On Margaret Thatcher Dying

We all die.  Death isn't some wrong done to the good and noble, a tragic end of the admirable and heroic.  Even the most evil and malignant international criminals have been known to die.  Those never get a death they deserve.  There is no way to balance that equation.   Sometimes they are spared the agony of a death they've imposed on their victims, their survivors maintained in a comfort and security that they actively deny to the survivors of those they murder, enslave and starve.  So we can begin by saying to hell with the stupid idea that of the dead we are to speak no ill.  There are few more obvious and hypocritical benefits grated to some of the worst people that the notably depraved human species has produced. 

Margaret Thatcher was a pretty thoroughly malignant human being, if she had managed to rule another country than Britain she probably would have racked up an even more impressive record of imposing pain and death on people unable to defend themselves.  As bad as it is, British law and culture at least impeded her from attaining that kind of record.   She did her best to destroy the already woefully inadequate British Welfare State, clearly longing for the period in which the Poor Law was in effect.   

Her greatest success was in propagating her diseased thinking that greed was good, that selfishness was a virtue, that there was no society who she needed to trouble herself with.  It now dominates the English speaking media and the public life of most English speaking countries.   Margaret Thatcher has made the world a more depraved place to live in. She, Reagan and other conservatives have done more to promote the amoral, sociopathic dream of Ayn Rand than Rand's little army of maladjusted two-year-olds has.   In my country, before Reagan, homelessness and hunger were seen as a national shame, now due to Reagan's and Thatcher's shared philosophy the homeless and hungry are seen as annoyances that the media and society should ignore or to starve, harass, jail (for the profit of private prison systems) and, yes, kill. *  I will point out that their philosophy is the complete repudiation of the teachings of Jesus and the Jewish prophets who their supporters pretend to follow.   That level of hypocrisy is endemic to it. 

She and her close ally, Reagan, fed the military industrial complex and shifted wealth into the hands of the already filthy rich, actively encouraged hatred of the poor and oppressed. They say that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead but telling the truth about someone is more of an imperative than that. 

When Reagan died I said that the forgiveness he needed wasn't mine to give, that he could have what I had to give him when the many tens of thousands of victims of his proxies in Central American terror states gave me permission to do that. The bones of the victims of those terror campaigns would have to be found and the disarticulated jaws would have to attach and speak before I have that permission.

* See my series on Marilynne Robinson's brilliant analysis of the British Poor Laws and nuclear pollution last month.