I'm uploading this again because it's been pushed off the main page: life in Malta under Gaddafi and friends
Published:
August 26, 2011 at 7:05pm
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This is Eddie approaching the apogee of his career as a statesman.
Within a few months, Malta was to embark on the arduous task of regaining its lost self respect.
Within a few years Malta was turned upside down with water and electricity back in our homes.
Within 18 years of this speech, Malta had clawed back what it had lost in 16 years of Labour and had become a European nation in its own right.
This is now history.
Lest we forget.
What’s the point Daphne? No matter how much you or anyone tries to drive home these sort of things, bringing them up will just be seen as unfair or PN propaganda.
These footage (stolen from the Archives of PBS or MBA) are used to ‘remind’ people of the ‘old’ days but little do you know dear blogger, that these pictures have been prostituted way too much before every election. Now for due impartiality’s sake, little is said especially by your good self about today’s dear blogger that today freedom of expression is so controlled that one has to be careful what to say to a group of friends while having a drink socially…. We are living in a Fascist state where those who are blessed earn a mint while those who are not (no matter what their skills and abilities are) earn a mediocre pay making sure that we make them beg for what’s there’s and rebuking them. Now when the ‘fallen from grace’ person complains to the ‘blessed one’, (about the current affairs of our small island) instantly he/she is tagged as a ‘qerried’ and a ‘negattif’ even if he/she is right on the whinging…. Wake up Blogger and smell the roses… We are not living in 1986 but 2011 and those who live in the past usually miss the opportunities of the future….
Randolf Tzuma’s comment exhibits classic peasant thinking – ‘scarce goods’ theory.
In primitive peasant societies – and Maltese society exhibits many of those traits despite everything – the amount of resources is fixed and stable, so the thinking goes that if you have something more than I do, then you have taken it at my expense and I am going without because of your actions.
Tzuma you must be joking. We are so much living in a Fascist state that you can log on to whichever website you want and you can say, without any fear of admonition or reprimand or revenge, that we’re living in a Fascist state.
I know how ridiculous your statement is because I lived in a fascist state: Malta 1971 to 1987.
Nobody who knew the fear of those times, the fear of speaking, the fear of voicing an opinion, the fear of being ‘noticed’, will ever mistake what we have today for what we had then.
You think that you are owed a living. You think that the jobs other people have have been stolen from you. You are deluded. If that is your attitude, then no wonder you haven’t got the job you want but only the job you deserve.
Our main concern this Summer, when the rest of the world is trying to eke out a living in an economy with 30% or 25% unemployment, while our neighbours in Libya were going through hell, was the buses.
Also interesting reading: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877632-1,00.html
What oratory… what stature! The greatest politician ever to grace this godforsaken land. Makes his recent stance on divorce ever more painful.
Makes Joseph Muscat look like a useless prick, though he’s VERY OBVIOUSLY modelling his way of speaking on old Fenech Adami videos and falling flat.
The least we remember of those horrible days, the better
I don’t agree. We must never, ever, forget those days.
It is our duty, for the well-being of our country, that we even make sure that our children come to know about them.
I know that it is not something to enjoy remembering but we have to make sure that we, and future generations, will never pass through those times again.
Not remember those days? We have a duty to tell our children about those days because those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.
I can never forget those days because I am the product of them: my whole being and wherever I am in the world, I take those days with me because it was through those horrible days and the hardship which my family had to face that I am what I am today.
Why so they can happen again?
No, Ginger, so that come 2013 Joseph will be thrown in a garbage skip as his predecessors were.
The Labour Party cannot win next election because there is that ‘trust’ bit which determines how a voter casts his vote.
Forget polls, forget wishful thinking, forget Jeremiahs even within the Nationalist Party, but when the moment comes, the voters’ intelligence (of the majority) will find in favour of the party which propelled our country forward and away from the shackles of Laboiur governments of the past.
Unhappy as many Labour supporters may be, they cannot re-write history until the old party politics are abandoned and true fresh blood is injected in it to replace the old (and some newer) relics with men and women who espouse true moderate and progressive thinking.
Unfortunately, this new blood is not even a tiny blip on the Labour Party’s radar.
Daphne, as you rightly pointed out today, over two decades later, we still see the likes of Karmenu Vella, Goerge Vella, AST, Joe Debono Grech, etc within the PL’s highest echelons.
The Maltese electorate must use its vote correctly in two years time to oust this mentality from Maltese politics once and for all.
That can still be achieved, if PN would jolt itself out of the rut of the “PN=Gonzi=PN and PN’s Perfect” mantra.
People have evolved and they’re not impressed by bullshit.
The marketing spiel needs to be something like: “Look chaps, we’re the least bad option. Vote to keep Labour out of power and we’ll have some breathing space to so we can govern properly.”
Also interesting reading: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877632-1,00.html
Am I the only one who is irritated by the thinny, whiney voice of Mario Tabone Vassallo (ex PN candidate now turned media person for new Labour?).
I listened to his radio programme ‘Bla Kantunieri’ late last night on One Radio. As has been his custom in recent months, he was ranting on against America, NATO, the west (Malta included) in general and also the Israelis (“theJews”), holding them responsable for every misfortune happening in Africa and the Arab world.
Move over, Ibrahim Moussa.
[Daphne – Is this the man who insists on wearing a bow-tie and speaking only Maltese, even in mixed company?]
We should never forget this.
I had tears in my eyes as I watched this, even now while I’m writing.
When I think what we went through because of the fixations and personal demons of some very dangerous and ignorant people, when I think that we wasted 16 crucial years of our life and that so many, many people’s lives were ruined, starting with my father’s, I feel angry.
But I am also grateful that ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’, and Eddie Fenech Adami did not show up a moment too soon. His bravery, keen sense of right and wrong, and his moral strength changed the course of Malta’s future.
Had things carried on as they were, we would be going down with Gaddafi’s Libya now. We would not be in the European Union, or even democratic.
What upsets me most about Joseph Muscat is not his idiocy, his self-delusion, his ideas of grandeur, but the way he describes that dreadful period in Malta’s history as the Golden Years, “ignoring and rubbishing the pain and damage caused.
For saying that, for belittling the ruining of so many lives, I can never forgive him or vote him.
For half of Malta, they were golden years. That half of Malta must have been a masochistic lot – they liked being punished – no water in the taps, work corps instead of real jobs, having food on the market that in Sicily would be fed to the pigs – the list is endless.
But you see, we were not as badly off as people were in Libya (but getting there) and as long as the hated Nationalists were unhappy then what did it matter that we had no ‘luxuries’?
Also, the Nationalists had no reason to complain, who did they think they were?
So what if a lady in Hamrun was beaten up, served her right, using a blue umbrella was defiance of the first order.
We also had a taste of Mintoffian freedom. We could belong to a trade union but we teachers were locked out for refusing to sign a paper in which we promised not to follow our union’s directives.
Even today I wonder how teachers could have been pro Labour. Almost all MLP education ministers looked upon us as their enemies and showed little respect towards teachers and their union.
The more we remember of those horrible years, the better.
Unbelievable, the hell through which we went during those sixteen frightful years. What a pity that thousands of voters have not the slightest idea of what life was like under Labour.
If the reason for uploading such videos is to rally support for the PN, I think it is counter productive. I watched the video and realised why I don’t feel comfortable any more with the PN; Gonzi is such a let down when compared to Eddie Fenech Adami.
Ronnie’s comment is very illogical and in very bad taste.
But Ronnie is not, certainly a PN supporter. Genuine PN supporters compare Gonzi to Joseph Muscat and not to past PN leaders. And there is no doubt who is the better.