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

[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.