I cannot even watch that freaking movie without entering a mild state of panic. That movie, the idea of celebrating that movie, takes me back to my childhood and war time exercises during the Malvinas war (I know most people reading this call the islands “Falklands”). The whole “theme” of the movie takes me back to a very dark time, growing up in a dictatorship, seeing my father burn his library because the military could just take you away for owning books. And they would come and check, bearing assault weapons and intimidate anyone and everyone, etc. THAT was my childhood.
And then, this CIA backed brutal dictators entered a war with the British and they would instill so much fear and propaganda on to us, and I was attending an English school, which means we couldn’t even have our text books in the open because the propaganda legitimized any hostility over school children carrying books in the English language. The funny part? I wasn’t attending this school because I have some English heritage (which I obviously don’t) but because my parents thought raising me bilingual might come in handy one day. And they worked very hard to make that possible. But then again, attacks on school children were sort of “expected” because WAR.
And the war itself was the most illogical, nonsensical, doomed enterprise the country could have undertaken. But we didn’t have a say in it! Again, brutal dictatorship supported by the CIA and the US and by a whole lot of international backing (just like all the dictatorships across Latin America at the time). So now, I see the “Iron Lady” celebrated as some sort of “inspirational” bullshit and I hyperventilate. What exactly is celebrated here? She commanded her army to bomb a military boat that was outside the war zone. Hundreds of young men died. These men had not enrolled for the military, they were forced to be there (dictatorship, remember?). Recently, the British PR machine released “new evidence” to exculpate her from this war crime, surprisingly, coincidentally, with the release of this movie that “celebrates” her life.
I was very young at the time, but I learned the meaning of losing people I knew in a senseless war against an imperial power defending colonial interests. I don’t want any celebration of the woman who made that “lesson” possible. I could have done without it.
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