Margaret Thatcher and the Cold War and the Real Story to Possibly be Revealed in a Post Humous Biography

Steve Bell on the death of Margaret Thatcher.  She says (presumably popping up in Hell to fix things up), "Why is this pit still open??"  Source

Margaret Thatcher has died.

I'm not one of those that are jumping up to extol her virtues now that she's passed on, as I'm pretty much suspicious of the almost deification that she has undergone in recent times.

A movie was made about her, The Iron Lady, where she was played by Meryl Streep. Haven't seen it, not planning to, despite my mother-in-law telling me how wonderful it was.  Though, Bruce Ramsey, someone who presumably buys into Margaret Thatcher's importance to the world, was dissatisfied with the film.  Ramsey says:

The audience needed to know why this woman mattered. Because she did matter.

A movie was also made about Alfred Kinsey as well, and he was a complete and utter bastard as well as having laid the ground work for the sexual revolution, but the movie basically glorifies him, proof that movies are used as propaganda.  Maybe that's why Ramsey was unhappy with Thatcher film, the propaganda aspect wasn't quite right.

I do know that not everything that is published in the media can be trusted, and therefore a story that appeared in 2009 on Margaret Thatcher supporting the continuation of the Berlin War and the hegemony of the Soviet Union has to be treated with caution.  However, I have seen no refutation or explanation of the following story on what was said in a meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow in 1989:

Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it.

In an extraordinary frank meeting with Mr Gorbachev in Moscow in 1989 — never before fully reported — Mrs Thatcher said the destabilisation of Eastern Europe and the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact were also not in the West’s interests. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. Nor would it do anything to risk the security of the Soviet Union.

Even 20 years later, her remarks are likely to cause uproar. They are all the more explosive as she admitted that what she said was quite different from the West’s public pronouncements and official Nato communiqués. She told Mr Gorbachev that he should pay no attention to these.

“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”

However, in previous year, Margaret Thatcher did did state publicly during one of her trips to Rome, when she visited visited John Paul II’s tomb to pay her respects, that it was thanks to John Paul that Soviet communism was brought down.

I suppose we'll just have to wait until her posthumous biography is published to know the full story on what she was thinking when she talked to Gorbachev in 1989.

In the meantime, out of charity, I will pray for her soul.

Related link: Margaret Thatcher dies: live reaction and updates ~ The Guardian