Pinochet's bullshit

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From the BBC: "Chile's former military ruler Augusto Pinochet has said he takes political responsibility for everything that happened during his 18 years in power."

Here's some of what he said (or rather of what his wife read on his behalf): "Today, near the end of my days, I want to say that I harbour no rancour against anybody, that I love my fatherland above all... I take political responsibility for everything that was done."

Everything? Well, certainly the coup that brought down the democratically-elected Salvador Allende in 1973. He claims to have had "no other motive than to make Chile a great place and prevent its disintegration," but, well, that's where the bullshit comes in. For he doesn't seem to understand what might be wrong about overthrowing a democratic government. And he doesn't take responsibility for the human rights abuses that were committed, but that's because he doesn't think any human rights abuses were committed.

For more, see this BBC profile of the former dictator: "It was he who ordered many of the purges that saw more than 3,000 supporters of the Allende regime killed, thousands more tortured, and many thousands more again forced into exile."

And see Costa-Gavras's powerful film Missing, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

And see these important resources: Remember-Chile, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.

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Now might be a good time to post the lyrics of "The Fletcher Memorial Home" by Pink Floyd:

take all your overgrown infants away somewhere

and build them a home

a little place of their own

the fletcher memorial home for incurable tyrants and kings

and they can appear to themselves every day

on closed circuit t.v.

to make sure they're still real

it's the only connection they feel

"ladies and gentlemen, please welcome reagan and haig

mr. begin and friend mrs. thatcher and paisley

mr. brezhnev and party

the ghost of mccarthy

the memories of nixon

and now adding colour a group of anonymous latin

-american meat packing glitterati"
did they expect us to treat them with any respect

they can polish their medals and sharpen their

smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for a while

boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead

safe in the permanent gaze of a cold glass eye

with their favourite toy

they'll be good girls and boys

in the fletcher memorial home for colonial

wasters of life and limb

is everyone in?

are you having a nice time?

now the final solution can be applied

General Pinochet is in there somewhere.

Margaret Thatcher @ The Fletcher Memorial Home

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Margaret Thatcher – "free" market extremist, neo-imperial authoritarian jingoist, and BFF to any number of right-wing military dictators – is dead.

I once admired her a great deal, back in the stupid haze of my youth, and, yes, I still think there are a few things to recommend her (e.g., her Euro-skepticism, even if it was overly cynical; her unabashed love of country, particularly early on in her premiership, at a time when the present was hopeless and the future looked bleak; her personal political determination as a woman struggling to succeed in what was (and in many ways remains) a male-dominated world), but for the most part I now consider her to have been, in politics at least, a vile and grotesque figure who did far more harm than good.

Oh, is it not polite to speak so ill of the dead? I suggest that you read Glenn Greenwald's piece at The Guardian on "misapplied death etiquete," which includes this:

This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts.

And of course Glenn is right that her many admirers aren't keeping quiet but are rather bombarding us with their hyper-partisan praise. So why can't we push back a bit? Thatcher was a towering political figure. She is not above criticism, including today.

This doesn't mean celebrating her death, which is certainly inappropriate -- it's one thing to celebrate the death of a tyrant, quite another to celebrate the death of a democratically elected leader who had been out of politics, and very much out of the public eye, for nearly two decades. What it means is being honest about who she was and what she did -- and that requires acknowledging the bad along with whatever good there was.

Yes, there is impassioned disagreement with respect to how much good and bad, of course, but the point is that her critics must be as vocal as her admirers.

I will leave it at that for now. Suffice it to say that I agree for the most part with Glenn's comments about her record, as well as Charlie Pierce's brief remarks at Equire.

Thatcher was a right-wing ideologue. She did things that right-wing ideologues do, or want to do. The world of 1979, particularly in Britain, was ugly in many ways, but the world she left behind when she left Number 10 in 1990, while much nicer for the oligarchs who were her main beneficiaries, was even nastier and even more brutal, in large part because of what she did while in office.

Such is her legacy.

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And here she is – where she always belonged, with her own kind, among the "overgrown infants," "incurable tyrants," and "wasters of life and limb" who bloodied the 20th century, including her pal Ronald Reagan – at "The Fletcher Memorial Home" (from Pink Floyd's very much anti-Thatcher final album with Roger Waters, The Final Cut):

Incurable tyrants and kings

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This is Roger Waters performing "The Fletcher Memorial Home" at Madison Square Garden last year. (It's the best version I could find at YouTube.) It's on the Pink Floyd album The Final Cut, and as the title of this post would suggest it's about the final days of the world's "incurable tyrants and kings," "wasters of life and limb" -- see if you can recognize the two figures who appear at 2:20. (Hints: They're American, they're often in the news, and I've written about both of them this evening in two separate posts.) I included the lyrics in a post on Pinochet -- see here.