Hooray for Thatcher?

[ciphergoth]

OK, so it's far from clear he actually tried to do it, and if he did he doubtless did it for personal gain, but if he did, it looks like overthrowing the government of Equatorial Guinea and bringing in the main opposition party might actually have been a good thing to do. I mention this here only because AFAICT the news reports seem to be treating it as if Equatorial Guinea was a perfectly nice democracy until he came along.

Don't worry, I'm not turning Tory. It's just that I don't feel motivated to catalogue every single evil and stupid thing they do, but when they do something that might not be either evil or stupid it's surprising enough to blog about. If Boris does something that is only one of evil and stupid I'll probably blog about that too.

Comments

[actionreplay.livejournal.com]

Oh _that_ Thatcher :). I thought he hadn't actually done that, but was just too dim to realise what was going on...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You said "hooray" too soon; that Wikipedia article is curiously skewed -- only one, very brief, mention of oil in the whole thing!

Yes, the coup plotters were after some enormous offshore oil reserves that were discovered in the late 1990s. Private Eye has been tracking this one; IIRC there were rumours of one of the big oil multinationals being behind the plotters.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Still, would success of the coup make things better or worse for the people of Equatorial Guinea? They're not seeing much of the oil revenue either way.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

That's the $64,000 question, isn't it?

But I'd just like to note that coups driven by the avarice of American oil corporation boardrooms do not have a reliable track record of delivering happiness and wellbeing and liberty to the subjects of the odious dictators who are to be overturned for not sharing their oil revenue. (See also: Iraq, Iran in the 1950s, Nigeria, etcetera.)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

True enough. I guess the only reason I might hope for better in this instance is that they're only talking about replacing the Government rather than the entire State, and they're replacing it with a body that already exists and already has support in that country. Effectively they're just enforcing what should have been the results of the 2002 election. This is in pretty sharp contrast to at least Iraq and Iran.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

would success of the coup make things better or worse for the people of Equatorial Guinea?

Of course one can't ever say for sure with counterfactuals, but I strongly suspect it'd would have made things worse.

Can you give (m)any examples where coups have clearly been a good thing for the people of the country? Because I can think of plenty where it's been pretty disastrous. (Plus some, admittedly, where it's made precious little difference in the short term.)

And as you get on to below, the question of who's doing it is more than incidentally germane to guessing the likely effect. Anyone carrying out a coup is, ipso facto, the sort of person likely to get involved in a coup attempt, and let's be honest, that sort of person isn't likely to be good news for the populace in general.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Has Chavez been awful for Venezuela? I remember reading a bit about this a few years ago, and thinking that he was better than the alternative. But I don't know a great deal about it TBH...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure Chavez would've been a lot worse if he'd come to power through his failed coup than through the democratic election in the late 90s. It's hard to get information I trust about him (he's not exactly an uncontroversial figure, and the coverage is absurdly polarised) but he's shown more than incidental authoritarian tendencies. If his coup had succeeded and he hadn't had to base his claim for political legitimacy on a democratic mandate, I think his more Stalinist inclinations would've had a lot freer reign, with very bad consequences for Venezuelans.

[werenerd.livejournal.com]

I don't think it should be up to private businessmen to decide which countries to topple with mercenary armies. The consequences of that are even most disastrous than the poor system of international law we have today. Even in the case of war-mongering USA, there's at least some element of electoral accountability, in this case there is no accountability at all (except for the mercenary captain).

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

*agrees*

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I disagree with what you're saying, but I can see arguments against it:

No-one with accountability was proposing to do anything about the situation, so the choice Thatcher might feel he faced was either unaccountable mercenaries coming to the rescue, or no-one coming to the rescue. Is it clear that the latter is better for anybody?

[autopope.livejournal.com]

My inner cynic keeps reminding me, "yes, but this is Mark Thatcher we're talking about." The guy who allegedly spent most of the 1990s outside the UK because the SFO wanted to ask him pointed questions about the Al Yamammah kickbacks. The George W. Bush to Dennis "corporate raider" Thatcher's George H. W. Bush, if you like (except luckily neither of them were involved in politics -- ruining the country was just the Missus' little hobby).

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, OK, the idea that someone like him would even accidentally do good is pretty implausible. Made for an interesting and enlightening discussion though :-)

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I don't want to die for Fernando Poo.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I am disappointed to discover that he is not the subject of the ABBA song.

(And that there is no backwards B character in Unicode)

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

I like you xxx