Why I Didn't Join In On The Hagiography of Margaret Thatcher

How many times have I heard people on the right speak disgustingly of those who glorify leftist icons like Che Guevara.  The pearl-clutchers are appalled that anyone would admire murderous leftists like Che Guevara.


Except:

This historic account in the New Yorker show how cozy Madam Thatcher was with the murderous Pinochet of Chile.  It's amusing, isn't it, that we don't hear anything about her relationship with Chile's dictator.  We only hear of how rotten it is for lefties to wear t-shirts with Che Guevara's image on them.

Hypocrisy of the 10th magnitude:


From The New Yorker:

"In a tribute Monday, President Barack Obama said she had been “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” 

Actually, she hadn’t. 

Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted “Chilean economic miracle.” 

And kill he did. Pinochet’s soldiers rounded up thousands in the capital’s sports stadiums and, then and there, suspects were marched into the locker rooms and corridors and bleachers and tortured and shot dead. Hundreds died in such a fashion. One was the revered Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who was beaten, his hands and ribs broken, and then machine-gunned, his body dumped like trash on a back street of the capital—along with many others. 

The killing went on even after Pinochet and his military had a firm hold on power; it was just carried out with greater secrecy, in military barracks, in police buildings, and in the countryside. Critics and opponents of the new regime were murdered in other countries, too. In 1976, Pinochet’s intelligence agency planned and carried out a car bombing in Washington, D.C., that murdered Allende’s exiled former Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, as well as Ronni Moffitt, his American aide. Britain regarded Pinochet’s killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons—that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. 

 In 1980, the year after Thatcher took office, she lifted the arms embargo against Pinochet; he was soon buying armaments from the United Kingdom. In 1982, during Britain’s Falklands War against Argentina, Pinochet helped Thatcher’s government with intelligence on Argentina. Thereafter, the relationship became downright cozy, so much so that the Pinochets and his family began making an annual private pilgrimage to London. During those visits, they and the Thatchers got together for meals and drams of whiskey. In 1998, when I was writing a Profile of Pinochet for The New Yorker, Pinochet’s daughter Lucia described Mrs. Thatcher in reverential terms, but confided that the Prime Minister’s husband, Dennis Thatcher, was something of an embarrassment, and habitually got drunk at their get-togethers. 

The last time I met with Pinochet himself in London, in October, 1998, he told me he was about to call “La Señora” Thatcher in the hopes she could find time to meet him for tea. A couple of weeks later, Pinochet, still in London, found himself under arrest, on the orders of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. During Pinochet’s prolonged quasi-detention thereafter, in a comfortable home in the London suburb of Virginia Water, Thatcher showed her solidarity by visiting him. There, and in front of the television cameras, she expressed her sense of Britain’s debt to his regime: “I know how much we owe to you”—for “your help during the Falklands campaign.” She also said, “It was you who brought democracy to Chile.” 

 This, of course, was a misstatement of such gargantuan proportions that it cannot be dismissed as the overzealousness of a loyal friend. Pinochet himself finally died in 2006, under house arrest and facing over three hundred criminal charges for human rights abuses, tax evasion, and embezzlement. By then, he was alleged to have over twenty-eight million dollars stashed in secret bank accounts in various countries, with no sign that it had been legally earned. At the end, Pinochet’s only defense was a humiliating claim of dementia—that he couldn’t remember his crimes. His final heart attack came before he could ever be convicted. During the years of what could be called Chile’s return to democracy, after 1990—when Pinochet was forced to step down from the Presidency he had seized following a referendum on his rule, which he lost—little was done to truly exorcise Chile’s demons, much less judge them. Pinochet retained the command of the armed forces, and when he stepped down from that role, in 1998, he retained a senatorship-for-life, which gave him immunity from prosecution. 

Until his detention in Britain, the Presidents who ruled “democratic” Chile continued to tiptoe around the fact that the country’s chief former tormenter continued to dictate the terms of the national discussion about the recent past. Following his return home, after sixteen months, however, Pinochet was stripped of his parliamentary immunity, criminally indicted for some of his coup-era crimes, and spent much of the remainder of his life under house arrest. But it took Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s President from 2006 to 2010—the daughter of a general who opposed the coup and was tortured until he died of a heart attack in detention—to end the tradition of deference."

In addition to Thatcher's admiration for the rightwing murderous dictator, Pinochet, this is how she handled the apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela.


"When she denounced Nelson Mandela’s liberation movement as a “typical terrorist organization” and rejected calls for sanctions against South Africa’s white minority government, Margaret Thatcher found herself on the wrong side of history. Characteristically, she never admitted error. 

In 1987, just seven years before the fall of apartheid, a Thatcher spokesman scoffed that it was “cloud cuckoo-land” to suggest that Mr. Mandela would ever win power. In the same year, Mrs. Thatcher clashed repeatedly with the Brian Mulroney government as she bitterly fought Canada’s efforts to introduce Commonwealth sanctions against South Africa."

The rightwing can have their love fest for Margaret Thatcher on the occasion of her death, but they also need to look at the hypocrisy of overlooking her horrendous bad judgement in backing the rightwing murderous dictator, Pinochet, as well as her choosing to be on the wrong side of history in South Africa's stuggle with apartheid.