Tell us something we DON'T know, sir
Oh, really? Black Monday should never have happened? Who would have thought it.
The leader of the opposition, while hectoring people about media ethics at the invitation of the Tumas Foundation for Education in Journalism, said that ‘the events of Black Monday should never have happened’.
This earth-moving statement made the headlines in The Times today: BLACK MONDAY SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED – LABOUR LEADER.
It is at times like this that I feel a strong urge to pack up and leave for pastures new. I feel I am living in a parallel universe, where people are hypercritical about irrelevant things while ignoring the bleeding great elephant in the room, the one that’s sitting on their sofa and guzzling the contents of the drinks cupboard.
Is there anybody out there who thinks that Black Monday should have happened? If so, raise your hand so that we may see you.
Muscat is so far up his own butt that, like a 1970s rock-star who’s tripped on far too much acid, he thinks that every meaningless word he utters is a golden pearl of wisdom dropping from his lips, to be slowly taken in and repeated – man – by the wasted groupies at his feet.
Either that, or he’s one of those cunning people who are just plain thick. The world is crammed full of them.
Why state the obvious? We were not under the impression that Joseph Muscat thinks the events of Black Monday should have happened, so he didn’t need to tell us that he thinks so. That breaking and entering, vandalism, theft, arson and endangering the lives of others are criminal acts is not a subjective opinion, but fact. If we are speaking morality rather than law, the first three are deeply wrong and the last two are evil.
You do not need hindsight to assess whether Black Monday should or shouldn’t have happened, and especially not 30 years of it. What concerns me most is that, like many Labour obsessives – Mintoffjani, actually, because that is how Muscat was raised – he assesses the events of 15 October 1979 not for their intrinsic evil, but for their consequences.
The thinking goes that they should never have happened because they were bad for Labour. They should never have happened because they condemned Labour to opposition for decades (not quite, because half the population kept right on rushing to vote for them). They should never have happened because the Nationalist Party benefitted from Black Monday, not suffered.
I cannot believe what I am hearing, what I am reading, even from the Leader of the Opposition. It is so distressing to live on an island where most people appear to be only partially educated and with wholly undeveloped thinking skills, no matter how many university degrees they acquire. It is frightening to sense that so many Maltese are probably amoral and that others cannot see amorality for what it is, confusing it with immorality or justifying it as the entitlement of others to their opinion.
You get the feeling that beneath the gloss, the material goods, the letters after the names, the information technology, the cars, the houses and the trips, people here are just as primitive as they were in 1979.
Forming an opinion on whether it is wrong or right to set fire to an office building with its employees still inside, with some of them left trapped upstairs after the stairs collapsed, does not depend on partisan interpretation. It depends on whether one is a civilised human being or not.
I cannot imagine why The Times po-facedly reported Muscat’s ridiculous words in a headline, unless it was to poke fun at him and show him up for his dull intellect and doubtful morality.
“I made a historic apology,” he told us. Really? When and where? Funny that – I missed it.
And to call your own words historic – I mean, really.
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“I feel I am living in a parallel universe, where people are hypercritical about irrelevant things while ignoring the bleeding great elephant in the room, the one that’s sitting on their sofa and guzzling the contents of the drinks cupboard”.
That’s one hell of a sentence!
What infuriates you, I think, is that so many people are ready to let Joseph Muscat get away with it scot-free. As long as he makes the right noises, extends the right hand, winks in the right way…people take him at face value without as much as a critical assessment. Qalha mela orrajt. Stedinnha r-reception mela kollox sew. Qalilna li ahna familja wahda mela kulhadd kuntent….
You hate the fact that people aren’t as cynical as you about Joseph Muscat and simply take him literally.
Is that more or less it?
[Daphne – Not cynical – the word I would choose, because it is more accurate, is perceptive. It isn’t only where Muscat is concerned that lots of people are unperceptive. It is with many other individuals and situations. They seem unable to read glaring clues or even notice them at all, to properly interpret words, behaviour, expressions, developments – even when the meaning should be as clear as written language. Things are taken literally and at face value, as you said. It helps me understand why lots of people here take decisions and do things which end up damaging their lives or careers and then they can’t understand why it’s ‘happened’. I suppose this is a natural extension of that other problem: total lack of self-awareness.
It’s an endless source of frustration to me that so many don’t know that no one at all – not a prospective boyfriend or employee, still less a political leader – should be taken at face value, but must be assessed on the basis of character traits and personality. Let’s leave politics aside for one moment: it applies to every other area of life. A few years ago, I sat and listened to a woman crow with self-assured satisfaction about the solidity of her relationship with her lover, who had left his wife and two extremely young children for her. This woman had had a child of her own with him, and thought that she and her daughter were her lover’s ‘real’ family, as intended by fate, and that he would never leave her now that he had found his one true love. I remember thinking to myself ‘Honey, leaving the second lot is a hell of a lot easier than leaving the first lot, so don’t count on it.’ And sure enough…]
@DF It’s not cynicism. As Shaw would have it “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven’t got it.” – and I’d hate to think you are on the wrong side of Shaw’s division!
Accurately seeing the old man behind the veil posing as a wizard is a gift for the very few. What baffles me is how some people can selectively see this happening only on the PL side. The latest generations of Nationalist politicians seem to find an equally unperceptive audience to woo with their hollow promises and nonexistent plan. It’s the Maltese version of the Delaware Effect – we manage to exploit the greatest weaknesses of the democratic system to our own disadvantage.
What Muscat should have said is whether those responsible were ever brought forward, were ever punished for their deeds. Oh and if you read some of the comments on timesofmalta.com, the little elves are blaming the Nationalist Party supporters for PROVOKING the government. Excuse me for breathing! What provocation, may I ask? Going to a mass meeting, buying In-Taghna, what? These people make me physically sick, we were scared to the buy a newspaper because of repercussions; we had to pay (I never did) a minister or some bezzuzlu to buy a colour TV. I wish someone out there would give me an exact definition of provocation. When I remember what my family had to go through because of our political beliefs, and the transfers my late father had to endure when he was a police sergeant, I get so worked up and angry. But I hope today’s youngsters get to to know what we went through because this is history, whether Joseph Muscat and his cronies like it or not.
Apology my foot! How long ago has it been since that master of authorised political violence, the ex head of police, left prison only to a hero’s welcome, organised by many (and I am not sure if Muscat was with that sorry pack) prominent figures of the current Labour Party?
@Joseph Micallef – my sentiments exactly. The ex head of police was one of the men who made my late father’s life hell – and my father was only trying to do his duty.
Rita, using today’s terminology I could easily describe my late father as a walking Maltese GPS. With all the ridiculous transfers he got, he knew all road networks – urban and rural!
Daphne, this is unworthy of you. Labour always respected and defended human rights, and between 1972 and 1987 Malta was a shining beacon of democracy and rule of law. This is proved ipso facto by the fact that Mintoff was awarded the prestigious Ghaddafi Human Rights Award, picked up by on his behalf by the silver-haired KMB. This was a great honour for our country, and we as a nation should be proud of our Great Leader’s achiev———————– TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED—————————–
Actually, I don’t care for an apology from Joseph Muscat. I just wish they’d stop trying to re-write history and, for once, acknowledge the facts as they happened.
They won’t stop. Look at the Grima brothers. They like to think that their interpretation of events (past and present) is gospel truth. But they won’t convince us who lived through those terrible years.
So why is the Labour Party holding back from returning the properties which the 1970s government gave it abusively? Dawn mhux ukoll qatt ma misshom ittiehdu? Il-Pl ghamel minn kollox biex icahhad lil poplu tas-Siggiewi milli jiehu lura l-post fejn hemm il-kazin ghal uzu ta’ centru tal-anzjani.
What vision! What a statement! Not even the earthquake in the Philippines should have happened – but that does not change a fraction of the fact that it did happen. What we want Muscat to tell us is that the government of the 1970s was run by a corrupt bunch of people, abetted by thugs and criminals, some of them in police uniform, who ran the country through fear, vengeance and violence. Only when Muscat has the balls to say that – without any disclaimers – will we, who survived those years start to give any credence to his vague words.
I don’t really care what he says. I’m more concerned about what he does and how he does it. He is still surrounded by some of the MPs who let those atrocities happen and he is bringing back more who were left out or sent away by Alfred Sant.
And what about the way the Labour Party and their partners the GWU ruined the Dockyard in the 70s? When is an apology coming for that tragedy?
I think that people are perceptive but they just don’t want to see and acknowledge the truth. They interpret events to sustain their vision and desires but in their hearts they know the truth. They know that the PL hasn’t changed if only for the simple reason that they are still shackled by people like the two deputy leaders. But they wish for change and victory so much that they start believing it is really happening.
Alfred Sant painstakingly got rid of a lot of rubbish from the MLP. The ‘sorry’ which he never uttered is louder than Joseph’s ‘apology’. In a matter of six months Joseph littered his progressive party with the rubbish Alfred threw away decades ago. Pity that the likes of Lino Spiteri and George Abela were elbowed out.
Hardly a week ago we saw a Labour wreath-laying ceremony at the foot of Lorry Sant’s monument in a Paola public garden. And only the day before yesterday we saw Ronnie Pellegrini (one of Lorrie’s loyal followers) at the MOVE launch at the UoM – distributing progressive MOVE condoms, one assumes.
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JM as PM in three year’s time…what do you think the consequences for Malta would be? high unemployment? violence?]
[Daphne – Acute embarrassment.]
Daphne. Won’t happen. He’s got over 3 years to screw up, By this time next year, he’ll be up to his neck in doo doo. He will, however, retain that ridiculously childish smirk.
Hysterical…acute embarrassment? Isn’t that what is the case already? Brussels banging its big drum about how Malta’s government is ignoring EU prescriptions in spite of Malta’s lauding its inclusion in the EU ethic? Isn’t that what socially sensible people should be right now?
Do NP transgressions supersede LP transgressions? I don’t think so; they’re both the same. It’s just that one represents the interests of wealthy classes and the other, the working class, i.e.the ignoramuses. Yet what keeps an economy ticking over? The working classes. Love ’em or hate ’em, they are the workhorses. They are the ones who keep the economy ticking over. Middle-to-upper-classes pocket national wealth and run away with it…without a sod’s thought about national interests. Show me an upper-crust individual who recognises Malta’s uniqueness and sticks his/her head out to preserve it…besides Astrid, that devil of yours. AwaIting your perspicacious comments about upper crust vis-a-vis FAA…
[Daphne – Everyone at Din L-Art Helwa for a start. It’s hardly a working class organisation. In my experience, it’s the working classes who have scant respect for the preservation of heritage, because theirs is a survivalist mentality. It might be changing, but only just. You make the mistake of thinking that just because people have money, they cease to be working-class, and that anyone with money is ‘upper crust’. In a couple of generations, yes, but it takes a couple of generations, especially when there is no willingness to change one’s working-class manners, mores and values. Also, please don’t get too excited about the romanticism of Mrs Vella as crusading ‘upper crust’ heroine – it’s more a case of a bored housewife stumbling on something to do. If she’d had a job to start with, none of this would have happened.]
Daphne, you forgot to mention that the article was written by Kurt Sansone. In that case, logic would be cpmpletely absent.
Does this guy have a lot of say at The Times these days? He is writing most of the news articles relating to politics, where the bias is quite transparent.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20091016/local/muscat-trying-to-rewrite-history-pn
On the news this morning “Joseph Muscat says that it’s the PN that should apologise for the events of the 70s/80s era”, According to his logic if the PN hadn’t complained so much – after all why all the fuss about a bomb here or there, wrecking the opposition leader’s home, the curia, the law courts, the MUT building, testing tear gas on people attending a meeting in Floriana, attacking a lady in Hamrun because her umbrella was blue – the list is endless – nothing of this would have happened. For Joseph Muscat these were just pinpricks. I wonder what he would sanction were he to become prime minister? One thing he might change is official ceremonies. He hates them – maybe he’ll be organising free meals at Macdonald’s instead.
You asked if there anybody out there who thinks that Black Monday should have happened. That assumes that the perpetrators repented. Somehow I doubt it.
The problem with little Joey is not “[He thinks his statements are worth repeating], or he’s one of those cunning people who are just plain thick. ” as you put it.
It’s that he knows what the people around him want to hear and says that. The problem is that the people around him and the population at large are two differing groups so he ends spending time doing damage control that he could have avoided had he been cunning in the first place.
I wonder if anyone who worked with him before could be asked about this … not at Super 1, obviously.