Thatcher’s False Slogan: “There is No Alternative”

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher popularized the slogan: “There is no alternative” (TINA). She was not the first Western politician to promulgate her own worldview as the only possible way for all of mankind. For 500 years, the West has been veritably obsessed with brainwashing people in all parts of the world to make them believe that there is no alternative to the Western way. 

When Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, and other European conquistadors and imperialists were rampaging in the Americas, they were telling the natives something similar to what Thatcher was telling the world in the 1980s: There is no alternative to European religion and European power. When the Europeans were dragging millions of Africans across the Atlantic to labor as slaves in the American colonies, they were telling the Africans: Accept your fate because there is no alternative to slavery. When the British were expanding their dominion in India, during the eighteenth century, they were telling the Indians: There is no alternative to British rule. In the nineteenth century, the British were telling the Chinese: There is no alternative to British opium. In the 1950s, the Americans were telling the world: There is no alternative to American global bureaucracies—UNO, IMF, World Bank, GATT (WTO),  and other institutions. From 1960 till this day, the Americans have been massacring people in wars after wars to hammer home the message: There is no alternative to American capitalism. In the 1970s, when Nixon abolished the gold standard, he told the world: There is no alternative to America’s paper currency, the dollar. In the 1980s, Reagan joined Thatcher in declaring: There is no alternative to the Western way. In 1991, when the Soviet Union fell, the Western ideologues declared that the “end of history” had arrived and that henceforth there would be no alternative to Western rule.

“There is no alternative”: this Western slogan is bullshit. This slogan is totalitarian and genocidal, and it amounts to a war on imagination. The Western establishment does not want people in non-Western countries to put their imagination to work and think of a way of life that is better than the Western way. They want people everywhere to believe that the non-Western ideas just don’t work; only the Western ideas work. The truth is that the Western way is terrible and a better way is possible. There is always a better way. Once America falls, and Western power comes to an end, I am hopeful that the human imagination will become freed once again and we will be able to imagine hundreds of new systems which could be better than the Western way.