We were not forced to learn Arabic but if one wanted to further his/her studies at university, an O-level certificate in Arabic was compulsory to have irrespective of the course chosen.

The bone of contention here is not the teaching of Arabic at school but the COMPULSORY teaching of Arabic to Maltese children to please Gaddafi.

Without an ‘O’ level in it, you couldn’t take your studies further, unless you could afford to study abroad. I don’t see any silver linings there, only some serious Gaddafi butt-licking, as unsavoury as that image might be.

Che centra major HQ?

Baxxter, I replied to your comment about no intelligency agency being interested in Malta. Who mentioned the Malta Today article?

You did. I didn’t.

Here are a few things that Mintoff didn’t do:

encourage private enterprise, rather than tearing down existing businesses;

shore up banks, rather than bankrupting them;

encourage initiative, rather than dependency;

create opportunity, rather than rationing it out;

open up the possibility of education to all, rather than creating an inverse elite.

There’s more, but that will suffice for now.

Mr Borg
How difficult is it for you not to recognise sarcasm when it’s staring you in the face?

Goes without saying that we’re different :)

And that makes Malta a major HQ?

Look, Stagno-Navarra is desperate for some major story. The truth is Malta did jack shit in the military campaign. Dinghies, radios and tinned food. Yeah right. Now I know why Borg Pisani’s mission was a total shambles.

Absolutely. It’s the hamallu gene at work.

If he’s my friend, I’m on back-slapping level. If he’s my enemy, I’m into name-calling. Case in point? Xarabank. “Peppi” wants to ask a question to Herr Doktor Theophraste Fotherington-Ubergang. So he goes and puts his hand on his shoulder in the chummiest way possible and it’s “Thé, ahna sirna nafu li int trabbi l-fniek, hux veru?”.

Buried among the useless proverbs in First Aid to English was a useful one: Familiarity breeds contempt.

“We had nothing else”…maybe we didn’t have all the flashy things we have today but we certainly had a whole lot more than we previously had.

[Daphne – Maybe we’re different, Frans, but none of that was worth anything without freedom from fear.]

He took beggars of the streets made sure the elderly and redundant we cared for. Don’t get me wrong by today’s standards we’d be the equivalent of some shitty town in Poland.But you do have to start from somewhere to reform a country and you don’t start by making nice flashy things.

You say that ‘Mintoff raised taxes’ like it was a feather in his cap. Yes, he raised taxes all right, from the very people who could potentially provide productive jobs, but instead did everything in their power to stash the money where Mintoff couldn’t lay his hands on it.

May I point out that even though he introduced one labour corps after another, the number of unemployed workers always hovered around the 10,000 mark.

But, worst of all, Mintoff introduced the philosophy, which is proving so hard to eradicate, that the country can afford to provide everything for free; the mentality of social services and handouts ‘from the cradle to the grave’. It was never going to be sustainable, especially when it was partly (mostly?) funded by the Gaddafi millions which could, and did, dry up.

It raised a whole generation of people who became experts at milking the system, without doing much in the way of work or self-improvement. The less you appear to have, the more benefits you are eligible to, so why bother with hard work?