Gareth Morgan becomes propaganda tool for the child torturing fiefdom of the Kim family: UPDATED 2

When Gareth Morgan's group got permission to enter the DPRK by motorcycle I was surprised, but then it is being accompanied every step of the way in the country.  I was also surprised when he got permission from both the DPRK and ROK sides to cross the DMZ.  I think the DPRK is also surprised by this, as it has several times used crossing as a propaganda trick, knowing the other side would arrest and detain anyone undertaking it (those who do it are typically DPRK sympathisers after all).  

So now he is in the country, and not surprisingly the New Zealand media is reporting none of it, even though North Korean media actually is.  Unless some celebrity is involved, or it involves a sports team or a disaster, then it isn't of interest.  Of course he'll get coverage when he returns, but it will be of the "wow amazing wasn't that cool" type of questioning.

You see Morgan's group is now being used for propaganda and this slave state will milk the propaganda value of peace loving sympathetic Westerners coming to learn about their country's "history" and how they struggle against the yoke of foreign aggression (when all of the aggression comes from the mafia family that runs the place).  

Gareth Morgan is now a tool of a slave state.  I doubt he'll ask about children being kept in gulags.  

The state/party daily newspaper has a photo of him on its visit here and here.  It reports on Morgan's group learning about the country.

His visit has included paying reverence to the murderous war-mongering Kim Il Sung, who set up the abominable personality cult led slave state that it is today, started the Korean War, and has manufacturer such a complicated web of lies about the place that it is difficult to know where to start.

For a start Kim Jong Il wasn't born on Mt Paektu, he was born in Russia in Khabarovsk.

Kim Il Sung did not lead a gang of guerrilla fighters based at Mt Paektu to led the Korean people to victory against the Japanese, he did led a small group based in Manchuria that tactically fled to the Soviet Union, where he was when Kim Jong Il was born.  Kim Il Sung was a Soviet selected stooge put in place to follow Stalin's order and occupy the land.  He successfully took all he learnt in the USSR and then some, started the Korean War and ended it building a cross between Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.

So if you want to follow Gareth Morgan, read the Rodong Simnum and the Korean Central News Agency, or listen to Voice of Korea's English broadcasts online, which are reporting on these adventures (all pretty much similar).

Meanwhile Porirua based Anglican pastor Don Borrie continues to felch the regime, and it continues to render his reputation to be equally vile.

UPDATE:  So the West needs to "rethink" North Korea now, says Gareth.  It wasn't just a motorcycle trip. His head has gone soft and he has taken in all the lies and thinks they are awfully nice folk.

The thing is, the guides are.  The people you see are nice, as they are privileged members of the elite painstakingly trying to make sure their country is seen in a good light.  

You don't need to try to demonise north Korea.  He claims it isn't a great big prison camp, but who gets to leave Gareth? Who gets passports?  What about the domestic passport system that ensures no one can leave their village or town unless they belong the elite? 

He talks of how everything is tidy and clean and everyone has a job. The Potemkin world he got to see. Escorted the whole way, he claims everything he saw was real, and told was real. 

He then touts the Democratic Confederal Republic of Koryo reunification scheme (not by name) of Kim Il Sung as the solution to reunification, except for removing US troops from south Korea.  Naively thinking the north Korean regime actually could survive any extensive contact by north Koreans of south Korea, but also wanting China to protect the slave state's sovereignty.  He even uses the language that has been uttered in DPRK English language propaganda since the 1970s over this.

Gareth talks of why he and his wife could travel across Korea, but Koreans couldn't.  Yet North Koreans can't own motorcycles and drive anywhere they want in the north.

Until now I thought he was just a bit naive and actually would come out and acknowledge that he didn't know what was true, what wasn't and what he was shown and not shown.  No, the fool appears to have swallowed the Kim gang fiction hook line and sinker, and not only that, is even endorsing the sustenance of the regime by giving it propaganda.

Matt Nolan has questioned his wisdom here.

I question his sanity.  

Imagine if he had travelled through Pol Pot's Cambodia and did this, or Nazi Germany in 1938 talking about how misunderstood the proud German people were and they only want more living space and to be reunified with Germans in Czechoslovakia, and it isn't a prison camp, the stories about the Jews are lies, demonising them.

Well Gareth - you kind of did that.

Go get your head examined, and if you're sane, here are some books to read

(UPDATE - he has read some unspecified books about the horrors of the regime and said he has no reason to question them.  It would have been balanced had he acknowledged this publicly instead of telling me on a comment on his blog)

Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan  (for life as a child in a gulag)

Kim Il Sung - the North Korean Leader by Dae Sook Suh (for the best historically accurate and well researched account of Kim Il Sung's REAL life and what he did to fight the Japanese (a little) and what he says he did (saved the nation) .

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia by Andrei Lankov an excellent report of how the country has changed and contrasts with the USSR, by an academic who lived there over decades and has fluency in Korean, Russian and English.

I still think despite reading some books and believing they are true, his behaviour is astonishing.  I don't understand it.

I STILL think he should...

Apologise to the hundreds of thousands who are in prison camps, including the thousands of children. Apologise to the millions dead because this regime preferred to build a mausoleum and deny farmers the right to grow more than tiny private plots of vegetables outside state and collective farms, leaving mass starvation in the 1990s.

Next time, take a holiday somewhere else interesting, but don't start describing how homosexuals in Iran have a happy life, or women in Saudi Arabia have such freedoms we don't understand, or how the people of Zimbabwe love papa Bob Mugabe.

Better yet, whatever you do, just shut up. The last specks of your credibility have been flushed well and truly down the basement toilets in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun (resting place of the DPRK's "eternal President").

The problem of Egypt

Egypt has no tradition of respecting individual liberty or secularism.

Nasser was widely admired, as he took over the Suez Canal and lost the war he was about to launch against Israel (and lost the Sinai Peninsula).

Anwar Sadat bravely made peace with Israel, gaining back the Sinai, and was assassinated for his efforts (and is largely forgotten).

Hosni Mubarak set up a massive military led corporatist state of rent-seeking self-aggrandisement, whilst simultaneously suppressing Iranian style Islamists.  The same Islamists who bombed hotels, tour buses and killed foreign tourists, until Mubarak's secret police authoritarian state put enough of them in prison.  Meanwhile he appeased a moderate form of Islamism, allowing for the occasional hassling of Christians and implementation of Shariah law.

So he gets overthrown, and elections are held. The world quietly condones it and lo and behold, a plurality of Egyptians choose theocracy, as the alternative is a patsy of Mubarak.

The USA, EU and the rest of the supposedly freedom loving West celebrated democracy, not individual freedom and rights.   Not separation of religion and state.

So how could any Western politician oppose a government led by the Muslim Brotherhood?  How could it oppose that elected government trying to change the constitution?  

Indeed.  Egyptians who supported Islamism were happy.  Egyptians who supported secularism, the small Christian minority and Muslims who keep their religion in the private sphere, were not.

Neither was the Army, which has a large network of businesses which keep many of the senior officers well fed and watered.   

So Egyptians who don't like Islamism, and Egyptians with a vested interest in the Army's own corporatist enterprises, protested.

The Islamists were less than happy as the Army overthrew their authoritarians, to reimpose their own.

Now the Army is killing those who resist it, but don't be fooled.  The Islamists would do the same, given their predilection to terrorism, their predilection to criminalising apostasy, to harassing those who are not of their faith, to censoring views, cultural expressions and humour they don't like, to constraining the role of women.   Then of course there is the widespread anti-semitism, which is far more widespread.

So whilst the philosophy, politics and the motives of the Islamists are thoroughly despicable and the anti-thesis of individual freedom and the secular liberal democracy that Western civilisation is supposed to be based on, the ends - the political defeat of Islamism - do not justify the means - opening fire on civilians.

The problem is that the Army is led by a man, who believes it is ok for women to have their virginity checked by men, to protect them.  

Egypt needs rulers who will allow people to live ascetic Muslim lives, by choice, or not to.  It needs rulers who believe in freedom, and who believe in separation of religion from state.

However, it doesn't have a majority of citizens who share those values...

Stock market bubble fueled by printed money

So the Dow Jones has hit 15,000, it was 14,000 just over two months ago, with the S & P reaching a record level, the FTSE is at its highest since 2007, and the German DAX index reaching levels not seen since before the global financial crisis.

It is like the crisis didn't happen, but oddly enough there isn't a huge amount of evidence to demonstrate that this is due to performance, rather than cheap credit.

Yes there has been a bit of a recovery, and yes some stock prices were low compared to expected revenues.

However, as Allister Heath of City AM says:

"Ultra-loose and interventionist monetary policy globally is one of the main causes of this resurgence. Pretending that it isn’t, and that economies – even those like America’s which have liquidated many past malinvestments – could immediately and easily readjust to neutral interest rates and zero intervention is a dangerous delusion.

Much of the central-bank induced madness that led to the last two bubbles is reaching ever more dangerous proportions, not least the Fed’s hubristic determination to prop up markets..."

It was the perpetual issuing of fiat money by central banks that fueled the crisis, with CPI inflation hidden by a combination of plummeting prices from Chinese imports (a scenario that has come to an end, as China no longer offers lower costs) and the inflation being largely seen in stock and property prices.

The new bubbles will be stores of future problems. 

Increases in stock prices due to good performance and optimistic earnings based on improved productivity and market growth are one thing,  increases due to banks, flooded with cheap money from central banks, seeking somewhere to put it, are another.

No one has learned anything.

Not all austerity is equal...

Allister Heath of City AM:

Spending cuts are austerity of the public sector  (as it has to reduce its activity)

Tax increases are austerity of the private sector

Think about which one is more likely to decrease employment, and which one is more likely to reduce economic growth.

Self-driving cars could transform land transport

In the UK the talk is about taxpayers paying for an extensive high speed railway network between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.  It would cost £35 billion to build and would lose money.   It will mostly service well-heeled business people (the fares will be too high for families, who will drive, or the poorer, who will take the multiple competing privately provided coach services).  90% of its users will be those using trains now, or people who wouldn't have travelled in the first place.  It will make next to no impact on domestic flights or road traffic.  One of the main objectives is to free capacity on the existing lines, so that more loss making commuter services can operate on the lines close to London.

In Auckland the talk is about an underground rail loop to enable its commuter rail service, soon to be electrified, to have more capacity during the peak hours.  Roughly 45,000 trips a day are taken on that system, roughly the entire average daily trips of Fenchurch Street station in London (yep that busy) (and 10% less than Wellington's network, despite Wellington's region having at least a quarter of Auckland's population.  It would cost NZ$2 billion to build and would lose money.  

In both cases the projects are expensive, not financially viable, and serve relatively few people.

They are 20th century solutions to perceived transport problems, but another is on its way, and it could transform land transport between and within cities.

Self-driving cars. Allister Heath says it makes big rail schemes like HS2 outdated.

The technology exists now.  Cars can already park themselves, emergency brake, follow road lines and follow other vehicles and brake automatically.  Several US states are already changing laws to allow for fully autonomous road vehicles, and the technology now being trialled enables vehicles to navigate safely along existing roads.

What could that mean?

Road vehicles that actively avoid collisions, both with other vehicles, and cyclists and pedestrians.

Road vehicles that operate in convoys, in close formation on major roads, increasing the capacity of those roads by a factor of three to four, rivalling railways.

Road vehicles that don't need a driver, that can be sent to be parked anywhere, called up on command by mobile phone.

Motorways that operate like trains of vehicles, except that the vehicles have the ultimate flexibility of starting and ending trips anywhere on the road network.

Traffic lights will no longer need to keep traffic stopped, but rather interweave traffic to maximise capacity.

Speeds can be faster where it is safe to do so, and better managed where there are many pedestrians.

Cars could be parked with a far higher density.

Let's not pretend there are barriers to this.

Technology needs to be refined, it needs to be secure.  Nobody wants autonomous cars diverting onto footpaths and mowing people down.

Laws need to be changed, so that owners of vehicles are liable for accidents when there is no driver or active driver.

Roads need to be better managed, so lines are maintained, databases about road rules, traffic signals adapted and systems in place so the network is actively managed.   

However, it can transform transport.

Buses can have the capacity of commuter railways (with the exception of high frequency metro services, which Auckland will never have).

Roads can have much more capacity, so there is far less need to build more capacity, and there is far less need to build safety into the roads with barriers and signs and speed limits that reflect driver behaviour.  

Roads would be so much safer that incidents of accidents causing congestion would be rare, and thousands of lives would be saved from serious injuries, and hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage and health costs avoided.

Vehicles would be much more fuel efficient, as vehicles become more efficient anyway, reducing emissions and the environmental impacts from transport.

Roads would be more like networks akin to telecommunications and energy networks, and politicians choosing projects to expand capacity would be rightly treated as amateur fools.  Who today would listen to a politician who says that a specific switch needs to be installed on a network, or a substation or that cable capacity be added somewhere?

Railways are bespoke inflexible networks that have a lot of capacity best suited for a narrow range of transport tasks.  The range of those tasks will narrow even more with automated road transport.

Of course some will still choose to drive, and will have options to do so, for leisure, but probably pay much more for insurance to do so without driving assistance.   What happens ought to be up to market demand, for vehicles and for roads.

Unfortunately, roads are managed by politicians and bureaucrats.  If anything is going to get in the way of setting them free, it will be them.

Auckland road pricing?

Some questions:

- Is there a funding gap if large totemic projects that the users would never pay for themselves are dropped? (yes rail and road)

- Why does Auckland Council assume fuel tax will still exist in 30 years time when multiple states in the US and the Australian Federal Government are considering whether it has a future at all when vehicle engines become so fuel efficient that the tax would have to be very high to collect enough money at all?

- Why does Auckland Council think that two road pricing options, both highly criticised in a previous report are still worth considering, especially since technology has moved in leaps and bounds since then?

- Why does Auckland Council think that if there is user pays on the roads, directly, not through fuel tax, that there shouldn't be user pays on the railways?

- Why do options to fund transport in Auckland automatically exclude any evolution of the existing road pricing type system in the form of national road user charges?  A system that now has increasing numbers of people paying through a privately provided electronic system that measures where and when vehicles use the roads, and has competitive delivery.

- Why did Auckland Council completely ignore other road pricing options used elsewhere?  Is it because its consultants know nothing about them? (I very strongly expect this)

- Why does Auckland Council think roads shouldn't be run like a business?  Just because Auckland Transport Blog wants to plan, tax motorists and subsidise public transport in its eager bright eyed bushy-tailed attempt to push people into doing what it thinks is best for them, doesn't mean people will comply, or that it is good for them.

- What is Auckland Council's view on the automation of road transport, including the increasing likelihood that road vehicles will increasingly be self-steering and self-driving, at least part of the time?  Given this could treble the capacity of existing roads,  virtually eliminating congestion, dramatically cut pollution and eliminate one of the few advantages of rail over road, why ignore it?

Syria - Time for difficult decisions

Let's make some points very clear.

Syria's government is reprehensible.  It is a softer version of the north Korean crime family one-party state, but only in scale and depth of totalitarianism.  Bashar Assad inherited the supreme leader role from his murderous tyrant of a father.  That family, from the Alawite minority sect has run the place for my entire lifetime.

Bashar Assad loosened the screws somewhat, but has demonstrated the typical attitude of any dictator when challenged by his subjects.  He wont step down, wont disband the secret police, wont abolish the state monopoly on media, wont legalise free speech, wont legalise competing political parties, wont hold elections.

He has spread nationalist-sectarian fear amongst Alawites, fearful that anything other than the dictatorship of his family will mean their slaughter.  He has encouraged the view that anyone who opposes his "secular" rule, is an Islamist.

Assad's regime torture and executes political opponents, and it is clear that it has used its own military to attack civilian populations to repress political dissent.  By no measure can it possibly be said to claim any moral authority, unless one adapts Mao's statement to claim morality comes from the barrel of a gun.  Human Rights Watch estimated 17,000 people 'disappeared' in Syria in the first decade of his father's rule.  In 1982 he bombed the city of Hama, slaughtering between 10,000 and 40,000 people as he suppressed an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood.   Yes, one can't argue that the Islamists would be better, but the indiscriminate oppression was brutal on a scale that Western "peace" advocates would usually decry.

Bear in mind Syria has previously invaded and occupied Lebanon, and assassinated Lebanese politicians.  It is far from being a non-aggressive actor in the region, a point thrown by its supporters against Israel, but ignored in Syria.

Assad's regime has long been supported by the USSR and more recently Russia, and has always been anti-Western.

It is perfectly moral for Syrians to fight to overthrow this regime.  It kills, torture and imprisons those who challenge it.  Its apparent use of chemical weapons does cross a threshold, one of degree.  As chemical weapons kill and harm over a wide area indiscriminately in a way that is almost impossible to defend against.  It is a tool of mass slaughter, beyond that of conventional bombs and firearms which have very localised effects.

Providing arms or other support for the Syrian regime is being a party to this.  Russia already does this, it maintains a military base there and openly supports the regime.   Hardly surprising, since Russia is an authoritarian faux-democracy that arrests and imprisons its opponents, and has little compunction about using force against those challenging its corrupt corporatist crony-capitalist state.  

So let's not pretend that Syria should not be subject to international intervention in its civil war, it already has it.

Similarly, Qatari, Saudi and other Arab states have been arming and funding different rebel groups.  The very same states which would cite "state sovereignty" as a reason to oppose anyone interfering in their politics.

So the genie of intervention is already out of the proverbial bottle.

Should something be done?

Anzac Day 2013

Anzac Day is largely ignored in the UK.

Which is sad, given that it started by commemorating the loss of life in World War One, for Britain.

Over 17,000 New Zealanders died from fighting for the British Empire in World War One.
Over 60,000 Australians died from fighting for the British Empire in World War One.

So tomorrow I will take a moment to remember them, and all the others who died fighting.  It's a day to wear a Poppy in London, causing some to be confused and some others to smile and acknowledge, for they too, have not forgotten.

Previous posts on Anzac Day are, as always, just as applicable.  Here, here and here.

Robyn Malcolm - the classic ignorant Green airhead - loving a mass murderer

I thank Peter Cresswell for highlighting this.  It may seem like a small accident to some, but airbrushing the mass murders and starvation of millions is not that.

It's not that she denies it, or pretends it didn't happen, she's just too ignorant to know about something she decided to celebrate.

Expecting actors to come up with pearls of wisdom about politics and history is a bit like expecting them to be competent at medicine, so I'm hardly surprised that Robyn Malcolm wished the mass murderer Lenin a happy birthday.

She said Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot were very different from Lenin.

Brainless bint.

She is espouses the classic far left myth that Lenin's revolution was some glorious popular revolution that transformed Russia into a socialist state that was corrupted by Stalin's cruelty.

This view of history is the revisionist version that the CPSU spread after Khrushchev, as he "de-Stalinised" the country, which of course meant that instead of everyone fearing everyone else all of the time, everyone feared everyone else just some of the time.

Lenin was a monster, and airbrushing his history is a grotesque misjustice to the millions killed or starved under his misrule.

For a start, let's not forget that the Tsar was not overthrown by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, but a popular revolution in February 1917 which saw a democratically elected executive created.  In October, it was the Bolsheviks that overthrew that regime.

Beyond that the story is grim:

The "Red Terror" was Lenin's campaign to "cleanse Russia of the filth" who opposed him.

December 1917 the Cheka was established, the secret police.  It shut down all newspapers critical of the Bolsheviks and established a press monopoly, by force.  In 1919 concentration camps were set up, to place the bourgeoisie and hold them as slave labour for the revolution.  About 70,000 people were in such camps by 1923.

One shouldn't forget Lenin's famous hanging order:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people

So the idea of the kulaks, the label for the hated scapegoats of the revolution popularised by Stalin, started under Lenin.

Historian Robert Gellately estimates that between 300,000-500,000 Cossacks were forcibly relocated or killed by 1920.  

In September/October 1918 10,000-15,000 were summarily executed by the Cheka.  Ownership of a business or a large house that you refused to surrender to the state (for no compensation) could be sufficient grounds to be liquidated.

Lenin, after confiscating farmland from landlords and giving it to peasants, then oppressed the peasants demanding any surplus after what they needed for their own "personal use" be sold at heavily knocked down prices to the state.  Some peasants sold produce to the black-market, and would be executed for this.  Many chose not to sell the surplus, and got it confiscated.  So they chose to simply produce less, given there was little point in working harder than was necessary to feed themselves and their families.  The resulting underproduction, and with a subsequent drought (and no surplus stock), saw the 1921 Russian Famine result. 

At least 3 million died in that famine, ameliorated only by the end of the Civil War which saw the Bolsheviks utilising the opposition (White Russian) surpluses in grain for their own needs.

Historian Richard Pipes said that:

Lenin repeatedly said that he would sooner the whole nation die of hunger than allow free trade in grain. In short, Lenin and his comrades knew with substantial certainty that their policies would cause widespread death from starvation. Under any sensible definition of murder, this makes Lenin the murderer of millions.

Now I don't expect Robyn Malcolm knew this, given her tweet I don't expect she's spent much time with books that don't have a lot of pictures in them.

As a result, she ought to apologise, profusely, for insulting the memory of the hundreds of thousands slaughtered by this tyrant.  A tyrant that spawned Stalin, and who then spawned 70 years of totalitarian terror spanning much of the world from Havana to Hanoi, Luanda to "Leningrad".  

It is, as if, she accidentally didn't know about the Holocaust, and it's disgusting.  

Earth Day 2013, keep it to yourself

I like what the Ayn Rand Institute said about it in 2009:

The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.

I called it onanistic vileness, as it is a childish exercise in mutual gratification amongst the self righteous who have the luxury to choose to spend a short period of their comfortable lives deprived of a light bulb, a car or maybe something else they take for granted.

Children are starving in gulags in north Korea today.  Tens of thousands of them, like concentration camps, whilst most people think north Korea is a bit of a joke.

Millions of people every year get electricity to power a light enabling a child to read a book at night.

Billions of people right now are alive because electricity and man-made energy enables them to be warm, to be fed and to be sustained.

To hell with Earth Day.   Yes, pollution kills.  Yes, it is important to not destroy the environment that sustains us all, but that isn't achieved through the worship of non-production, non-technology and de-industrialisation.

However, those who propagate Earth Day are at best hypocrites, like the jetsetting, big house owning, big mouth propagandist Al Gore, and at worst destructive towards humanity, like those waging war against genetic engineering.

Abstain from consumption if you wish, but don't pretend that asceticism towards energy use, technology, production, mining or the like is doing anyone any good.  If you want look after the environment, look after your own property and campaign for property rights to be expanded, and against the abuse of the commons because they are the commons.

For those who cite science as the basis for their policy misanthropy, are more often than not as much (if not greater) abusers of science than those they condemn.

North Korea - what's going on?

When I started studying north Korea it was the early 1990s, and few were paying attention.   Nobody paid attention then, and few pay attention now to the horrors of the totalitarian slave state that it has been for over 60 years.   The name - Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) - says much in itself.   Governments that use names to deliver messages about how utterly devoted they are to "the people" are  naturally quite the opposite.

The adjectives thrown about by the mainstream don't do justice to the place.  Stalinist?  No, the extent and efficiency of the  cultural revolution, the rewritten history and the personal cult far exceed that of Stalin, and it has now gone into two subsequent generations.   Dictatorship?  That bland term doesn't really highlight the totality of control in the DPRK.  Life there is under constant surveillance.  Totalitarian?  The DPRK should be the dictionary definition of it.

Much of the media coverage of the place focuses on how amusing it is to have a strongman leader, legions of soldiers goosestepping, and now how it is a bit of joke that he threatens to attack the United States.  Yet the DPRK isn't that funny for those living there.  

Thatcher was allied to Reagan, but never kowtowed to the USA

The Falkland Islands.

Grenada.

Supporting the right to first use of nuclear weapons.

Repelling Iraq from Kuwait.

On all of these, Thatcher disagreed with the US President of the day.

Why?

It was principle.