Margaret Thatcher: The Lady Doesn't Vanish

Margaret Thatcher was buried today in a funeral ceremony at renowned St. Paul's Cathedral in London attended by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen last attended the funeral of a non-royal in 1965 when she was present for similar rites for Winston Churchill.

Thatcher was an extraordinary political figure whose place in history is assured. That place is one of honor and accomplishment.

Her most vicious detractors do not warrant a response or serious engagement. It is apparent to all but the most invincibly ignorant or ideological that 2013 Great Britain would be impossible without her election in 1979 and subsequent governance through 1990. The unremarkable, unimpressive men who followed her in No. 10 Downing were but variations on her theme, the theme known loosely as Thatcherism. They, and each of them, suffer by comparison to her.

This is not to say she was beyond criticism: no elected leader is and Thatcher would have been among the first to say so, to welcome criticism and debate about how to keep a free people free, how to unleash their economic power for their own well-being and how to avoid suffocation by bloated, crushing government set up by mandarins pretending to know best while deliberately putting themselves out of reach of the programs they enact and foist on others.

Some ideas are right; others quite wrong. It's not just in America that the banality of compromise and meeting half way holds sway. Some ideas and the consequences of them needs must be rejected outright. Thatcher's genius was having the courage to speak the truth to the governing, corrosive, poisonous lies of her domestic political milieu.

The peoples of Eastern Europe are especially in her debt and readily, gratefully acknowledge such. The end of that monstrous, wicked, thoroughly evil enterprise known as the USSR would have been impossible without her. Of course, she is grouped with President Reagan and Pope John Paul II in this regard and rightly so. Those three helped bring freedom to more people in one general time than ever before in human history.

Thatcher stands as an enduring rebuke to all things collectivist, in personal or public life, except for the collective action of free peoples where ever they may be found in the world in support of maintaining and defending that freedom. The mute presence of her Sovereign at today's farewell is the most eloquent testimony possible to that fact.


The entire ceremony may be viewed by clicking here.

Click on the above photo to enlarge.