Margaret Thatcher....

[glens abu]

The death of Margaret Thatcher has sent a cacophony of sound, a kaleidoscope of colour and a feel good factor that could have us confuse this Monday morning for a Friday evening at the beginning of a bank holiday weekend among the working classes worldwide.

The mainstream media outlets will eulogise a tyrant in both British and (semi-British) Irish media outlets that will have little reflection on how the masses viewed the greatest narcissist in World politics in the last half century. But it will not reflect the general feeling of the masses who greeted the news of her demise with a huge,

'Thank f@#k for that'.

In South America she is hated for her resolute support for the detested Chilean dictator, General Pinochet, her support for right-wing Contras in Nicaragua and of course the abdominal sinking of the Argentine Navy light cruiser, the General Belgrano. The Belgrano was sailing away from the war zone of the Malvina's in 1982 when she was sunk on the orders of Thatcher with the loss of 323 souls. The action was a war crime.

In other notable International affairs she labelled Nelson Mandela a Terrorist and supported covertly the Apartheid rule in South Africa. Given her support for Pinochet and the right wing Contra's and her recourse to label the ANC terrorists, it's a relief to note Ireland's best shared the same stable with the ANC, PLO etc. Thatcher failed to hide her racist tendencies.

Ireland

In Ireland there will be those who uncompromisingly support the actions of Thatcher throughout the 32 counties. They are some of the few individuals who done exceedingly well from her neo-liberal policies that destroyed the lives of millions from the working classes, destroyed the welfare state and ensured greed, 'loads a money' and a mentality of 'me first' took over from the need for collective wellbeing.

But when the book on Thatcher is authored by the enlightened, it will make difficult reading for those who fought Thatcher only to surrender and embrace her political philosophy in the pursuit of that age-old fiendish crime, preoccupation with self.

In Ireland, few in politics are immune. The demolishing of the welfare system has been resumed by her greatest advocate, David Cameron and delivered with alarmingly little fuss by his contemporaries in the N.I Executive.

The closing of Residential Care Homes, Venerable Adult Day Care facilities, Specialist Care facilities, longer waiting lists for healthcare, Social housing, bedroom taxes, the removal of thousands from disability living allowance schemes, public services run into the ground etc. can be traced directly to Thatcher's policy of attacking the working classes and the poor. It is Thatcher's economic policies via her 'chomp' Cameron that the present Stormont Executive is administering.

Some of the great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic in the political mainstream has evaporated like a puddle in the Sahara. Ireland no longer enjoys visionaries like Connolly or Larkin.

While we have watched the appallingly ignorant diatribe of bombast and crocodile tears flood from the eyes and mouths of representatives of the five party Executive, only a complete failure to grasp the most basic in economics could prompt this strange inversion of logic while attempting to support the parties that administer these cuts. To be fair the shallowness is not evenly distributed and some members are beginning to question policy. But on the day of Thatcher's ultimate demise, it is important to show where the 'Left' resides.

The one question we all must ask ourselves, and we may wish to ignore the answer, Did Maggie Thatcher defeat Republicans & Socialists in Ireland?

Her most evil bedfellow was surely Pol Pol and the Khmer Rouge. Sending the SAS to Cambodia to train the Khmer Rouge in technical areas such as planting landmines had devasting results for decades.

Without a doubt

[Main Street]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-editorial

Margaret Thatcher: the lady and the land she leaves behind

Her legacy is public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed that together shackle the human spirit

The Guardian, Monday 8 April 2013 18.35 BST

The English media don't comment negatively (or even at all) about Thatcher's Government record in the North, do they?
Strange one that, don't you think?

[Harold Disgracey]

@skearon: @niallboylan4fm Thatcher deserves our gratitude for ensuring Provo thugs & criminals who didn't like prison food deservedly died painfully

I believe this **** Stephen Kearon is a former FF special advisor, special **** more like. ****

[Oraisteach]

I had never heard of Thatcher's connection to the Khmer Rouge.  Does anyone have a source to corroborate that link.  Pinochet yes, but Pol Pot!

[Jell 0 Biafra]

Shoot to kill policy. 

[Jell 0 Biafra]

I had never heard of Thatcher's connection to the Khmer Rouge.  Does anyone have a source to corroborate that link.  Pinochet yes, but Pol Pot!

Hadn't heard of it myself until today, but it makes sense in a "cold war politics" way.  Link here:
http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2010/07/30/cocktails-with-khmer-rouge-killers/

[Declan]

[glens abu]

Cavalcade of cars  leaving Twinbrook the home estate of Bobby Sands MP Tuesday night at 7pm to Divis tower avoiding Blacks Road via the Michael Ferguson roundabout into Poleglass and onto Glen Road, Shaws Road, Andersonstown Road, Falls Road in respect of the men of "81"

[The Subbie]

I had never heard of Thatcher's connection to the Khmer Rouge.  Does anyone have a source to corroborate that link.  Pinochet yes, but Pol Pot!

http://www.newstatesman.com/node/137397

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/jan/09/cambodia

and leaving the best to last

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G4dHRN2Dug so kids there was the good Khmer Rouge and the naughty bad Khmer Rouge, this is jaw dropping stuff even from this aul ****.

May she burn in hell the bastard.

[passedit]

George doesn't miss
http://redmolucca.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/tr**p-the-dirt-down/

"tr**p the Dirt Down"
This entry was posted on April 8, 2013, in Britain and tagged New Labour, Blair, Ireland, London, Thatcher, Poll Tax, Miners, Privatisation, Manufacture Industry, Tory, Liberal Democrats. Bookmark the permalink.

The old saw that one shouldn't speak ill of the recently dead cannot possibly apply to controversial figures in public life. It certainly didn't apply to President Hugo Chavez who predeceased Margaret Thatcher amidst a blizzard of abuse.

The main reason it must not preclude entering the lists amidst a wave of hagiographic sycophantic tosh of the kind that has engulfed Britain these last hours is that otherwise the hagiographers will have the field to themselves.

Every controversial divisive deadly thing that Thatcher did will be placed in soft focus, bathed in a rose-coloured light, and provide a first draft of history that will be, simply, wrong.

As is now well-known, I refused to do that today on the demise of a wicked woman who tore apart what remained good about my country, and set an agenda which has been followed, more or less, by all of her successors. I certainly wasn't prepared to leave the obituaries to those who profited from her rule or those who have aped her ever since.

So here is my own memory of Thatcher and what she did in her time on this earth.

On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was "Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher". It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste.

Before Thatcher, every primary school pupil received 1/3 of a pint of milk every morning. For some it was the difference between breakfast and no breakfast. I was sometimes one of those. I grew up in a brief period of social democracy in Britain, being dosed by the state with free cod-liver oil, orange juice and malt to build up my strength. Having been born in a slum tenement into a one-room attic in an Irish immigrant area, I needed all of that and more. And like millions I got it, until Thatcher took it away.

She became the Conservative leader after Heath's two electoral defeats in 1974 and his subsequent resignation.

She was a new type of Tory leader, entirely lacking in anything resembling "noblesse oblige". She was nasty, brutish and short of the class previously thought obligatory in Britain amongst leaders of the ruling elite. She was vulgar, money-worshipping, and blasphemous. She believed the important part of the Biblical story of the "Good Samaritan" was not that he refused to pass by the suffering on the other side of the road but that he had "loadsamoney".

In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was "no such thing as society"..."only individuals"

As the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, in one of his better efforts, retorted: "No such thing as society? Only individuals? No such thing as honouring other people's parents? No such thing as cherishing other people's children? No such thing as us and always? Just ME and NOW? ME and NOW?"

She was the living embodiment of Marx's prediction that under capitalism "all that is solid will melt into air... all that is sacred will be profaned"

Upon her election as prime minister (with just 40% of the vote, her position ensured by the treacherous defection from the Labour cause of the rats now squirming on the Liberal-Democrat ship) she set about "transforming" Britain allright. She privatised Britain's key industries, enriching her friends, and robbing the public of their birthright. When she took over "Financial Services" represented 3% of the British economy; when she left office it was 40%.










She destroyed the coal industry, the steel, car, bus and motor-cycle manufacturing, truck and bus-making, ship-building and print-industry, the railway workshops... she destroyed more than a third of Britain's manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler's Luftwaffe ever achieved.

She did this not just because she prefered the spivs and gamblers in the city -they were her kind of people. But because above all, she hated trades unionism, and was determined to destroy it.

I was a leading member of the Scottish Labour Party at the time she came into office, and a full-time Labour organiser. Scotland was to become an industrial wasteland in the first years of her rule.

I was also, from 1973, a member of the then Transport and General Workers Union, one of her  key targets – especially our Docks section.

Importantly, for me, I was an honorary member of the National Union of Mineworkers too.

In all of these capacities I was a front-line short-sword fighter in the rearguard action against Thatcherism.

I fought her at Bathgate, at Linwood, when she was sacking the automotive industry. I fought her at Wapping – every Saturday night when she destroyed the Print workers on behalf of her friend, the organised crime firm owner, Rupert Murdoch. I fought every day of the Miners strike when she destroyed the Miners Union and the communities they represented. I fought her at Timex in Dundee at Massey Ferguson in Kilmarnock, and at the aluminium smelter in Invergordon.

I fought against her poll tax – imposed first in Scotland – as a refusenik of the most iniquitous tax in Britain since mediaeval times, the tax which ended in flames – literally – whilst I was on the platform at Trafalgar Square. And which finally produced her political demise.

And I toured – as a political activist – the desolation in Britain's post-industrial distressed areas which she left behind. The City of London – deregulated by her – boomed whilst the coalfields and steel areas sank into penury. I saw the rusted factories the flooded mines the idle shipyards and the devilish results of millions of newly and enforced idle hands.

I faced her in parliament from 1987 as well, on these and other issues.

You see it wasn't just Britain that Thatcher made bleed.

Her withdrawal of political status from Irish republican prisoners and her brutal, securocratic, militarisation of the situation in the north led to much additional suffering in Ireland.

State collusion in the murder of Catholics became endemic during her rule. And ten young men were starved to death for the restoration of political status, before our eyes in her dungeons. She finally died on the anniversary of their leader, Bobby Sands, being elected to parliament as he lay on his death-bed.

During the Falklands War, she sent hundreds of young Argentinian conscripts to a watery grave when she shot the Argentine warship the Belgrano in the back – as it was speeding away from the conflict. She mercilessly exploited the sacrifice of them, and our own soldiers sailors and airmen, to save her own political skin. A lot of brave men had to leave their guts on Goose Green to keep Thatcher in power.

She pushed her alter ego – the semi-imbecilic US president Ronald Reagan – into Cold War fanaticism and burgeoning expenditure on more and more terrifying weapons – many of them stationed on our soil.

She pushed his successor George Bush Sen into the first Iraq War.

I was there, I saw her lips move, when she described Nelson Mandela as a "common terrorist".

She continued to recognise the genocidal and deposed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia – insisting that Pol Pot was the real and recognised leader of the Cambodians, even as they counted his victims in millions.

And she was the author of the policy of military, political, diplomatic and media support of the Afghan obscurantists who became the Taliban and Al Qaeda. She even produced them on the platform of the Tory Party conference, hailing them as "freedom-fighters".

I was one of the last men standing in parliament opposing this immoral policy of "my enemy's enemy is my friend".

On the eve of the triumph of these "freedom Fighters" I told Thatcher to her face; "You have opened the gates for the barbarians....and a long dark night will now descend upon the people of Afghanistan". I never said a truer word.






I hated Margaret Thatcher for what seems like all my life. I hated her more than I hated anyone – until the mass murderer Tony Blair came along.

It would have been utter hypocrisy for me to have remained silent about her crimes today whilst the political class – including New Labour – poured honeyed words, lies actually, over her blood-spattered record.

I could not do it. I believe I spoke for millions. The wicked witch is dead. tr**p the dirt down.

George Galloway MP

House of Commons

London

Design by Gayatri

[seafoid]

Shoot to kill policy.

Aidan McAnespie RIP

[passedit]

[seafoid]

that is a keeper.

[armaghniac]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPzzgE34YQY

[ziggysego]

Where there was discord, she did not bring harmony.