Amanda Foreman is a British historian educated at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University and Oxford. She has won prizes for history and biography.
She was on C-SPAN recently, and commented on the movie “Iron Lady,” in which Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher (emphasis below is mine):
I think that the film actually has prompted a massive rethink of Lady Thatcher. That most people, I think, shared my opinion, that it was someone who had been in power 20 years ago that she was a big towering figure, but was like an out-of-control Sherman tank, and was bossy, and loud, and seemed to create more discontent than anything else. And this film has reminded us that she was also a great feminist pioneer who changed the face of the world in terms of what it was possible for women to achieve, and that she ended the Cold War. And those are two things, that I know I somehow managed to forget.
Foreman was born in 1968, which means she was 11 years old when Thatcher became PM and 21 when she left that post. That’s pretty much her formative years. Its an astonishing admission that she forgot all that made Thatcher possibly the greatest woman of the 20th century, and that it took a Hollywood movie for her, at the age of 43, after years of being, you know, a historian, to be reminded of it.
The erroneous image of Thatcher that Foreman outlines in the quote above is point-for-point the view of Thatcher that the Left has worked tirelessly to impose. They tried the same with Reagan.
This shows just how much the media/left negative image of conservatives can, with the aid of liberals in the media and the culture, be imposed on even intelligent people who are supposed to be analytical and objective about what’s happening in the world.
