Word: thatcherism
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Simon DeDeo's op-ed savaging Margaret Thatcher's legacy ("The Darker Side of the Iron Lady," Oct. 28) is sadly misinformed. First, in the case of the Falklands War, Thatcher was responding to an invasion of sovereign British territory, territory whose inhabitants despised the invaders. While the eventual liberation of the islands might not have made "economic sense" as DeDeo points out, there was still a moral imperative to act decisively in the face of Argentinian aggression...
Born in London in 1979, I was a Thatcher baby, and, notwithstanding John Major's brief and uninspired coda to Conservative rule, I lived in Thatcher's England for 12 years. The daughter of a greengrocer, Thatcher gave liberals on both sides of the Atlantic pause as the first working class female leader of a major Western power. She was mighty, once, of course. But less ambiguously, I would simply say that she was One Tough Lady...
...question then becomes, naturally, whether Harvard should be honoring people solely on their qualifications as Tough Ladies. Thatcher ran rampage through the political, social and economic structures of Britain throughout her rule with little notion of what she was doing. Never a master of realpolitik, and without a Kissinger, she "declared war" on the Irish Republican Army, precipitating a fresh onslaught of terrorist bombings in both Northern Ireland and England. We are still recovering from the radicalization of Irish politics--and the death toll that ensued--that she precipitated...
...second general election, halfway through her blundering inability to think seriously or act cautiously at a critical time in Britain's history, Thatcher, in an ignorance of reality so great that even her own party blushed, she proclaimed that Britain had become "a classless society." And yet she slashed education and research funding, pinching Oxford as tightly as the network of polytechnic schools that might have eased Britain's working classes into the new era. She was directly responsible for Britain's "brain drain"; at a time when the rest of the Western world was swelling with emigres from...
Should Harvard--an institution founded on the principle that one can only serve one's country after having "Enter[ed] to Grow in Wisdom"--honor Margaret Thatcher? It is said in the Bible that he who causes discord in his own house shall inherit the wind. The void of vision in Britain now, backed by legions of unimpressive Tory and Labor back-benchers unable to deal with the mess she has made, is, in the end, Thatcher's only legacy to the British people...