The Golden Years, when we made the international news for the wrong reasons
Joseph Muscat's international secretary in China in 1972 with Mintoff and Hua Guofeng. And is that Karmenu Vella in between?
How many of us knew that Dom Mintoff, who liked to present himself as the son of paupers, went to a skola tal-knisja, De La Salle College?
That surprising piece of information is contained in the last paragraph of this article.
Time magazine, 24 September 1984
Malta: School’s Out – Mintoff takes on an old enemy
In 13 years as Prime Minister of Malta’s Labor government, Dom Mintoff has steered his rocky Mediterranean island-nation in an ever more Easterly direction. Once a firm friend of its former colonial master, Britain, and an important port of call for NATO warships, nonaligned Malta these days boasts such friends as the Soviet Union and North Korea. Mintoff, 68, severed defense ties with London in 1979, placed former NATO fuel-storage facilities at the service of Soviet ships, and, last March signed a threeyear, $260 million trade agreement with Moscow.
Now Mintoff is taking on his perennial enemy, the Roman Catholic Church. In May the Prime Minister decreed that private schools in Malta will not be allowed to charge tuition when classes begin early next month. The move will affect the country’s 19 church-run secondary schools, which enroll 25% of high-school-age children. The church schools have been charging a relatively modest fee, $214 a student, set by law in 1972. Last month the government went further, closing eight leading Catholic academies and creating four state-run substitutes.
Mintoff defends the measures as being necessary to stamp out elitism. Senior Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, Mintoff s probable successor, insists that the church can afford to fund its schools and that parents should be relieved of the burden of tuition. Asks Bonnici: “What is immoral in providing free education?”
Opponents, however, see the move as the latest government attempt to break the power of the church in Malta, whose population of 400,000 is predominantly Catholic. Last year the state seized church real estate and Mintoff banned visits by Archbishop Joseph Mercieca to public schools and prisons. The Prime Minister has also given students at state schools preference in admission to the island’s only university and ended government grants to church schools.
None of those moves has touched off as much outrage as the tuition ban. Parents, clergymen and members of the opposition Nationalist Party have staged protest rallies and filed lawsuits to halt the closings. Opposition Leader Eddie Fenech Adami has vowed to send his children to unlicensed church schools. Archbishop Mercieca warns that if the tuition ban is allowed to stand, “education will surrender to indoctrination.”
The Maltese have reason for worry. In his drive to turn Malta into a socialist state, Mintoff has grown increasingly authoritarian. He keeps the local press tightly reined and prohibits all coverage of Adami’s Nationalist Party. Businessmen complain of rising government interference in their affairs. Though Malta apparently has no political prisoners, any citizen may be detained for 48 hours without charge. Says a leading Nationalist: “Mintoff doesn’t treat us as the loyal opposition, but as the enemy.”
Mintoffs assault on the church may be designed at least in part to distract attention from economic problems. The unemployment rate has been estimated at close to 20%, and tourism is down. Despite the huge trade deal with the Soviets, not a single ruble’s worth of merchandise has been exchanged so far. “It’s a very traditional pattern for the Soviets,” said a State Department official. “Massive trade agreements, good publicity, then nobody pays attention to the follow-up.”
The Vatican has broken off an attempt to mediate the tuition dispute. Maltese parents, defying a ban on private contributions to the schools, have raised $1.2 million, which will pay the bills until December. “If parents send their children back in October, we shall continue with our work,” says Brother Martin Borg, headmaster of De la Salle College, whose former students include Mintoff. “Our doors will be open.”
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Indoctrination was and remains Labour’s permament policy. That policy applies to both education and the media.
During the 70s / 80s they tried to dismantle free education system, and burnt The Times building down, while today they are trying to block or stop this blog from operating.
I attended a state school – Junior Lyceum – where the Libyan teachers teaching Arabic turned these classes into propaganda machines in favour of Ghaddafi, where the headmaster was a canvasser for George Vella, where there were students who could not write (did they sit for any exams?), and where a number of sons of Labour personalities (Chris Cardona was one of them) were admitted to the Junior Lyceum without sitting for any exam.
“…while today they are trying to block or stop this blog from operating.”
How? By expressing disagreement with it? Can you be specific and describe exactly what steps the Labour Party is taking so that this blog goes offline? Don’t just repeat slogans you’ve heard elsewhere. Be concrete. What is the danger that this blog disappears?
[Daphne – Please don’t be fatuous, Albert. There are calls every day for me to be stopped, shut down, condemned by the prime minister, and I regularly receive anonymous death threats from – what else – Labour supporters. Also, if you read the stream of comments under Saviour Balzan’s videoblogs and other anti-Daphne sites, you will see quite clearly the incitement to hatred that has led, in the past, to violent acts committed against me and policemen stationed at my gate. The Labour Party fundamentally does not comprehend freedom of expression, and its supporters are genuinely perplexed that I should be ‘allowed’ to carry on.]
Albert,
I suppose Time got it all wrong?
Also, once again, what’s your justification for me (and hundreds of others) having to study in hiding and while your precious Labour tried to deny me an education?
Can’t answer? Didn’t think so.
This is the “GLORIOUS PAST” that Labour is now (2011) bragging about
I remember reading this article in Tripoli airport when it was published. I also remember pointing out the contents to Labour-leaning ‘colleagues’ who reiterated with ”U iwa, dawn tat-Time f’hiex iz-**** jifhmu? Dawk zgur imhallsin minn tal-muccu u l-knisja.”
Doesn’t look like things have changed at all.
I have a huge hunch that the writer of the above article was none other than our liver-spotted friend, Godfrey Grima, who was in those day, for some reason, anti Dom Mintoff.
I wonder why? Does anyone know?
[Daphne – He did not write for Time. Time did not use stringers.]
There is nothing surprising about the son of paupers going to a church school, since that is what they were created for, after all. One of Mintoff’s daughters even taught at De La Salle for many years.
[Daphne – My point was, Peter, that Mintoff was NOT the son of paupers, and anybody with the remotest bit of intelligence would have been able to work this out. Look at his extended family down to the third generation, for starters. Look at the fact that be went to university, not to work at the dockyard. His mother was a moneylender. Did you know that?]
Maybe that is why he ‘nationalised’ the banks.
I am fairly well acquainted with Mintoff’s genealogy, as it happens. My point is that there is nothing inconsistent with Mintoff posing as a man of the people, albeit not particularly effectively, and going to a church school.
Indeed, I would imagine that is where he made many of his first proletarian chums in the first place, given that so many De La Salle old boys came from the towns around the school.
You appear to think I am sympathetic to Mintoff over this, which could hardly be the case since I effectively lost a year’s education because of the Labour government’s antediluvian stance.
And since you are trawling through the archives, you might be interested in this article and letter in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Interesting that we still seem to be having the same conversations:
Democracy in danger, Maltese claims
Democracy in Malta is in imminent danger of collapse unless both of the island state’s political parties can reach a speedy agreement, opposition leader Eddie Fenech-Adami said yesterday.
Violence is clearly possible if political reforms are not soon made by the ruling Socialist Labor Party, he told a press conference in Toronto.
If a negotiated solution is not forthcoming, “I think we could be heading for a major confrontation and there could even be violence,” he said.
Mr. Adami, 48, leader of the rightist Nationalist Party, said the first priority in renewing democracy in Malta is calling elections and scrapping electoral boundaries, which he said were gerrymandered by the Government of Prime Minister Dom Mintoff.
The pro-European Economic Community Nationalist Party, which polled 51 per cent of the votes, secured only 31 of the 65 parliamentary seats in the 1981 election.
Mr. Adami argued that chronic unemployment among the 320,000 people of Malta, which he put at 18 per cent, and widespread dissatisfaction with the Government’s intervention in the economy, obliged Mr. Mintoff to begin negotiations with the opposition, which boycotted parliament after the election until March of this year.
He said the Government has refused his party access to the country’s electronic media and stymied attempts to broadcast from nearby Sicily. In addition, the Government has tried to restrict his access to print and made life difficult for foreign journalists seeking interviews with the opposition.
Mr. Adami said he is in Canada to visit the Maltese community, made up of about 25,000 immigrant islanders and about the same number of first-generation Maltese Canadians, and that he has met several Cabinet ministers, including Multiculturalism Minister James Fleming.
He said his party, unlike Mr. Mintoff’s, has no differences with the Roman Catholic Church, once a paramount force in the political culture of Malta.
Mr. Mintoff accuses the church of being too dominant in education and property and has closed its two hospitals and two church teachers’ colleges, as well as severing the theology faculty from the University of Malta, Mr. Adami said.
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
June 27, 1983 Monday
Maltese democracy never better, reader says
Re: Democracy in Danger, Maltese Say (May 28):
Ignatius Saliba’s letter (June 8) concerning the Maltese Nationalist Party’s “social-democracy” and the decline of democracy in Malta is not only naive and uninformed, but false and reactionary.
The Nationalist Party, although slightly more moderate than seven years ago, is still one that favors the old order. It was Dom Mintoff’s Labor Party since the 1971 election that initiated Malta’s modernization schemes. The Nationalist Party with its allies (the Catholic Church and the Maltese bourgeois) has always done its best to resist any progressive reforms in such diverse fields as education, women’s rights, censorship, wage laws, all types of social services and NATO military operations.
Malta today has never been more democratic, even in the liberal sense of the word. The Maltese worker has a better chance of advancement compared to his counterpart in the sixties when the ruling Nationalist Party cry was, “One must emigrate, it’s the only way.”
The present Labor Government does not infringe on the opposition’s right to hold huge public meetings (which the PN is so proud of), or the right to criticize the Government and the country at every turn, whether in Malta or abroad.
The slight moderate turn in the PN occurred following its defeat at the polls in 1976. The PN had no choice, since Malta’s socio-economic structure had become more modern and the PN remained antiquated even by Maltese standards. The PN now realizes that it has to give the public at least a minimum of what they gained under the Labor-Socialist administrations since 1971.
The Nationalist Party remains the protector of the old status quo and the obnoxious Maltese bourgeoisie – a definite party of the right, currently saving “democracy” from the rights of divorce and full free education for all.
Noel Paul Agius
Mississauga, Ont.
The present International Secretary of the PL can be seen in the background. That’s thirty-nine years ago, in China, with Hua Guofeng.
He’s still around, another living fossil in PL’s ranks.
And is that Karmenu Vella in front of AST ?
Yes, that’s Karmenu Vella in front of Alex Sceberras Trigona.
The most amazing thing is that since 1972, China has made dramatic political changes. The Partit Laburista hasn’t: same leaders, same philosophy.
Hua Guofeng rose from the ranks in the 70s but was eventually removed from power in 1981 – 30 years ago – and never made a come back, until his death in 2008. In contrast, those Labour fossils in the background in the picture are still lurking for power.
His mother was a money lender and Dom a money grabber.
Where is the war-damage money, Dom?
Ghalhekk minn dejjem kien u ghadu wicc il-lira.
When I read about Chavez and Venezuela, I think to myself – humanity never learns.
Human nature has innate failings which were probably a great benefit in our evolutionary years but which have little place in modern society. Nevertheless, these are inbuilt instincts that are unlikely to be “bred out” but can only be countered by a relatively high level of intelligent reasoning, resulting in self-restraint.
Sadly, very few possess the capability.
It must be so. Mintoff was phenomenally popular and glorified (and still is) by at least half of the country, and at least another half of the remainder would still be susceptible to his “attractions” were they simply not born into a Nationalist family.
Same with Chavez, he was also voted in, let us not forget, again off the back of policies based on the crudest of human animal instincts.
I grew up in a staunch Mintoffjan family and although i don’t remember those days, I still regard them as dark decades of our recent history.
Having learned and able to make up my own mind, today I’m a proud anti-socialist and although I never voted for PN I think we are to be grateful to them for liberating the nation from such fervent socialism.
However, I still regard Mintoff with gratitude for smashing the influence of the church institution. Yes, he was authoritarian and I hate him for that, beside of course I detest him for his economic and foreign policies.
But crushing the church authority is something that anyone who treasures liberty must remember, and Mintoff was a pillar in such modest accomplishment. He didn’t do enough of course, otherwise we wouldn’t argue about the introduction of divorce in the 2011, but at least he tried.
Unfortunately, the power vacuum left by the British and the Church was occupied by the wrong people and to our misfortune, this nation is today bankrupt in every aspect!
[Daphne – I don’t know how you can explain away the persution of a religious organisation in the name of freedom. It is the precise opposite. There is a clear distinction between keeping church and state separate and infringing the rights of a church or its members, rights which should have been guaranteed under freedom of worship. The fact that a church or religous has lots of members/believers does not make it OK to persecute it, no more than it would be OK had the Roman Catholic Church been the minority religion in Malta as it was in England in the 17th century.]
One has to admit however that the Roman Catholic Church did not exactly play nice and fair either. It used its full nuclear arsenal just because it felt threatened by Protestantism or secularism.
I am hesitant to judge some of Mintoff’s actions in this regard by today’s standards. Maybe it was necessary back then.
[Daphne – You are thinking in a most conservative way. The means to reduce the influence of religion is education, not violence against or aggression towards religion. The more educated a people are, the less influence religion has in their lives.]
So you believe that Malta is actually a secular country?
[Daphne – Yes, definitely. All our laws and systems are those of a secular country, except for that censorship board thingy. It’s the people who don’t have a secular mindset, and the authorities react to that. If you analyse the situation, you’ll see this: look at the way people talk and behave. It’s a very odd mixture of extreme conservatism with an outlandish approach to ‘mixing it up’ in sexual and family matters. And there is an innately poor understanding of what democracy means.]
I would toss in the blasphemy laws (vilification of religion as they so delicately calls it). The fact that they prescribe different punishments for different religions kind of negates that a bit.
So, yeah, secular at large, but still lacking.
If we truly were a secular nation…then we wouldn’t assist to the current fiasco of the divorce debate in 2011.
[Daphne – ‘Nation’ means the people, not the government.]
Officially we might be a secular nation, but in reality we’re far from it.
The whole ruling elite of the nation are products of the church. Even self-proclaimed liberals such as Joseph Muscat are as such.
And yes, church schools are the root of the whole thing. They don’t educate our children, but constantly brainwash them to become products in safeguarding the ruling elite interests.
Secularism is indeed the issue, around the whole divorce debate. Those against divorce are not in such position to protect the family and all the hypocrisy they are dishing out, they are simply threatened that the introduction of divorce might translate into another step towards a true form of secularism.
Not to making sweeping statements, Daphne, but if that were the case, then they would legalize abortion “in the case your daughter sleeps with an Arab or black man”. I’ve heard that opinion from 3 people today and I was only out for three-quarters of an hour.
That is exactly why I choose to put it that way, because with the lack of secularism it is the people that will suffer from the deprivation of individual liberty, not the bureaucrats in government.
Individual liberties stop where the common good commences. And minorities must never overrule majorities.
[Daphne – You’ve got your democracy in a bit of a twist. The rights of a minority must be safeguarded. This does not equate to minority rule.]
God forbid if ever we allow the small section of perverts in our midst to dictate the way we live and act. Society is based on families and families are based on sound values.
Break one of these and goodbye to the Malta we know. It would be like living in Denmark where the rates for suicides is enormous.
[Daphne – Perverts? My, my. There are a lot of suicides here too, you know. And lots of people on pills for depression and anxiety, so don’t run off believing that it’s paradise, because it’s not. Living in a small community with no escape is actually far more stressful than living in a metropolis, for the same reasons that animals in cages sometimes go nuts under the stress and confinement and end up scratching out their own fur or banging their heads against the bars. Cabin fever.]
..“If parents send their children back in October, we shall continue with our work,” says Brother Martin Borg, headmaster of De la Salle College, whose former students included Mintoff”.
Following De la Salle Mintoff attended the church seminary where the antipathy towards the then rector Mgr. Gonzi first started.
The ungrateful Mintoff later made sure to get even with Archbishop Gonzi and made it his mission.
The archbishop’s interference with Mintoff’s plans for integration with Great Britain was the proverbial straw. Imagine, if Mintoff succeeded, our national flag today would have been the Union Jack and we would not only not pay students while attending university or college, but we would charge them some e40,000 each for a degree, the VAT would be 21% and pensions and salaries frozen or in some cases reduced!
The irony is that we would have become members of the EU a long time ago thus the MLP would have been deprived of embarking on an anti-EU campaign.
Destiny thankfully deemed otherwise, and we still proudly fly our Maltese flag, have survived the global recession quite nicely and still argue about wanting more for less (or free) while other much larger countries struggle to keep their (financial) head above waters.
Thanks to the NP governments of the last 23 years we have avoided the serious woes other countries are experiencing, we have low unemployment and an infrastructure which is infinitely superior to what the NP government found when it defeated the Socialist regime in 1987.
During the Church schools saga I had the CID calling at my house because I was suspected of having private lessons being given at home. Those were the days when we had lost all freedom of speech and which I am afraid we shall be returning to.
Would you know if the Brazen Cap weilding moron and his “leader” have been invited to this?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/
8327989/Kim-Jong-il-celebrates-69th-birthday.html
Reminds me of the only time Malta was mentioned on the brilliant UK satire show “Mock the week”. They had pictures from Gadaffi’s birthday party, highlighting the fact that there was only a single leader of a western country present – President George Abela of Malta.
Any idea what school Mintoff’s children attended. I doubt it was a government school.
We should all be concerned about why, how and when history is being revised.
It is being revised because facts about our recent history are uncomfortably ugly: the ugly years of the Malta Labour Party brought hardship to Malta. Mintoff aped a number of close regimes in the non-Aligned and other alliances: Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, China at the height of its murderous cultural revolution, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Tito, Gaddafi (our friendly colonel to the south of us), and others.
Labour’s past can be best understood not as the foundation of modern Malta, a Mintoffian myth anyway, but if compared to, for instance, Mugabe’s politics and tactics which are still making news today.
In common with the way Mintoffian colleagues ran their countries, Malta experienced repression, violence, corruption, the loss of civil liberties, not to mention a floundering economy. During the 1970s and 1980s, we also experienced the beginning of terror attacks, bombings and assassinations.
Some people also disappeared. Others had to go into exile. Some of Malta’s best minds risked all they had to start life again away from what was becoming the Mediterranean Cuba.
These were Labour’s glory days. It is all so sinister now to think that a few people are out to revise history. It is sad that our historians stand spineless in all of this. They shy away from moral issues in a most unethical way.
Not to write history is tantamount to supporting this revisionism. It is a dereliction of a historian’s duties. Perhaps our history department should be closed down! And for those disgruntled few who do not like to discuss the past, or who think that the past is not relevant to the political development of our future, let them note that their abdication from their moral duties to remember is an abdication from their responsibilities towards present and future generations.
The greatest nations of the world are those that actively remember, not just their dead, but also their collective past. The Maltese must stop being petty, take their place among nations and face the future with the optimism of the lessons learned from the past, however ugly a history lesson has to be! It is a sign of social, cultural and political decline that some of us choose to be guided by a terrible past which they glorify.
Nelson Mandela showed us the way. Truth and reconciliation are what different generations need to develop their identity, and move into the future. But the signs we now see in Labour are those of decadence and missed visions. Will Malta’s future be very much like Malta under the Malta Labour Party? Did we not learn anything from our history? Should we continue to trivialize our past?
I have been considering my voting options for the coming general election, but I cannot ignore a factual past through which many of us have been made to suffer.
Going through above blog the name of Furtu Selvatico came to mind. Can anyone elucidate further please.? I am sure he deserves a mention.