Paean to Individualism - Maggie Thatcher's Sad Burial Under the Viciousness of Mobocracy.

In my last post I said I was writing in the funereal dimness of the death of the last Western leader who understood Western classical liberal values, albeit, she was no libertarian, though a rare thing in spite of that, being a radical Tory set on change, rather than a conservative: Margaret Thatcher. Since that post I have been watching horrified at the pure, unadulterated celebratory vitriol being thrown at this grand individual from not just pockets of the Left, but a huge portion of it. As Liberty Scott points out on his post on this phenomenon, in the free society both he and I want, people are free to conduct themselves disgracefully like this; however, that doesn’t make it any less frightening, and the clip from the movie of Orwell’s 1984 of the mandatory two minutes of hate against enemies of the state Scott has put on his post, is way closer than is comfortable for those of us who understand the wellspring of what we are witnessing on the news and in the blogs.

Here’s a challenge. Can anyone think of similar vitriol as this from the Right, or Libertarians – because we’re different - to the death of a comparable left of centre Western leader? I can’t. This reaction, including the street parties celebrating her death in the UK and interviews with the barely literate attending, is beyond compare.

The issue in microcosm, and the essential truth that a civilised, free society must draw from this, are usefully all evidenced on New Zealand Marxist feminist blog, the Hand Mirror (yes, that blog has been mentioned here before). The Hand Mirror is a loose collection of twelve contributors. Anonymous contributor Maia on Tuesday put up their first Thatcher post, and it was a particularly hate-filled, hateful one celebrating the ‘death of the witch’: read her post ‘Dear Left, This is a Great and Glorious Day’, if you can stomach it, and ask yourself what sort of society such a woman as Maia would find us all in.

Fortunately, anonymous contributor LudditeJourno on Friday redressed this somewhat in her piece ‘On Margaret Thatcher and Empathy’; her last paragraph, even though I don’t agree with the conclusions of her reasoning on the politick and economics, is at least penned by a fellow human being whom I can respect, which Maia counts herself out from. However, it is not this I found of interest in the former’s post; these two snippets were:

[Margaret Thatcher was a …] woman who did as much as she could to dismantle society into a collection of individual men and women … [snip] … Margaret Thatcher would have revelled in the importance her individual death has been granted because it continues that placing of the individual above society, that privileging of individual agency over the importance of social structures, that she held so dear, that she championed so fiercely.

I put it to LudditeJourno that when a society loses sight of the fact it is made up of individuals relating and transacting peacefully and voluntarily under the tenets of a classical liberal laissez faire, then it quickly slides into the barbarity of the collectivist Gulags that sickened the Free World throughout the twentieth century. Societies, which Maggie rightly saw as the enemy of freedom, that have not set their sights on the rule of law protecting their smallest minority, the individual, have allowed tyrants to bully them into wiping out the individual, en masse.  Even Orwell, a socialist, understood this. Speaking of writing and the arts, he said:

... Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is nothing.

As I say, we take this notion for granted, and yet as soon as one puts it into words one realizes how literature is menaced. For this is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever. When one mentions totalitarianism one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be world-wide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralized economy that one can call Socialism or state capitalism according as one prefers. With that the economic liberty of the individual, and to a great extent his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now, till recently the implications of this were not foreseen. It was never fully realized that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any effect on intellectual liberty. Socialism was usually thought of as a sort of moralized liberalism. The state would take charge of your economic life and set you free from the fear of poverty, unemployment and so forth, but it would have no need to interfere with your private intellectual life. Art could flourish just as it had done in the liberal-capitalist age, only a little more so, because the artist would not any longer be under economic compulsions.

Now, on the existing evidence, one must admit that these ideas have been falsified.

LudditeJourno’s remarks miss an important truth that I have yet to find someone from the Left who can comprehend: libertarians, those of us who want the small state and free lives, understand we live, as the cliché goes, ‘in the village’, we relish it, as we relish arts, culture, et al. The point of difference is we understand, as Orwell did above, all of this is only possible when the village doesn’t own us, as individuals: once that happens we are slaves, subject to the seemingly depthless viciousness of the mob mind.

And if you want to know how vicious that barbarity of the collectivist based society LudditeJourno wants is, look at the vicious reaction of the Left on the death of this grand individual. Maggie understood this viciousness was precisely what individuals must be protected from, that’s why she espoused classical liberalism in much of her policy (not all of it).

There must be empathy, Ludditejourno, most certainly, but without the employ of our reason, thinking, then empathy slides directly to its opposite, the sick hatred of the Maia’s and the Borg at the street parties, which is the hatred at the heart of all collectivist, totalitarian societies. Perhaps some of the Hand Mirror contributors should start their own blog called the Rear View Mirror, because the Left have already plumbed depths that go deeper than this, and learned nothing from the bloodshed.

Margaret Thatcher is on record as stating a peaceful, free society must have the rule of law, not the rule of the mob: unfortunately despite the good she did, it was only but a break in the West’s relentless march toward statism that gathers pace year on year; that is why the society that will be burying her is the mobocracy she feared the most, as do I, with over 700 policemen having to protect her body at her funeral. A mobocracy founded on redistributive law making that allows the state to take an individual's private property which the state, properly confined, should only have been about protecting. A mobocracy wherein the state operates by force and police state means, to have become the biggest abuser of private property rights. There will be no policemen to help me when Maia and her vicious street party gang manage to get into the Fortress of Legislation; albeit the rules from the fortress are over time delivering me to her, regardless, because really, anonymous Maia’s is the ruling ethic in the surveillance states of the West now.

Privacy in NZ: This Week’s Signposts on the Road to Our Serfdom. IRD & GCSB

Writing this week in the sad, funereal dimness of the death of the last Western leader who understood Western Classical Liberal values, Margaret Thatcher, let’s take a peek at this week’s signposts of our forced shuffle down the road to our serfdom.

The term ‘road to serfdom’ was coined by a free man called Hayek who said, paraphrasing, government policy leads always to unintended deleterious consequences which allows bureaucrats and politicians to promote as solutions, more government policy, until in this way we are all lead down the road of slavery to the State. Indeed, statism has an incredible advantage over freedom, as Daniel Horowitz points out:

“We must understand that there is an imbalance of power in the political system of any democracy in that the forces of statism have an innate advantage over the defenders of freedom. It takes but one legislative or administrative victory for statism to succeed in guiding society on an indelible path towards dependency. We cannot perpetuate the free-market, but we can perpetuate statism by creating inveterate dependency constituencies. Statism enjoys the inherent advantage of self-perpetuation through its own pernicious activities that engender a continued need for the government programs.”

Returning to the current affairs of the last week, despite I’ve lost count on the privacy breaches of government departments over the last twelve months, noting that in a country with a population of just over four million the victims are in their hundreds of thousands, and yet this week the Minister of Taking, Minister Dunne, on top of the intricate web of information sharing agreements his department has with international governments - because the war on freedom is global - wants to give more powers to IRD for sharing information with police in ‘serious crimes’.

No, Mr Dunne. It always sounds reasonable of course, and is nothing given the total absence of privacy this department symbolises for all of us, but the surveillance state is already huge: stop requiring information of us, stop recording information on us, stop sharing information on us. Just. Stop. Doing.This.To.Us.PLEASE.

And then on news this week, leaked, laughably, about our state spies illegally spying on people they shouldn't be; the fix? Why of course, to make their illegal activities legal.

@johnjcampbell Hayek called it the road to serfdom. Everyone who says state must do this, state must do that, is peddling our lives down it.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) April 9, 2013

See what I mean? Remember my yellow high-lighted byline out to the right of this post, at top of page.

Update 1:

As fast as we are being shuffled down the road to our serfdom in New Zealand, the litmus test of totalitarianism being the powers granted to the revenue gatherer – remembering  the powers of IRD are obscene – in the United Police States it seems to be a sprint to the Gulag, the individual’s right to be left alone an historical fantasy:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people's emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.

Hattip Peter Schiff

Film Review: The Iron Lady (2011).

The subject of this film was, of course, not Margaret Thatcher: it was Margaret Thatcher as pastiched together for us first by the film’s writer, then the producer, director, and lastly, Meryl Streep acting the main part. The making of such a film is not something I’d be brave enough to try: the protagonist in real life is surrounded by iconography that swamps the cinematic bio-bite, plus she must be the politician of the twentieth century most susceptible to stereotype, as demonised now, as she was vilified at the time by those who didn’t understand the philosophical, political and economic importance of an individual's liberty to pursue their happiness unhindered by the state. I’ll give the film a grudging pass, but only in terms of entertainment. Outside of that, I have many misgivings.

I’ve not Googled whether the film won any major awards, but would suggest it should have made a ‘special mention’ for employing a subterfuge the Iron Lady would not have been best pleased with, and to that extent its treatment of her is subversive. The group of people who brought this to screen, from concept/novel/whatever on through to screenplay, and finally in the editing room, to parse Margaret’s own mind, in the most memorable scene - and in personal terms no greater sin could have been committed against her - based the movie on their ‘feeling’ toward, rather than what they ‘thought’ of the woman and mind that is Margaret Thatcher.

Why do I say this?

Because this film largely took the politics out of political bio-pic and replaced it with something quite other: The Iron Lady was filmed as a love story. Worse, the deceit was twofold. Not only did the film revolve around the love of the protagonist to her elusively portrayed – due to the lack of detail necessitated by film – husband, Dennis (Jim Broadbent), but it also, cowardly, tried to cut the icon and the stereotype of the Iron Lady down to her knees, by focusing on her trapped in an apartment, as well as in old age, at the start of her slide into dementia. On both counts I’m sure the woman she is would have been furious with the artistic licence taken.

So, entertaining movie, enjoyable, even; Meryl Streep near her best, tasked with an impossible feat: but I do feel the need to come to the defence – as much as she’d hate that also – of Mrs Thatcher: this was not the Iron Lady, certainly not as she would have wish to be remembered, nor for the achievement she made of her life – first and only woman prime minister of Britain, likely to be so for the foreseeable future, and in times that were extraordinary, when she outshone every world leader of the time, even Reagan. (Quick question: what are the full names of Britain’s two current coalition leaders?) Whether you agree with her politics or not, it’s a stunning, gigantic thing she did with her life, which should have been deserving of more respect than this film gave her.

Or not? As I write, ideas tumble over themselves to slowly solidify in place, but can be dislodged again. The film could be interpreted as giving the Iron Lady back what the maker’s saw as a needed humanity that has been lost in all the politicking. I remember hearing an interview with Streep in which she, who had no agreement with Thatcherism, said as much, and that acting the part had changed her view of the subject – though hating Thatcherism is Hollywood for you: I used to idolise Barbra Streisand until I heard her interviewed on her politics; by which I not so much mean what she believed in, but the unthinking way she believed in it - she could only emote her views, as badly as Jane Fonda, not explain them. Regardless, whether Margaret Thatcher would have been interested in such a reconstruction at the expense of her private life and dignity in old age is highly debatable.

Stop the press. I couldn't resist searching for an indication of Maggie's response after all. As it happens, not highly debatable: it seems she was not ‘best pleased’ with this portrayal:

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to view an early screening of Meryl Streep's portrayal of her in The Iron Lady after snubbing director Phyllida Lloyd's personal invitation.

The Hollywood actress tackles the part of the UK's first female leader in the movie, but rumours emerged last year suggesting Thatcher's grown-up children Carol and Mark were "appalled" by the film's plot.

And it seems Thatcher herself has no desire to see the film - she and her offspring rejected the chance to attend a screening of the project.

Lloyd says, "They were the first people we invited to see the finished film. They didn't take up our offer."

Parenthetically, the main interest I take from the film, otherwise, and I wonder if it’s a sign of aging in myself, is a curiosity about the man behind the woman, husband Dennis. I know little about him, I’d like to know more, plus what on earth is the personal history of their son, Mark, last seen, from my memory, facing trial for trying to organise a military coup in Equatorial Guinea. If there was going to be a more informing movie about the family, I reckon it would be about Mark: albeit from what I have read, more in the genre of Mr Bean, than the Bourne trilogy. 

This shouldn't put you off, however: worth watching.