Politics & Power Quote by Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher’s phrasing turns media attention into something almost physiologically dangerous: “oxygen.” It’s a hard, memorable metaphor that frames publicity not as a neutral byproduct of open society, but as the fuel that keeps political violence alive. In one stroke, she shifts the battlefield from airports and streets to newsrooms and broadcast schedules, implying that democracies can win without only relying on force - by refusing to amplify the spectacle terrorists are trying to stage.

The specific intent is practical and strategic: reduce incentives for hijackings and terror attacks by denying perpetrators the mass audience they seek. But the subtext is where Thatcher’s political instincts show. “Democratic nations must try” reads like a moral obligation with an escape hatch: it acknowledges liberal norms (a free press, public accountability) while pushing those norms toward managed restraint. The verb “starve” is doing quiet work, too. Starvation is not regulation; it’s deprivation. It suggests an active policy posture that edges toward controlling information flows, even if it stops short of saying “censorship.”

Context matters. Thatcher governed through the IRA campaigns, the 1984 Brighton bombing, and a broader late-20th-century environment in which terrorism was becoming televisual - designed for live coverage, hostage cameras, looping footage. The line anticipates a modern dilemma: democracies are uniquely vulnerable to propaganda because they broadcast their own wounds in real time. Her argument flatters democratic self-image (“we are open”) while warning that openness can be weaponized.

The quote works because it compresses a contradiction into a single, tough-minded imperative: protect free societies by limiting what free societies publicize.