This article, like the rest in the mainstream media, only focuses on positive parts of Thatcher's life. What about the rest? Wikinews needs to make it stand apart from the rest of the media afraid to mention the truth. If it were Hitler, Pinocet, Stalin, George W Bush, etc. who had died then articles wouldn't fail to criticize the person.
The article says very little about her life at all. There's really only the second paragraph. Which does mention the coal strike and the riots.
I'm with Xania on this, we've fallen for the "don't speak ill of the deceased" nonsense and produced a bit of a hagiography. She was a hateful woman, and she will not be missed because her loathed ideology lives on, even in toadying members of the Labour Party.
Hunter S. Thomson had this to say when Nixon died:
- "If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."
There are plenty of notable figures as-glad to see Thatcher gone, and not willing to be cowed by her fans in the mainstream press. A well-worth reading editorial in The Guardian warns on the risks of hagiography, just look at the "burial" of the socially divisive policies Reagan was responsible for along with his corpse. The policies never went away, they were canonised alonside him by Fox News.
Much the same can be said for Thatcher.
In the case of this article, I tried to improve it. I added mention of right-to-buy, privatisation, the Miners' Strike and Section 28 to try and make sure that it wasn't just the Falklands and the "transforming of the British economy" (which masks many important details).
I would have liked to spend a bit more time increasing what we had to say specifically about her time as Prime Minister... which is sort of the most important part of an article of this sort. But alas, there were pressures of time: both to publish, and for me to get back to work.
Yes, I was glad to see some mention of her darker deeds. It was the lack of quotes from those unafraid to talk ill of the dead I was mourning.
It's not too late to add other quotes; the horizon is 24 hours after publication, and we're nowhere near that yet.
People keep going on about how horrific she is, I think if we tried living a week under Kim Jong-un in North Korea, people who have never seen the light of day, lived their lives under fear from the state, indoctrinated and brainwashed, and ultimately told that the grandfather Kim Il-sung is the "Eternal President" and God-figure and his children are the sons of God - then this is a far worse predicament. The only thing I could think of comparing it to is the situation in Nazi Germany - but even that was a period of indoctrination between 1939-1945 but this is three generations' worth that may be irreversible. State TV is controlled, newspapers are controlled, radio is controlled, no internet just an intranet, again controlled.
"Margaret Thatcher: she's better than North Korea" isn't much of an endorsement.
My point summarised would be: to appreciate our liberty and that she did uphold that core principle of freedom and democracy.
She was responsible for a whole swathe of legislation aimed at eroding people's rights and liberties. Best-of-friends with Pinochet and Saddam. Always referred to Mandela as a 'terrorist', most-likely gave the go-ahead for extra-judicial executions over The Troubles - as-in the IRA vs British Establishment in Northern Ireland.
You're comparing her, a right-wing ideologue whose outlook borders on fascism, with a spoilt brat that just inherited a very sick state with nuclear weapons. She put US cruise missiles on British soil. She used the police to enforce her political will in her obsessive war to smash unions. Police, brought in from London on overtime, kettled, coshed, clubbed and charged striking miners on horseback. Those on picket lines, many of whom had near-starving families at home, faced riot police who would stick £20 notes on their shields to try and goad people into moves that allowed them to act as thugs.
Pres. Obama's statement about Thatcher having stood shoulder to shoulder with Ronald Reagan is not something I would say to praise the woman. Remembering how Reagan and Thatcher hit it off and their stance against blue-collar workers and Reagan's policy concentrating even more wealth into the rich while driving others even deeper into poverty, I don't doubt the anti-labor allegations I'm reading about Thatcher.