When a prominent public figure bites the bullet, the corporate media is not in the business of providing truthful reflections of their life – especially with controversial characters who had a polarizing effect on the political landscape.
As soon as they’ve gone from the chessboard, all true memory of their presence is promptly expunged from the record, and replaced instead with a distinctly sanitized version of their exploits and persona. Fact becomes fiction with alarming haste.
A number of divisive individuals spring to mind: Vaclev Havel, Che Guevara, Princess Diana, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Lenin, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Hugo Chavez, Osama Bin Laden, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi. Some were exalted in the public arena, others vilified. I was going to add Henry Kissinger to that list, but then I remembered that that son of a gun is still alive. Regardless, whatever sort of person they were, and whatever their level of renown or infamy, upon their death, the official news agencies simply serve up genetically modified info-nuggets and specious platitudes to anyone who will swallow them. Feigned news is more than adequate for citizens who show no real appetite for truth.
Example. Upon the death of Reagan in 2004, there was an immediate comprehensive white-washing of his hazardous mediocrity and a startling repudiation of the vile materialism that he helped to install into global social consciousness. The reaction? No-one cared. No-one cared enough to insist that he was, at best, nothing special. Though the man was extravagantly elevated above his actual deeds, this has not stopped him from becoming an icon for millions of influential Conservatives around the planet. Even when the press do occasionally direct some spicy verbiage towards major league figures (for or against), it is invariably penned by either disgruntled lefties, swaggering right-wingers, or intellectual hermits, and therefore lacks essential veracity. Why? Because institutionally centered ruminations are too far removed from the real world, having long since forsaken an authentic path. Unreality-saturated souls that refuse to acknowledge the truth within themselves cannot perceive the truth outside themselves.
So when Margaret Thatcher died on April 8th 2013, a familiar question was once again put to both the corporate media and real people: is it wrong to openly criticize a dead politician who was so transparently awful in public office? Whilst the corporate media answered yes (including the increasingly ghostlike BBC), many millions of Britons said no, it is not wrong.
Those who recognized how Thatcher mutilated Britain during her premiership from 1979-1990, helped the song “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” to climb the UK music charts. In fact, the 1939 Judy Garland track hit number one spot in the iTunes download chart shortly after her death was announced. Is this distasteful? Of course it is, like lots of other stunningly relevant political satire from the likes of Mark Twain, Bill Hicks, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll, George Carlin, Frank Zappa, William Burroughs, Douglas Adams, Jonathan Swift etc. But as for the original question, is it wrong to admonish the dead – no, of course it isn’t.
Everyone with a beating heart understands that there is a human element to the death of Margaret Thatcher, the woman. Yes. We appreciate that real people who loved her will feel her loss. She was a human being on a sacred journey, just like everyone else. Yet there is a further element that we need to look at here, one that is of the utmost importance if we are to continue self-determining our own unfoldment as human beings: anyone who ever chooses to accept the privileged role of high public office automatically invites an open and on-going evaluation of their activities. Whether senior cabinet ministers or junior politicians, it’s the same dynamic. They are all accountable to us. No exceptions. Under UK law, the prime minister must ultimately answer to the electorate. The British people are the boss. She works for them. People forget that.
Let us acknowledge what is really occurring here. It is time to speak the truth. What we are witnessing is real-time editing of consensus reality, a rewriting of history, a substitution of organic human chronicles with artificial machine narratives. This gross misrepresentation is most conspicuous in the immediate time-frame of a famous political death – like now. We are wise to observe it in the moment, learn from it, and grow beyond it. To transcend a thing, we must first deconstruct it. To deconstruct a thing, we must understand how it works.
The corporate media employs two main tactics to divert inquiring consciousness away from meaningful analysis of prominent dead leaders. These cons are used over and over again, and ordinarily provide sufficient camouflage for the faking of history.
Firstly, they bombard the airwaves with rubbish faux analysis, which, to the uninitiated, looks a bit like discussion. People in suits, sat at desks, speaking in somber tones, interspersed with archival video footage. Hours and hours of it. Melodramatic language incessantly scrolling across the screen. But this is not real human thinking. It is insubstantial and wholly disingenuous – exemplified in the churn that CNN, Fox, BBC, and MSNBC excrete into the media-latrine on a nightly basis. Behind the obfuscation, there is next to no coverage of real life events.
And secondly, we come to one of the shrewdest and most persuasive tools in the “nothing to see here” arsenal: the mirage of morality. Within the fabricated unreality of corporate media reportage, you can be certain that whenever the death card shows up, the morality card is sure to follow. When the screen requests that you show some decorum and moral judgment at such sensitive times, what they are really saying is shut the hell up. Showing respect means being quiet. As many numbskulls still parrot to this day, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Translation: what you are saying upsets me. The hammer of morality is brought down to silence any potential questioning of authority.
The system always petitions its citizenry to behave with high moral fortitude when they want people to stop thinking. So let us pause when a famous dead person takes some flak (justified or not) and the media calls for respect. Think. If a well-meaning person says things like, “Let’s respect the dead and allow the family to grieve in peace,” we have to understand that there are many different ways of respecting the dead, and the family will be able to grieve in peace whether we stay quiet or not. So, whilst not speaking ill of the dead is an understandable response, it is no less short-sighted, reflexive, and dangerous – especially if it is ever prescribed as the only proper response. We have to do better than that. The universe requires us to own up to our complicity in the manifestation of the demons of the world. To see “what is” (not what we would like to see) is part of that acknowledgement.
Margaret Thatcher was not great. She steered the purposeful destruction of Britain’s ability to support itself. She achieved this by implementing some of the most ruinous policies that Britain has seen in modern history. Whether she was fully conscious of what she was doing is another matter. It’s hard to know where to begin, such is the epic scale of her demolition. In short, I would summarize her corrosive résumé as follows: (1) Dismantling national manufacturing – removing Britain’s ability to make its own stuff. (2) Eliminating local democratic powers and moving them to centralized Whitehall control. (3) Overt corrupt privatization of basic human services (water, electricity, gas) – generating profit (lack) by commercializing naturally abundant resources. (4) Regressive taxation to widen social and financial disparity – leveraging credit and currency flow in the short term at the expense of low-middle income tax payers in the long term. (5) Diminishment of the education system through demoralizing the teaching profession. (6) Deeply ignorant social policies that saw British communities torn apart, inciting massive rioting and skyrocketing crime – the worst in any Western nation. (7) Key role in exacerbating and exploiting numerous grievous conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Gulf War, the Iraq war, and apartheid in South Africa. (8) The focused encouragement for all British citizens to value greed and see their neighbors as competitors.
Of all things, it was this last one that struck hardest in England. It dramatically increased the economic and cultural divide between the North and the South, and penalized tens of millions of working class people. As the British ska band The Specials wrote in their 1981 song Ghost Town, “This town, is coming like a ghost town, Why must the youth fight against themselves? Government leaving the youth on the shelf, This place, is coming like a ghost town, No job to be found in this country, Can’t go on no more, The people getting angry.” This is a real portrait of a real situation by real people.
The dire ramifications of Thatcher’s policies turned mainstream British society (and I emphasize the word mainstream) into a defeated swamp of disenchantment; a process which continues to this day. Without a written constitution, this sort of thing is permissible. It’s part of the imperial shroud that the old European hierarchy love to draw over the unthinking masses. Watch out America. Defend your constitution. It may just keep this hideousness at bay long enough to transfer power away from those politicians who have taken the path of ignobleness.
Thatcher succeeded in instituting another layer of consciousness suppression. The plot thickened and the unreality game got more intense. Along with Reagan, she turned half the planet away from inner truth and instead onto the hollow delusion of external things. People were coerced into valuing only what they had, not what they did or who they were. In the face of this metaphysical oblivion, some perished, some rose up, and some began to contemplate the very foundations of their reality. This is where the real answers lie. On a practical level, as with so many “world leaders”, Thatcher was nothing more than a channel for transporting the injurious doctrines of globalism into the hearts and minds of unwitting men and women in the late 20th century. Any flashes of intellect were really not hers at all. She was more akin to an astute actress, serving as the loyal narrator of someone else’s story. Just like Obama and Biden. No greatness involved.
For me, honesty and integrity are key components of honorable conduct. When the evidence of someone’s deeds demonstrates a clear absence of these qualities, I rationally consider such a person to be in dishonor. Sometimes this can be due to a mental instability, in which case, one can make certain allowances. Where this is not the case however, dishonorable conduct must be acknowledged as a sign of basic immaturity. For a genuine soul serving in public office, this means instant disqualification.
It is only when we begin the journey of perceiving the deeper mechanics of this reality, that all of this grotesqueness starts to make sense. The weight lessens. We can deduce, from another perspective, that Thatcher’s determination, ambition, and hardheartedness, are the perfect blend for any dependable conduit of dark forces. A dysfunctional heart in particular, is crucial for absolute compliance. In the past few days I have read some disturbing allegations concerning her father, which may explain part of her emotional shutdown. However, this does not excuse a reign of chaos affecting millions. There comes a time when we must all take account of our inner landscape and marshal our powers of authentic conduct, healing, and spirit. Those who feel utterly incapable of this will often fall into a terrible inversion. The opposites present themselves: duplicity, pain, and emptiness. This is Thatcher.
Yet, if we zoom out still another level, we can see that this particular soul vehicle was apparently serving as the negative attractor on the destructive side of the gameboard. Another gearshift in the ridiculousness of world pain (weltschmerz) to compel humans to sit up and take ownership of their own divinity and reality. Thatcher effectively thrust the question of human spiritual disavowal right in front of our noses. She was playing the bad guy, or should I say, the evil queen. In this respect, the spiritual emanation that was manifesting as Margaret Hilda Thatcher did an outstanding job. Mission accomplished. Thank you Maggie. Let us not allow her prodigious polarization to go to waste by not fully reflecting on her presence in the world and what it means, both personally and collectively. As an old teacher of mine used to say, “question, think, grow, speak.”