By Rajan Laad
Recently, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum sparked controversy over an exhibit that places former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the same light as Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden
This display is part of an exhibition called Laughing Matters: The State of the Empire, which looks at the role of humor relating to ‘identity, empire, and power over the last two hundred years.’
The exhibit attempted to depict how villains in the Punch and Judy caricatures have evolved over the last century. Punch and Judy is a British puppet show about a couple whose name features in the title.
The caption read: “Over the years, the evil character in this seaside puppet show has shifted from the Devil to unpopular public figures including Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, and Osama bin Laden, to offer contemporary villains.”
To bracket Britain’s first female prime minister with mass murderers is staggeringly offensive and shockingly unfair. To call her “unpopular” is inaccurate and ahistorical, (not a good thing to see from a museum), given that she was re-elected by the British public in two landslides in 1983 and 1987. The Time magazine headline on June 20, 1983 read: “Maggie by a Mile.“
It has to be remembered that any items to be displayed at an exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum have to go through a series of approvals as part of the national British museum system. Yet no one at any stage of these approvals seem to have objected to this vile affront.
This isn’t the first time the Victoria and Albert Museum authorities have behaved like this
The museum (dedicated to applied arts, decorative arts, and design, with the most comprehensive costume collection in the U.K.) allegedly refused to exhibit items from the wardrobe of the first female British prime minister in 2015.
A spokesman for the Museum told the Daily Telegraph that they “politely declined the offer of Mrs Thatcher’s clothes, feeling that these records of Britain’s political history were best suited to another collection which would focus on their intrinsic social historical value.”
The Museum has been severely condemned for its display. But the organizers of the Punch and Judy puppet show that have included Thactcher as a villain have somehow been overlooked.
Margaret Thatcher served as Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold the position.
She was branded “the Iron Lady” for being a fearless leader who never capitulated under pressure or was swayed by public opinion.
Thatcher was a staunch advocate of free-market capitalism and a strident critic of socialism. She implemented sweeping reforms concerning the affairs of the economy. She privatized most of the state-owned industries. She stood up to the unreasonable demands of labor unions. She cut taxes and controlled public expenditures. She introduced stricter immigration controls. She displayed exemplary courage during the Falklands War (March-June 1982) caused by the Argentine invasion of the islands.
She is a conservative icon and a fiery orator.
Here she is at her very best, launching a scathing attack on socialism.
So what do we make of this?
This once again proves how the left has managed to hijack every aspect of public life. They infiltrated education, the entertainment fields, the news media, the arts, culture, science etc.
They knew that once education and culture were taken over, the rest automatically falls in place.
This didn’t happen overnight. This is a result of years of working from within the shadows. They gradually moved the Overton window of what was acceptable and what was not. At this time conservatives were either minding their own business or busy supporting themselves and their families.
The result is an unmitigated catastrophe.
They used education to brainwash young minds, knowing that some of these would end up in positions of power.
They used the arts to propagandize and push their agenda. The object of ridicule and hate is always the conservative. One who values traditions is depicted as narrow-minded, bigoted, and ugly. The liberal is presented as one that possesses all the virtues in the world. No prizes for guessing where impressionable minds gravitate.
Today fringe ideas by the left such as critical race theory and man-made climate change have been mainstreamed and accepted as axiomatic facts.
The left has developed their ecosystem which controls most organizations. They have created a climate of fear such that one dares to challenge the groupthink out of fear of being ‘canceled.’
We often hear well-wishers tell conservatives ‘Just remain quiet, do your job, and take care of your family, there is no need to engage in gratuitous controversy.’
The museum receives most of its income, not from some shady far-left foundation but from taxpayers’ funds, according to figures from 2022-2023. Yet Margaret Thatcher is dubbed as a ‘villain’ and placed alongside Hitler and bin Laden in a London Museum. Those with little knowledge about the former British PM will probably accept it as fact and move on.
The remedy for all these grave and scandalous wrongs will take a great deal of focus, time, effort, and patience.