to foreign lands to make the inhabitants into Brittish subjects, therefore they cannot complain when those natives descide to move to 'mother england' and claim their heritage. Right now they are no longer afraid of their 'offspring' desciding to come home, rather the eastern europeans arriving. When England sent large numbers of people abroad, they were still part of the Brittish empire, therefore not technically even abroad. |
Anonymous
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