MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Meryl (Lady Thatcher) unveils “The Iron Lady” poster before Parliament
US actress Meryl Streep gave a sneak peek Monday at what she will look like as.” The award-winning star unveiled the official poster for the upcoming film in London before Parliament House. Read full article
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Disclaimer & comment rulesI look forward to seeing this film. She was a great lady who deserves the respect of all British people.
Nov 14th, 2011 - 07:10 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Was..........?
Nov 14th, 2011 - 07:30 pm - Link - Report abuse 0What a Turnip!
I loook forward also to seeing that film, meryl streep is a great actress, and she deserves all my respect, and the respect of everyone, on the other hand, i respect those people who admire thatcher, she must have done some thing right for the u. k. because she governed for 11 years that country, but she doesn't have my respect, for me she is as despisable as galtieri.
Nov 14th, 2011 - 09:31 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Thatcher tore up the rule book. Out went the old boys networks and proping up loss making industries. Due to Thatcher, the ordinary man had opportunities that were previously not available to them. Home ownership, grants enabling academically able children from poor backgrounds to be independently educated, the ability for anyone to purchase equity.
Nov 14th, 2011 - 11:55 pm - Link - Report abuse 0She took on and beat the socialists that wanted to hold everyone back who had ambition. How dare I make individual choices about my own life!
A great visionary.
I've seen the trailer on youtube. Seems to base on that Hollywood, American cliché of the naive outsider who rises to his new situation and thrives to the surprise of more experienced of colleagues. Like that 'Legally Blonde' movie.
Nov 15th, 2011 - 02:18 am - Link - Report abuse 0What l like about her is that she's got guts & wouldn't take any rubbish from two-bit dictators.
Nov 15th, 2011 - 09:57 am - Link - Report abuse 0She'd just invite them to her tea parties.
Nov 15th, 2011 - 10:01 am - Link - Report abuse 0Iron Wall.... Iron Curtain....Berlin Wall.
Nov 15th, 2011 - 01:28 pm - Link - Report abuse 0WTF, Maggie was a superb PM.
Pity the “vegetables” stabbed her in the back.
Greatest British leader since Boudicca.
She'd just invite them to her tea parties
Nov 15th, 2011 - 01:33 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Stone glass houses
Brazil was the first country to deliver diplomatic recognition to the Pinochet-led junta -- the United States had agreed with Pinochet that, for practical purposes, it should not be the first to do so, though it welcomed the military regime.
A few days later, Brazil gave Pinochet an emergency $100 million loan. The Nixon administration's ``invisible blockade'' against Allende also ended, and American economic and military aid, under preferential terms, began to flow generously to the Pinochet regime.
Don't be silly, sticky. Brazil itself was under a dictatorship at the time. What sense would it make if the country's leaders ostracized other dictatorships?
Nov 15th, 2011 - 06:22 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Quite a lot of the world was under a dictatorship at that time, Forgetit.
Nov 15th, 2011 - 09:36 pm - Link - Report abuse 0I guess we should have had no contact with the world at all, Right?
No, but if we are to have contact with the world, including with dictators who are supposed to be friendly, then let us not brag about how harsh we can be to dictators who are our enemies.
Nov 16th, 2011 - 12:01 am - Link - Report abuse 0Forgetit87 on the defensive again. Geoff! where are you?
Nov 16th, 2011 - 09:50 am - Link - Report abuse 0Brazil taught torture to Pinochet's police
Nov 16th, 2011 - 09:59 am - Link - Report abuse 0By Jeremy Smith, Reuters, 14 May 2000
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 (Reuters)—Brazil's former military rulers taught interrogation and torture techniques to Chile's feared secret police after a bloody 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power, a Brazilian newspaper said on Sunday.
The O Globo daily—one of Brazil's leading newspapers—said it had obtained U.S. Central Intelligence Agency documents showing Pinochet modelled his DINA secret police on Brazil's then equivalent, the National Information Service (SNI).
From December 1973, Globo said, Brazilian officers held classes for their
brag about how harsh we can be to dictators who are our enemies.
Or provide training
Chilean counterparts in interrogation, communications interception and torture techniques, in three specialised camps in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Manaus.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/159.html
Isolde : “Forgetit87 on the defensive again. Geoff! where are you?”
Nov 16th, 2011 - 07:52 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Just getting a measure of the range of comment.
Beef @ #4 has the conventional wisdom, but fails to temper it with the social hurt that came with it. I tend to agree with him - as you would expect.
I hope the film tries to be 'British' and not Hollywood; it would be a great disservice to both if it Americanised British history - as so often happens in Hollywood WWII movies, where historical facts are overturned to make things palatable to the US box-office.
Just watched the DVD of the US mini-series Angels in America, where Al Pacino wiped the floor with Streep - and Emma Thompson.
Streep, on a good day - and most days are good for this great, great actress - can bring passion to a part; on a bad day she 'under-acts'.
Thatcher-by-Streep could go either way.
@13 lsolde
Nov 17th, 2011 - 10:05 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Where do you see defensiveness, woman? My counter-argument is still there: a dictatorship has no reasons to ostracize another on the basis of the latter's authoritarianism. As such it makes all the sense that Brazil, specially during the military regime, would maintain and cultivate relations with neighboring military dictatorships. For the UK, the situation is different as Thatcher wasn't a dictator. She wasn't, though she was a friend of Pinochet, and stood up for him even after the emergence of credible reports of political torture and murder under his rule (she was more outspoken than any former member of South America's military regimes). The same applies to you, @sticky. Your little links don't refute anything, though, as expected, you're too dumb to see that. Brazil has no reason to be ashamed of its contacts either before, during or after the military regime, as we've always come clean as to our interests; we've always sought to have relations with whomever is of interest: dictatorships, democracies, 1st, 2nd or 3rd World. The UK, by contrast, is a wannabe promoter of “human rights”; as such it has much more explaining to do when it supports the likes of Pinochet or invades and kills Iraqis under false excuses.
Whatever you say, Forgetit87.
Nov 18th, 2011 - 05:56 am - Link - Report abuse 0lf it makes you feel better.
Always thin in the arguments. Women...
Nov 18th, 2011 - 07:03 pm - Link - Report abuse 0But you are thin in the head, no?
Nov 19th, 2011 - 10:29 am - Link - Report abuse 0At least I don't ask people to come argue for me when I am out of arguments, as you did before (#13). Asking the male to save the day... Women....
Nov 20th, 2011 - 03:36 am - Link - Report abuse 0Without a woman, forgetit, you wouldn't have been born.
Nov 20th, 2011 - 10:47 am - Link - Report abuse 0Anyway, we are supposed to be ignoring each other.!♥
“we've always sought to have relations with whomever is of interest: dictatorships, democracies”
Nov 20th, 2011 - 12:27 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Yet you'd critizise us for doing the same?
The nationalists put on the patriot record in 1982 and it is still stuck on play, while they pine for a lost war and military junta soaked in Argentine blood, they make excuses and say they had to kill the terrorists. For terrorists, read right wing government provocateurs about 100 dead to the tens of thousands murdered by their government, tortured, raped, kicked out of the back of aircraft over the sea. Operation Condor, the CIA's programme of political genocide in Latin America is now well documented but to our nationalists it is to be over looked, it doesn't exist, they can read the official documents but not see them. Show them the documents and they will see nothing. If it goes against their image of the heroic Argentine and the brave military struggle against the Amerindians, the political left and everyone else it isn't true. All across the internet, wikipedia, etc they edit anything critical of Argentina, the Conquest of the Desert read 1,500 Indians killed for attacking government troops and civilians, rather than the millions killed for no reason other than they were not European and not part of the system, everything is edited, changed, the truth becomes a lie. The Argentine right wing are a mind controller's dream come true!
Nov 20th, 2011 - 07:21 pm - Link - Report abuse 0#21
Nov 21st, 2011 - 12:59 am - Link - Report abuse 0normally I'm not that much of a jerk towards women. But why should I let you monopolize the condescendence department? You're right about we being better off by ignoring each other, though.
@zethe
It's like those US ultra-nationalists who brag about their country being the leader of the free world, or the major patron of democracy abroad, at the same time they ignore coups d'état sponsored or tacitly approved by the US, or yet its close alliances with ultra-authoritariam regimes (Saudi Arabia, for instance). If they want to conduct close relations with the countries they see fit, including those under authoritarian regimes - so be it. But if that is the case, they should cease bragging about hating dictatorships or being the leaders of the free world. The same goes to every other country. You cannot be self-interested, you can't pursue what is best for YOUR country, and brag about how moral you are at the same time. This is hypocritical. If Thatcher thought her friendship with Pinochet advanced Britain's interests - and it doesm seem relations paid off - then there's nothing very wrong, or at least very unusual, about their closeness. But her admirers shouldn't brag about her being tough towards dictators, because that she was not.
“But her admirers shouldn't brag about her being tough towards dictators, because that she was not.” #24
Nov 21st, 2011 - 12:46 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Oh yes she was.
Her chief enemy was not Galtieri (that was a side-show), it was 'the enemy within'; the ultra-left, revolutionary leaders/manipulators of the 'workers' who manipulated democracy when in power, and undermined democracy when not.
More conservative than the Conservatives when it came to modifying their demands in the face of a country unable to win sufficient income to meet their ever-increasing demands, the Government had to eventually fight the dictatorship of the union bosses.
Prime Minister Thatcher did not fight to reach a compromise,
she used the power of the state to fight to destroy.
This is the way 'the British' do things if backed into a corner;
a fundimental problem needs fundimental treatment,
and leaders like Thatcher and Churchill never flinched from fighting to destroy to the point of surrender by the enemy.
“ . . . We shall go on to the end,
we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender . . . ”
Geoff often outdoes himself in sophistry. Since Thatcher was such a hater of authoritarianism, she shouldn't then be a friend of Pinochet, and surely her instance towards the South African apartheid regime should have been tougher. But she didn't hate authoritarianism - not when it expressed itself in the form of traditionalist, West-aligned regimes. The dictators she confronted - Galtieri, for instance - were her enemies because of isolated circumstaces - Argentina's interest in the FI, for instance - not because of their authoritarianism. If one can say she was tough on dictators because of Galtieri, then I too can say she was in bed with one because of Pinochet.
Nov 21st, 2011 - 06:37 pm - Link - Report abuse 0. . . . and Churchill got in bed with Stalin, the steel dictator,
Nov 21st, 2011 - 10:17 pm - Link - Report abuse 0but as we saw from his memoirs and his tomes on world history, he didn't exactly enjoy the prospect or the actuality, hence Yalta.
Your partners in the ebb and flow of world affairs are often not a matter of choice but of circumstance.
Thatcher's Yalta-legacy meant that her contemporary USSR cold-war enemy operated like a dictatorship, and yet she never shrank from her Allied duties to face-up to this vast hegemonic dictatorship, at the same time as addressing the enemy within.
All in all, it's a messy world where the condition of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' is a naively simplistic explanation of the expediencies of allegencies.
Oh very well said, Geoff.
Nov 22nd, 2011 - 10:03 am - Link - Report abuse 0Commenting for this story is now closed.
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