Oh, what golden years those were – no wonder Muscat thought they were fantastic, and AST is still around
Published:
July 15, 2013 at 9:23pm
I don’t trust myself to comment. This was 1984. Bear in mind that I was 19 at the time, and instead of an EU passport, EU scholarships, university exchange programmes and massive career opportunies, I had a prime minister who went to pariah 1984 China, the Soviet Union and North Korea on a sort of Grand Tour of Communist totalitarian states and human rights violators, to watch Chinese and North Korean performers sing and dance to the Innu tal-Partit Laburista and Ma Taghmlu Xejn Mal-Perit Mintoff.
Few things bring home the weird Through the Looking Glass madness of those years like these freaky videos do.
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Nistennew xi haga bhal din ad unur Joseph Muscat mic-cinizi li thabbeb maghhom.
And we Maltese had the ‘guts’ to vote these same people back to power again.
A nation of masochists.
A nation of masochists, you say?
Look at the demonstration that was scheduled for yesterday.
It was basically the same dance troupe in reverse: Ma taghmlu xejn ma’ Joseph taghna.
“Malta l-ewwel u qabel kollox” kien jonqoshom ikantawlu.
Mac-Cinizi Komunisti trid tkun tiflah iccapcap bla waqfien biex tiehu xi haga,filwaqt li f’Malta ma’ Joseph bizzejjed tidher darba fuq il-billboard u tilhaq membru f’xi bord.
Am very morally convinced that Labour’s problem is that AST is still lurking there in the background.
I pointed this out more than once before. On 10 March, AST was one of the selected few on the balcony at Mile End celebrating a Labour victory which prima facie he had no part in. What had be been organising in the background?
It is clearer every day that Joseph Muscat’s policies are intended to isolate us from the EU and to reconnect us to the traditional opponents of Western democracies with which AST had good relations.
Labour’s problem – nay, make that MALTA’s problem – is that Mintoff’s legions of voters are still lurking in the background.
In the foreground, we have legions of historians all busy touching up the tissue of lies they carefully built to make that vile despicable bastard out to be the national hero. Expect some colossal hagiographies on the first anniversary of his death.
Does anyone have a link to the state visit by President Agatha Barbara to that other pariah state, Myanmar (Burma) – pink frilly dress and all. The cherry on the Labour Party cake in the lead-up to the general election.
They were the ‘golden years’ just not for the general population. For those who worked in private companies who were not owned by people who could get import licences by making one telephone call and who could freely exchange foreign currency, it was a daily struggle for survival.
The first though in one’s head on waking up in 1984 was ‘what problems will they give us to-day?’.
You usually had a whole array to focus on: reductions or cancellations of import quotas and licences, banning of products, bartering schemes, impositions of having to export in order to import, bribes demanded.
But as I said, they were the golden years for those who, for example, could breeze through customs while the rest of us had to open every bit of luggage just in case we had some chocolate, new clothes etc etc. Of course now I wonder what they were really looking for.
But the greatest ‘golden’ thing about those years was the fact that everyone was afraid to talk, and with good reason. And in spite of the fact that today’s means of communication help in this regard, once you know what ‘that’ situation smells like, you never forget the smell and frankly, there is more than a whiff of it already.