Meryl Streep Film of "The Iron Lady" Just Another Leftist Rewrite of History

The new Meryl Streep film "The Iron Lady" is about the life and career of Margaret Thatcher, a popular conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, a friend and colleague of President Ronald Reagan.  The film, according to Norman Tebbit of the UK Telegraph, is another study in leftist propaganda and character assassination.  Once again, Hollywood rewrites the past to achieve political goals in the present.

A few posts back, I wrote about "He Who Controls the Past, Controls the Future."  It's a quote from George Orwell's famous novel "1984," in which a totalitarian state controls every thought and deed of its oppressed citizens.  In that novel, the state is continually rewriting history to justify its policies in the here and now.  Our state, the Federal government, doesn't do that, but they do have a propaganda agency that does it for them:  Hollywood.   One of the propaganda agency's chief pursuits is to create false but highly insulting impressions of conservatives and patriots who served their countries well, portraying them as ignorant, bigoted, paranoid, hysterical, small-minded and slightly mad.  Certainly, the younger generation who never knew these people can take Hollywood's word for it and vote "progressive," thus avoiding such leaders in the future.  And that, of course, is the goal.

Tebbit says this that the film is not of the lady he served as a cabinet minister, but a false film of an old lady suffering dementia.  The film's theme of "the housewife who would have been in a tizzy if the potatoes had boiled dry, suddenly put in charge of the country, was pursued through a series of false flashback accounts of her time as Prime Minister."  The film has a "slapdash indifference to historical accuracy" and also portrays Thatcher's husband in a false and insulting manner.

Thatcher is shown as "hysterical" in a segment where terrorists murder Airey Neave:

Then there is the blatant untruth of showing Margaret Thatcher dashing to the wreckage of Airey's car when he was murdered by Irish republican terrorists. She was not at Westminster at that time, but it suited the filmmakers to build a picture of a somewhat hysterical woman.

Tebbit sums it all up quite well:

Of those I have to say that had she behaved in real life as the film suggests I would not have supported her as I did in her election as leader of the Conservative Party, Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister over a span of 15 years. Indeed, she would not have lasted 10 months as Prime Minister, let alone 10 years. Nor indeed would she have carried more votes at her third election victory after eight year as Prime Minister than at her first. By comparison Blair carried four million fewer.

And then there's this:

It would be wearisome to pick over the bones of this film at length. It will influence the way in which many who never knew her will see Margaret Thatcher [and that's the goal]. Perhaps, however, not in the way the makers intended. Many young people who do not remember her time as Prime Minister tell me that they were profoundly impressed by the power and vigour of the Thatcher of the film. What is more, it is not good news for the feminists that the first woman to lead a Western democracy should have been depicted as precisely the sort of nagging hectoring emotional creature that misogynists declare that women in charge are bound to be.

Read the whole thing here.