Party labels and Big Lie theory

Published: October 30, 2008 at 9:26am

You know, I do try to give the Labour leader the benefit of the doubt, but it’s so difficult when he’s got such a mammoth credibility problem. Whenever he makes a statement, I can’t help wondering what sort of desperate-to-have-faith-in-an-alternative-government person takes it seriously, when my inner gremlin is laughing away and saying: ‘You’re a fine one to talk.’ And that’s just the politer way of putting what my inner gremlin really does say.

Now here he is this week, employing the timeworn Labour strategy of using a ‘political conference’ at a party club in some village to communicate a message to the nation, through the reporters who have been dispatched to hang onto his every word. Mintoff used that tactic, KMB did, and so did Alfred Sant. Whenever they had anything to say, they set up a political conference of dozing village elders at which to say it, and used reporters to relay the message. Very progressive and modern, I must say.

So Muscat trotted off to a political conference in Kirkop, of all places – a pretty village, but hardly the epicentre of political activity – and told us that the government has not achieved its targets. If I were 16, I would have rolled about the floor and screamed with laughter. The government was elected less than eight months ago, and here’s the opposition leader, claiming it should have achieved its targets already. We might as well hold a general election every year, then. And if I were 16, I would have said, look who’s talking. But because I’m not 16, I can put it better: has Labour achieved even one of its targets in the last 32 years? Hmmmm. No – not even one, except for the questionable target of electing our man here as party leader. Thirty-two years of every goal not reached and every target missed (and thank heavens for that), and here’s Muscat banging on about how the government hasn’t reached its five-year targets in eight months. I used to think his main problem is that he’s just too full of himself. Now I’m beginning to suspect that he’s simply not intelligent enough to see them coming.

Here’s another one: he told the same political conference in Kirkop that Malta seems to have two prime ministers, the real one and Austin Gatt. This strikes me as very odd, coming from somebody who forms part of a leadership troika. At least with the government it’s Austin Gatt, not Anglu Farrugia or Toni Abela – and I don’t need to go into great detail as to why that’s so much better. They’re both so touchy and belligerent these days that they might blow a gasket and pass out. You’re not stupid. You can work out why Austin Gatt’s preferable to Toni Abela.

Not only does Muscat fail to have the imagination to come up with new ways of doing things that are different to those of his predecessors, but he even copies the tactics and pseudo-smart remarks used by political leaders elsewhere in the English-speaking world – not that this is part of the English-speaking world, but you get my drift. So he told those nodding pensioners at Kirkop, in reference to the prime minister and Austin Gatt: “Will the real prime minister please stand up?”

This is such a hackneyed phrase, that his use of it makes me want to lie down and weep with disbelief. If somebody had written it into an article I’d commissioned, I would have blue-pencilled it immediately and sacked the writer. To find out how pathetically over-used it is by unimaginative, unintelligent and ineloquent people, just Google ‘will the real prime minister please stand up?’ and you’ll get a never-ending list. Here are some examples from the first two of the many, many pages of references that come up: will the real losers on Iraq please stand up, will the real Ukraine Central Bank please stand up, will the real St Patrick please stand up, will the real Indian please stand up, will the real Stephen Harper please stand up, will the real Belle du Jour please stand up, will the real Anbar Narrative please stand up, will the real Conservative please stand up, will the real Bob Dole please stand up, will the real Lebed please stand up, will the real Jew please stand up, will the real puppet please stand up, will the real John McCain please stand up….ah, John McCain. That’s where he must have heard it after all these years.

Here’s another campaign tactic that Muscat has picked up from his immediate predecessor. Sink your teeth into a sound-bite like a terrier hanging onto a priest’s cassock and whatever you do, don’t let go. Repeat it, and repeat it, and repeat it, and repeat it until people think it’s true. This is the infamous Big Lie theory, first described by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf – though not as Nazi propaganda strategy but as an accusatory description of what was done by the Jews he despised. His man Goebbels picked it up later, accusing the war-time enemy in England of doing the same. In short, Goebbels wrote that the English tell great lies when they bother to lie at all, and that they stick to their lies even when they are found out, to maintain their credibility, causing confusion in those who are listening.

Common error has attributed Big Lie theory to Goebbels as a form of Nazi propaganda. That isn’t to say that Nazi propaganda didn’t employ Big Lie theory, because it did. The Nazis saw it as using ‘the weapon of the Jews’ against the Jews themselves. George Orwell picked up Big Lie theory in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He described the method this way: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed…”. It is a good description of the strategy employed by the Labour Party for as long as I can remember. I find it most disturbing to watch Joseph Muscat start down that particular path, but of course he hasn’t had the most auspicious of beginnings, given that he has swung from telling us that EU membership will be the end of Malta to telling us that he is the most Europhile politician in the Valletta parliament.

The current Big Lie which has been repeated several times already and which will no doubt be repeated for weeks and months to come, is that the government hasn’t reached those blessed targets in eight months because it overspent by €70 million in the few weeks before the general election. Really? What were they doing, then – bathing in Beluga caviar while chomping on gold bars in private jets that circumnavigated the globe several times, burning up fuel? People like Joseph Muscat really try my patience. I have no time for those who manipulate the ignorant. It’s akin to manhandling the physically disabled, in my book: abusing the disadvantaged for the furtherance of your objectives.

We heard about that farcical €70 million in his debate with the prime minister on Xarabank (iss hej, Lawrence spent €70 million), to which the prime minister’s response was disbelieving laughter. And now we have heard it again at that political conference in Kirkop.

*****************************

One of the most unintelligent things that the Labour leader is doing right now is failing to recognise that politics is about policies not labels. He scuttles from political conference to televised debate to party walkabout telling us that the Labour Party is left-leaning and progressive, when the past few years have shown it to be a curious mix of the thinking of the extreme left and the far right: xenophobia and state control. Labour supporters and many Labour politicians appear to be happier with a totalitarian approach to running the country.

The Labour Party is Malta’s conservative party, in the worst meaning of the word and with a small ‘c’. It doesn’t want change. It has resisted all change strenuously over the last few years, particularly change for the better, and Muscat was right there doing most of the resisting. So concerned are Joseph Muscat and his people with labels rather than policies that they actually describe the Nationalist Party as right-wing, even though it has long been anything but that, which is why I vote for it. I wouldn’t, if it weren’t, and nobody in my family did when it was.

Now here is progressive Joe, with experience no greater than that of several years as a Super One journalist and four years as an MEP among many hundreds, giving advice on how to run the country to the people who dragged these islands into not just a semblance of normality but an economic success story after the wreckage left behind by Muscat’s ruddy awful predecessors. He doesn’t even have the self-awareness to see how this chimes with the rest of us. If Lawrence Gonzi had the sort of tongue I have – and he probably does, in private – then he’s finding it very difficult to resist saying that if he wants advice on running the country from a Super One reporter, he’ll call the Super One studios to get it.

Progressive left-wing Joe’s advice? Here goes: the man he calls Lawrence should cut taxes and put more money in people’s pockets because they now have to pay more for their electricity. Right, where do I begin, in between tearing my hair out and wondering whether I will ever live to see the day when Labour, for the first time in my experience, has a leader with the right confluence of intelligence, awareness, experience, and leadership skills? Cutting taxes to give people more spending power is not a left-wing progressive policy. It is a neo-liberal policy. And that’s why it was in the Nationalist Party’s political programme for the last election, but not in the Labour Party’s programme. Left-wing progressive parties raise taxes so as, presumably, to have more to spend on social welfare and the infrastructure, though in the days when the highest tax rate was 95%, we had very little of either.

The government has said that it has revised its commitment to cut taxes for now because it sees rather large storms on the horizon and no doubt, a shrinkage of tax revenue as economic activity slows down. It would be insane to shrink its revenue even further by cutting taxes. At this point, and Muscat should know this, any extra money that goes into people’s pockets is not going to be spent but saved. So cutting taxes will only serve to swell the already considerable amount of money swilling about in bank accounts.

As ‘Lawrence’ explained to Dr Muscat on Xarabank, cutting taxes in the current scenario means cutting expenditure on education and health. The money has to come from somewhere. But Muscat seems not to understand this, because he inhabits that Labour Party world in which money is generated by ‘businessmen’ turning on taps, and where Other People always have money, possibly plucked from the money-tree in their backyard. But for our man Joseph, it’s all about the labels.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.




2 Comments Comment

  1. Drew says:

    Daphne – “Progressive left-wing Joe’s advice? Here goes: the man he calls Lawrence should cut taxes and put more money in people’s pockets because they now have to pay more for their electricity. Right, where do I begin, in between tearing my hair out and wondering whether I will ever live to see the day when Labour, for the first time in my experience, has a leader with the right confluence of intelligence, awareness, experience, and leadership skills? Cutting taxes to give people more spending power is not a left-wing progressive policy. It is a neo-liberal policy. And that’s why it was in the Nationalist Party’s political programme for the last election, but not in the Labour Party’s programme. Left-wing progressive parties raise taxes so as, presumably, to have more to spend on social welfare and the infrastructure, though in the days when the highest tax rate was 95%, we had very little of either.”

    That’s exactly what I thought when Joe said that on Xalatabank. It’s what I hate about the Labour Party: where the hell do they stand? What’s their economic policy? Have they accepted the neoliberal way of thinking or not? If not, please say so. Make your stance clear and stop being populists.

    Regarding the promised income tax cuts, I still think it would make sense for the government to introduce them in this year’s budget. And especially since every union seems to be complaining about the new tariff system, I’m positve the government will be sensible and offer some form of “compensation” in the form of tax cuts. If that means cutting spending, then so be it.

  2. Graham C. says:

    Being the modern and progressive man he is, I think he got it ( ‘will the real prime minister please stand up?’) from here:
    http://www.imeem.com/sandrab012/video/Y8MgxmW3/eminem_the_real_slim_shady_music_video/

Leave a Comment