Joseph the Iron Lady and his Soldiers of Steel

This was my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

Joseph Muscat has made, at last, an impassioned speech about hatred, forgiveness and something strange which he called ‘political racism’.

Perhaps impassioned is the wrong word; this man delivers every speech as though he is reading it off a monitor without first having been to method-acting classes.

He invariably sounds wet, flaccid and only mildly interested, while wrestling hard against his Burmarrad vowels.

It wasn’t exactly the speech we’ve been waiting for, the one in which he hangs his head and begs forgiveness for the hatred, violence, human rights violations and supreme nastiness of the Labour Party in government during what Karmenu Vella called the Golden Years of Labour.

Nor was it an apology for the vicious character assassination and venom spewed out by Super One television and radio, Stalin style, day after day.

Muscat didn’t even touch on the vulgar, ugly spite churned out by his supporters all over their Facebook walls and the walls of others, or the Facebook groups and pages set up by his followers to incite violent and aggressive sentiments against those who champion different political ideas.

No, Muscat’s speech centred on throwaway remarks made by a 30-year-old local councillor for the Nationalist Party, and which became public only because somebody he trusted pressed ‘record’ on his smartphone or iPad. Can Muscat really be serious?

He should remember that a significant part of his wider audience is made up of people like me, who have perfect recall of current Labour heroes Joe Grima, Karmenu Vella, Joe Debono Grech and Alex Sceberras Trigona in the cabinet of government when Labour mobs ransacked the leader of the Opposition’s home and physically attacked his wife, set fire to a newspaper building with staff still inside (they had to climb out of an upstairs window after the staircase collapsed and the fire brigade took its time arriving), destroyed Opposition political party clubs, sacked the law courts and the Archbishop’s Curia, and created a climate of fear and violence so great that we are still suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder today.

And then there was the way the police force was used, in the way of totalitarian regimes the world over, to oppress and terrorise, with homes turned over at night without a search warrant, people arrested without proper grounds, incessant harassment, army and police road-blocks on a routine basis, raids and strip-searches.

The sentiments which created those almost two decades of hell are still there and thriving among very many Labour supporters and certainly in the party itself. Times change but people don’t, and those in their 20s who were raised by parents and grandparents who voted Labour in 1976, 1981 and especially 1987 will have had scant chance of turning out with a proper perspective. They would have to be very bright and very independent-minded indeed, besides having the will to find out what things were really like as opposed to the lies and fiction and distorted picture painted by the grown-ups in the household and those around them.

You can see that there has been relatively little of this, by reading the sort of things supporters of Joseph Muscat and his Labour Party post on the internet. They are humourless, malicious, eaten up with envy and the salivating desire for revenge, longing for the destruction and public humiliation of those they consider their social enemies, and really no different in their thinking to their fathers and grandfathers who rampaged with those 1970s and 1980s mobs.

No different, even, to their great-grandfathers who marched into Valletta, burning every flour-mill but one (it was defended by the workers inside) along the way, then ransacking the homes ‘of the rich’ and shops in the capital. Unlike the vast majority of people who hoovered up the Sette Giugno propaganda, I was lucky enough to have heard, first-hand, eyewitness accounts of what happened.

It wasn’t much different to the riots and looting that shocked us in London last year, except in scale and extent. And nobody would consider for one moment putting up a monument to the London rioters, just as we in our own time would not consider putting up a monument to the drydocks workers who sacked shops on Valletta’s main drag on their way to ransacking the law courts.

University education, EU membership opportunities, travel that broadens the mind, wider exposure to life in general, and the internet can only do so much to undo the drip-drip-drip damage of negativity and resentment that filters down from one generation to the next. The internet has actually had the opposite effect of what one would have hoped for.

Instead of becoming the means of opening the mind, it has become a tool for the release of anger and personal animosity that would, only a few short years ago, have been released through the catharsis of anonymous telephone calls, anonymous letters, or other acts of vindictiveness. Since those sorts of people began using Facebook and have discovered the comments-boards of news portals, I have not received one anonymous letter or anonymous phone call. I am quite certain that other people in the public eye, and even private individuals, have a similar experience to report.

The violence and anarchic behaviour didn’t stop after 1987, either. When the prime minister, Eddie Fenech Adami, turned up to serve as witness to a church wedding in Zejtun, he was shot at. That’s right: the people who plan to vote for Joseph Muscat shot at the prime minister – and got away with it.

That’s the sort of society in which we lived only 25 years ago. And under the direction of dockyard boss Sammy Meilak, others who plan to vote for Joseph Muscat towed an oil-tanking vessel across the mouth of Grand Harbour, so that a British warship on a courtesy call couldn’t get in and had to moor off St Paul’s Bay instead. If they couldn’t have ‘their’ Labour government, they intended to have anarchy instead.

So, with all this and counting, Joseph Muscat decides to turn into Francis of Assisi, quoting the famous ‘Where there is hatred, let me sow love’ prayer’, to the bewilderment of his befuddled audience, who didn’t get the reference, because of something a Sliema local councillor said. The dissonance between what Muscat says and what his party and so many of its supporters do is unbridgeable.

Perhaps Muscat went to the cinema at the weekend and took inspiration from Margaret Thatcher, who quoted from St Francis when she entered Number 10 for the first time in 1979. If Muscat thinks of himself as a sort of Thatcher for Malta in the 21st century, this would have made for an interesting image: Muscat the Iron Lady, leading his solders of steel.

But oddly enough, the only visual image which comes to my mind is that of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.