by SELVAM CANAGARATNA
“Mother: O my son . . . an evil and pernicious death. / Rebel: Mother, a verdant and sumptuous death. / Mother: From too much hate. / Rebel: From too much love.”
– Aimé Césaire, French poet and politician (1913-2008)
“Two deaths with diametrically opposite meanings, evident from the immediate responses they provoked,” wrote George Ciccariello-Maher after the death of Margaret Thatcher, having first quoted Aimé Césaire’s poem. “One was greeted by millions of mourners packing the streets of Caracas, waiting for days to catch a glimpse of their departed leader. The other prompted spontaneous street parties in Brixton and Glasgow and a barrage of comical send-ups about Thatcher’s impending privatization of hell! But while revelers gathered spontaneously to celebrate the physical death of the Iron Lady of neoliberalism, voters in Venezuela head to the polls to drive nails into her coffin and bury her legacy by electing a revolutionary successor to Hugo Chávez.”
George Ciccariello-Maher, author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, also teaches political theory at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Added Ciccariello-Maher: “Frantz Fanon once argued, somewhat notoriously, that ‘For the colonized, life can only spring from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.’ To celebrate an enemy’s death by necessity carries within it, however negatively, a positive political program, and those who took to the streets to spontaneously celebrate Thatcher’s demise were invariably firing shots at neoliberalism itself.
“But unfortunately for those gathered in Brixton, neoliberalism and its ideological partner, austerity, are today on the offensive in Britain and much of the global core. In no way does Thatcher’s death mark the destruction or even decline of her ideological legacy, and in this sense the celebrations are as cathartic as they are premature. It is across the globe that the greatest strides have been made to destroy Thatcher’s legacy in the intransigent insistence that there is, in fact, an alternative to neoliberalism.”
US President Barack Obama, on the other hand, described Thatcher as “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” [Evidence enough that words have lost their meaning. Or that Barack has lost his marbles. Or both.]
Tariq Ali, political commentator and Editor of the New Left Review, appearing on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! TV programme to discuss Thatcher’s legacy, described it as having “effectively wrecked Britain economically and to have made it a total vassal state of the American empire.”
Ali noted that Thatcher’s legacy “is still very much in force, so she’s not at all dead in terms of what’s going on . . . We’ve had a continuum, that the process Margaret Thatcher started off was carried on by Blair, who used rhetoric on the Iraq, Kosovo and Afghan wars very similar to the rhetoric she used on the Falklands. And this policy has continued.”
“You can ask if Thatcher was a feminist, but it’s a bit like asking if the lioness who ate your leg off is a feminist,” wrote Sarah Ditum in Britain’s New Statesman. “There’s a critical difference between a woman who exercises individual power, and a person who believes that the unequal distribution of power between men and women at large needs to be redressed: Thatcher was definitively the former and not the latter.”
Her public image was defined by sex — both her gender and her sexuality, Ditum claimed. “Margaret Thatcher was sexy, and she knew it and used it to gain and maintain power. Mannish, mad-eyed Thatcher bullying her cabinet was a glorious caricature, but it overlooked how much she used flirting as means of control. In Jon Snow’s retrospective Maggie and Me, over and over her former colleagues recall her ability to disarm them by coming slightly too close — and how ill-equipped they were to deal with it, when their only experience of commanding women up till then had been the matron at their public school.
“Is it demeaning to mark a female politician’s death with speculation about which leaders of the free world she probably fancied?” asked Sarah, and answered: “Certainly. But in Thatcher’s case, I don’t think we can understand her without understanding how much sex contributed to what she was.”
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