Mrs. Thatcher as a champion of "freedom and liberty"? Jon Lee Anderson doesn't think so

In March 1999, while General Pinochet -- finally, after all those years, being called to account for some of his crimes -- was under house arrest in London, his bosom buddy the former British PM paid him a much-publicized visit.

"Britain regarded Pinochet's killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons -- that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister."

-- from Jon Lee Anderson's newyorker.com "Daily
Comment" post, "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady"

by Ken

Where would the Right be if it didn't exercise so freely its right to abuse and sabotage language. At the moment I'm thinking of the hostage-taking of the word freedom, by which right-wing liars and nitwits understand something close to the exact opposite: the compulsion to behave in strictly prescribed orthodox, but socially sanctioned, ways. At the moment large swaths of right-wing insanity and coercion are being advanced under the banner of what they call "freedom."

The point comes up rather starkly in the case of Britain's Iron Bitch, the late former prime minsiter Margaret Thatcher. As Jon Lee Anderson points out in a newyorker.com post, "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady," President Obama tramped right into this linguistic minefield:

In a tribute Monday, President Barack Obama said she had been "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty." Actually, she hadn't.

As with most right-wingers, the Iron Bitch's idea of freedom and liberty was the freedom to think exactly the way I do and the liberty to do exactly as I do.

Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted "Chilean economic miracle."

And kill he did. Pinochet's soldiers rounded up thousands at the country's national stadium and, then and there, suspects were marched into the locker rooms and corridors and bleachers and tortured and shot dead. Hundreds died in the stadium alone. One was the revered Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who was beaten, his hands and ribs broken, and then machine-gunned, his body dumped like trash on a back street of the capital -- along with many others. The killing went on even after Pinochet and his military had a firm hold on power; it was just carried out with greater secrecy, in military barracks, in police buildings, and in the countryside. Critics and opponents of the new regime were murdered in other countries, too. In 1976, Pinochet's intelligence agency planned and carried out a car bombing in Washington, D.C., that murdered Allende's exiled former Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, as well as Ronni Moffitt, his American aide. Britain regarded Pinochet's killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons -- that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.

In 1980, the year after Thatcher took office, she lifted the arms embargo against Pinochet; he was soon buying armaments from the United Kingdom. In 1982, during Britain's Falklands War against Argentina, Pinochet helped Thatcher's government with intelligence on Argentina. Thereafter, the relationship became downright cozy, so much so that the Pinochets and his family began making an annual private pilgrimage to London. During those visits, they and the Thatchers got together for meals and drams of whiskey. In 1998, when I was writing a Profile of Pinochet for The New Yorker, Pinochet's daughter Lucia described Mrs. Thatcher in reverential terms, but confided that the Prime Minister's husband, Dennis Thatcher, was something of an embarrassment, and habitually got drunk at their get-togethers. The last time I met with Pinochet himself in London, in October, 1998, he told me he was about to call "La Señora" Thatcher in the hopes she could find time to meet him for tea. A couple of weeks later, Pinochet, still in London, found himself under arrest, on the orders of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. During Pinochet's prolonged quasi-detention thereafter, in a comfortable home in the London suburb of Virginia Water, Thatcher showed her solidarity by visiting him. There, and in front of the television cameras, she expressed her sense of Britain's debt to his regime: "I know how much we owe to you" -- for "your help during the Falklands campaign." She also said, "It was you who brought democracy to Chile."

This, of course, was a misstatement of such gargantuan proportions that it cannot be dismissed as the overzealousness of a loyal friend.

You'll have noticed that Anderson's post is titled "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady." It's the Neruda connection he starts out with.

It's curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country's elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba's President Fidel Castro as Pinochet's goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende's; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.

At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of Santiago -- a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the "Internationale" and saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime's men were going around the city, burning the books of authors it didn't like, while hunting down those it could find to torture or kill.

A couple of years ago, Neruda's former driver came forth to express his suspicion that Neruda had been poisoned, saying that he'd heard from the poet that doctors gave him an injection and that, immediately afterward, Neruda's condition had worsened drastically. There are other tidbits of evidence that bolster his theory, but nothing conclusive. Forensic science, in the end, may provide the answer to a nagging historic question.

The president probably thought he was saying something safely noncontroversial when he saluted Mrs. Thatcher's freedom-and-liberty credentials. Which is the problem with these famous-person memorializings. It's considered unseemly, even rude, to tell the truth about the deceased. But that's no excuse for outright lies.

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