The One-Word Warriors
The first item on the list when you Google BWSC
It is fascinating, the way the Labour Party resorts to the same brainwashing technique that it has used over the years, expecting it to succeed just because it did so once, in 1996.
This tactic is the seizing on and deployment of a single word (or sometimes three words used as one, like hbiebtalhbieb) as a cipher for some great and obscure evil which then becomes associated in the public mind with the Nationalist Party in government.
Alfred Sant was the first to do this in the early 1990s, when he used words like barunijiet and hofra in a relentless campaign designed to tap into people’s ignorance and baser emotions, while leaving their brains untouched.
It worked then because the use of the word barunijiet stirred up powerful feelings of bitterness, envy and resentment among very many of my own socio-economic group. They then rushed out in droves to vote Labour so that Marin Hili and Joe Gasan would have less money (they thought). Hekk, hekk, hekk, halli nwahhalulhom. Then they were shocked to find themselves hoist by their own petard, rushing out in droves again 22 months later to reverse their decision.
The promise to remove valued added tax was just a part of it. Hdura and lanzit, two very serviceable Maltese words to describe some very Sicilian emotions which are as yet undiscovered by English, was what really did it.
And this, along with the desire to supplant and replace (with themselves, quite possibly) those they perceived as hbiebtalhbieb, who got more than their fair share of cake. So off they went in 1996, the word barunijiet ringing in their ears, to vote Labour quietly and then boast about it only afterwards, when Labour had won and they felt they stood to gain by claiming their share of the victory. If the Nationalists had won, they would have been too mortified to say how they voted.
Apart from that, the one-word tactic hasn’t achieved its aims of eroding support for the Nationalist Party among those electors who make a difference to the party’s fortunes. Support has been severely eroded, yes, but not by use of single words as a cipher for evil and corruption.
That tactic is designed to appeal to the lowest common intellectual denominator, and that is Labour’s natural market anyway. So it ends up merely an exercise in reinforcing morale among the troops, rather than proselytizing among the enemy.
I rush to add that by the lowest common intellectual denominator I don’t mean the working-class. Some of the poorest intellects I encounter in daily life are very proudly possessed and displayed by women who would be slotted by a market researcher into the same socio-economic category as I would be.
You only have to check out some Facebook ‘walls’ to see what I mean. They are the ones who think that in order to be thought smart and clever and different, they must criticise the government. It is a crying shame that they have neither the arguments nor the words to do this, their intellectual development having been arrested largely at the age of 15 or 16, when they left school.
The Labour Party’s current deployment of this hackneyed tactic centres on the use of the acronym BWSC, the corporation which won the power station tender. It-Torca, L-Orizzont and KullHadd, the newspapers owned by Tony Zarb’s union and the Labour Party, use the letters BWSC in their front-page headlines. Super One newscasters and talk-show hosts rabbit on about it all the time.
Joseph Muscat talks about ‘bee double you ess see’ whenever he can, too – on street corners, at press conferences and on radio and television. He doesn’t do so because he thinks his audience actually understands what he means or takes a deep and passionate interest in the tender adjudication process and its myriad complications and technicalities.
He does so for the same reason Alfred Sant talked about mysterious and unnamed barunijiet, leaving the rancid imagination of bitter electors to fill in the blanks with rancorous Chinese whispers and defamatory untruths.
In the intellectually impoverished thoughts of Muscat’s supporters, ‘il-bee double you ess see’ is now a byword for unquantifiable evil, which in these unsophisticated minds takes the sole shape and form of mhux fier – other people taking money when they’re not getting any themselves.
It’s a safe bet that most of the people kvetching about the evils of ‘il-bee double you ess see’ haven’t a clue what the broad points of the issue are, still less the finer points and details in which the devil famously resides.
‘Il-bee double you ess see’ has become just another barunijiet, but with the key difference that the circles in which I used to move, but have time for no longer because they have become an even tackier take on a John Updike novel set among the disengaged and desperate of 1970s US middle-class suburbia, are not eaten up by jealousy because the corporation is not Maltese and they don’t know who to be jealous of.
This even if they felt jealousy for foreigners at all, which they don’t – this peculiarly soul-destroying emotion, as with all backward village societies, being reserved solely for fellow villagers who think they’re someone, who are thought to be getting special privileges and who must, as a consequence, be cut down, trampled on and destroyed so that there is more space for others to be seen and appreciated.
Yesterday, when persons unknown sprayed the letters ‘BWSC’ on the prime minister’s father’s grave, we had the perfect illustration of how this Labour tactic works – or rather, doesn’t. Of course, they might have taken with them a cutting from It-Torca to make sure they had the right letters and in the correct order, but I doubt it.
Constant repetition on the Labour-leaning and Labour-owned media has drilled ‘bee double you ess see’ into their minds. The clue that the print media played a large part in this brainwashing is the fact that, had they listened only to Super One, they would have got it down as BWSE, because that is exactly how lazy Maltese pronunciation has it: bee double you ess eee, rather than bee double you ess (PAUSE) see.
The sort of person who wakes up one morning and thinks ‘I know what I’ll do today: I’ll take a can of spray-paint, drive to the cemetery and spray ‘BWSC’ over gONzIPN’s father’s grave’ might well be the type to take more than a passing interest in the adjudication process of public tenders and in power station technology. But it’s unlikely.
Of one thing only can we be certain: when Labour begins to deploy its one-word-wonder tactic, the morons are out in force. If they’re not on some Facebook ‘wall’, then they’re at the cemetery, armed with a spray-can and a set of letters whose meaning is obscure to them.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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Know thyself. All wisdom begins with self-knowledge and introspection, but sad to say, Maltese people are trained away from self-knowledge from their earliest years. Not only is self-knowledge not encouraged, but it is actively discouraged for fear that it might result in independent thought and the development of analytical skills.
The result is the unfortunate situation you describe, ending equally in people who vandalise graves with letters they do not understand and people who, as you put it, have come to the sexual revolution party four decades too late, creating a ‘social scene’ in Malta that is straight out of The Ice Storm and Couples, except that they no longer bother throwing their housekeys into a bowl.
The common denominator among all these is lack of self-knowledge. If you have no insight into yourself, then you cannot have insight into situations.
Self-knowledge leads to lack of confidence, sadness and despair. Better to be an idiot and live happily.
No wiser words have ever been uttered.
Just to make a comment on a lighter tone, would you mind very much if I asked why you use the words “Sicilian emotions”?
I am reminded of that unforgettable scene from The Godfather Part II (the entire film is unforgettable) when Kay (Diane Keaton) shocks the Godfather (Al Pacino) by informing him she had aborted his child to end “this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for two thousand years”.
Sicilians’ reputation is what it is, rightly or wrongly, but I’ve met not a few Sicilians who are very nice people, intelligent and cultured and do not deserve to be denigrated. I suspect that what you describe as “Sicilian emotions” are common to all humans irrespectively of their ethnic origins or cultural background. Many of us are descendants of Sicilians but it is not because of this that there are undesirable character traits – it is because we belong to the human race.
[Daphne – No, it’s because we come from Sicilian culture, or rather, the Sicilians and the Maltese come from the same culture. Where that culture is left relatively isolated, the result is Gozo or the villages of the Sicilian interior where the Mafia festered and thrived on that culture of fear, secretiveness, self-protection and nihilistic pragmatism. Of course you know plenty of nice Sicilians, just as you probably know plenty of nice Maltese – but those nice Sicilians would be the first to tell you this. As my nice friend’s nice Sicilian husband says, “I don’t take people at face value and I trust nobody, because I grew up in Sicily.” ]
Besides “barunijiet” and “hbieb tal-hbieb”, one must not forget other buzz words or catch phrases like “l-gholi tal-hajja” (1987-1992), “trasparenza” (1996), “tmexxija moderna” (1996), “innehhu l-VAT” (1996), “bidu gdid” (2008) and “korruzzjoni” (2008).
Of course, Labour never really had any serious plan to address any of the issues. They just repeated each term until their supporters put them in everyday parlance.
And then, you had those funny episodes on Net News where they would ask people in Republic Street about their views on those catch phrases and the standard replies were “ma nafx”.
Don’t forget “nifs gdid”.
..or the classic ‘Svizzera fil-Mediterran’
Muscat has nothing to say about the economy and jobs. He cannot say that we’re in a worse situation than the Spain of his model Zapatero. So he tries to keep BWSC on the backburner, with the designer of the ‘new’ Labour torch, Godfrey Grima, writing ‘stories’ about BWSC which he can ‘sell’ to foreign newspapers.
Now we’re been told that BWSC has become a good source of income for one of Joseph Muscat’s advisers, Godfrey Grima. Mr. Grima himself said this on ONE TV while being interviewed by Ms Dalli.
Kemm hu laghqi dan Grima.
U kif:
http://www.maltastar.com/pages/r1/ms10dart.asp?a=8618
The Godfrey and Joseph Mutual Appreciation Society:
http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=113543
This article reminded me of a prosecutor presenting his case before the jury to prove the accused Labour Party is guilty of this crime. It will be difficult for the Labour Party to wriggle out of this argument, unless they call you “wich” and throw in some exclamation marks to prove their point.