Margaret Thatcher, Dead—Creature from the British Empire

May 1, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Margaret “Maggie” Thatcher was Prime Minister of Britain during the 1980s. When she died on April 8, there was an outpouring of celebration among the people—in the UK and elsewhere—for the demise of this deeply hated reactionary.

A fitting epitaph.

• Thatcher and the British ruling class joined U.S. imperialism’s mad nuclear arms race against the rival imperialists of the Soviet Union that threatened the planet with nuclear destruction.
• She praised every U.S.-installed dictator and U.S.-backed oppressive regime. She proclaimed that bloody General Pinochet of Chile, whose CIA-sponsored military coup slaughtered and tortured tens of thousands in the mid-1970s, was “bringing democracy to Chile.” Thatcher supported the white supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa, campaigning against economic sanctions on that government for its oppression of Africans.
• She led Britain in the war of aggression in 1982 when it prevented Argentina from taking back the British colony the UK calls the Falklands (the Malvinas).
• Thatcher led the British brutal reign of torture, mass detention, and shredding of civil liberties in Northern Ireland.
• She oversaw an era of rampant police brutality and fascist pogroms against black people, South Asians and impoverished whites in Britain's crumbling inner cities, provoking powerful urban rebellions such as the Brixton rebellion in 1981.
• Thatcher pushed ruthless fuck-the-poor policies, slashing social services and government aid for education and housing. Banks were deregulated, major government-owned industries were privatized, and unemployment doubled. She was proud of crushing a major strike by coal miners in 1981.

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