A Facebook friend of mine says she hopes she is in Hell. I don't think the individual actually believes in Hell (I told her if we knew what Hell was really like we wouldn't wish it on anyone) but it goes to show the depth of feeling against her.
From my own perspective, Margaret Thatcher was a bit frightening. She taught a doctrine of self-reliance and individualism that is, to me, let us say, 'challenging'. In some ways her doctrine was quite Christ-like in as much as she refused to give any credence to socialist collectivism and laid down the gauntlet to everyone to 'make something of himself'. In Thatcher's world view, I am totally responsible for all shortcomings and failures in my life. I'm under-employed. Why am I underemployed? Because I haven't searched hard enough for work. That is scary, but that is also quite true. I suppose I should get on my bike. Similarly, if I go to Hell it won't be because nobody told me about it, nor because the mercy of God did not work towards my salvation, but because I am responsible for choosing Heaven, or refusing His graces and choosing Hell.
This is, however, a spiritual/moral dimension that the Iron Lady rarely discussed and one reason why I still cannot get on with her ideology is not because she did not have deep courage in fighting communism, but because her own ideology was, in some respects, no less brutal. I don't particularly like being defined by my wealth, income or job or lack of it. There was an edge of social darwinism (the survival of the fittest) that seemed to run through her politics and a carelessness and indifference to those who suffered the huge economic changes that can only have been because she was blinded by the need to clamp down on collectivist action and the threat of communism spreading into the UK. To a point this is fine, since it was and is not up to politicians to be Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta nor to preside over the State's protection of business and industry, nor the indiscriminate handing out of cash to people who become dependent on it as their sole source of income. I quite like the fact that she believed that the care of the poor and sick should be something for the voluntary sector and/or Churches to do.
No, what still gets me about Lady Thatcher is the culture shift that happened in her wake. Yes, mines were closed and we lost our manufacturing base, but that's not quite it. Under Thatcher, British people were taught not just to save money, but to worship it. Sunday trading seemed to flourish in her time as the nation was urged to spend, produce and consume in a combined effort still touted by today's leaders but which is reminiscent of any ideology that places value only on work and production, like, er, communism.
Under Thatcher, every man, woman and child was taught that they were a consumer and a producer and that their social worth came from how much they were producing and consuming. This was the age - continued unabashedly under New Labour - when wealth and riches were seen to be the source of happiness instead of marriage, family and community cohesion. Thatcher and the Mandelson/Blair PR stunt that followed her ensured that Britain would forever be a country that had sold its soul to the City of London while the same City spat on the citizens who relied on its 'wealth generation'.
Thatcher left the country and the economy more prosperous and free than it was before she took office - as prosperous and free as any country owned by a banking cartel headed by the Rothschilds can be. She left the country as one in which men and women were both workers and economic cogs in a machine driven by the dynamic of the City of London and oversaw the next phase of the destruction of the family while the same industrialists who have exploited this country for centuries benefited out of the privatisation of its public services. Thatcher put the breaking up of public utilities to be sold off to Lord Rothschild and his friends. That's how 'in touch' with the 'common man' this lady was, but then, that's how in touch with the 'common man' all of our elected leaders are.
To the lady's great credit, she had great courage in facing down socialism and communism and its great threat to the United Kingdom, the USA and to Europe. Unfortunately, both socialism and communism won by vanquishing the family, murdering marriage, decimating generations of unborn children and leaving our school children a massive group of drug-addicted, sex-addicted, under-educated, STI-infected, irreligious louts. Perhaps, in the end, the Left was too big for one woman to take on since they had, let's face it, infiltrated every government department and institution in the country, including the Church.
The more silent work of Fabians and their ilk has always been far more deadly than a small rabble of out and out Socialist Worker newspaper sellers. That is, I expect, why they are the ones rejoicing at a principled woman's death, while forgetting that today's political leaders could not hold a candle to this valiant woman's stand against the terrible errors that have seen humanity enslaved in the East and may yet see humanity enslaved in the West. Raw capitalism can be just as dehumanising as raw communism and even more so when tenets of communism are incorporated into the framework of captialism.
May her soul and the souls of the Faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace and may Our Lady, Exterminatrix of Heresies, bring this poor, bankrupted, sick nation back to the Sacred Heart of her Divine Son. No ideology can serve to save this nation now. Only Catholicism can do that.
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