Mintoff would rather have my scorn and contempt than anyone’s pity, still more the pity of those he despised as his inferiors

The widespread inability of people to read personalities, and to interpret characters and situations, will never cease to astound me. We had the most spectacular example of this when the entire hierarchy of the Labour Party got ready to celebrate the collapse of the government after Debono’s vote, and raised its supporters’ expectations sky high.

I see the exact same catastrophic inability to understand and interpret individuals in the ‘let’s condemn the personal attacks on poor Mintoff’ crowd.

You don’t have to be the resident expert in difficult and deeply unpleasant men, as I appear to have become, to work out that Mintoff would much rather have my scorn and contempt than the simpering pity of the ignorant masses he despised and manipulated.

My scorn and contempt he could deal with. He would probably even bask in it. But the ‘jahasra miskin’ pity, the ‘he’s an old man now, leave him alone’ concern? He would hate that. It would enrage him. It would provoke him to a massive display of anger and bullying to show those pitying him where to stuff their pity.

They might even find themselves slashed at and knocked about with his stick.

People who are mocked, scorned and treated with contempt keep their pride and sense of dignity intact. People who are pitied cannot. Mintoff is very much an ‘it is better to be feared and hated than pitied’ kind of person, and I am astonished that even his greatest admirers, the marmalja he treated like scum and like something to be scraped off the sole of his shoe, don’t realise this.

Well, why am I astonished, really. There is so much they just don’t get.

Mintoff’s idea of pure and utter hell, the worst punishment possible he could ever have suffered on this earth, would be the situation shown in this photograph, which his own carer – who should have known this but either didn’t give a damn or uploaded it deliberately because he secretly resents him – displays in his public and wide open Facebook album.

It shows Mintoff, wasted and decrepit, seated in the kind of family dining-room environment he despised, surrounded by those he regarded with contempt as his gross inferiors, all simpering at him in that ‘ara kemm u helu miskin’ way. In another photograph, one of those simpering individuals is shown about to feed him some cake.

Would Mintoff have hated it if he knew what was going on? Would he hell. The blasphemy would be heard all the way to Hal Luqa. Me and my contempt he could deal with. It was the sort of thing he got off on. And anyone who can’t see that can’t learn the lessons of history or interpret people’s behaviour and actions.

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This comment was posted here this morning by MayMintoffrotinhell, in response to a ‘leave him alone miskin’ Mintoff admirer:

I think Daphne’s ridiculing him because he was the worst prime minister Malta will ever know and because he ruined so many lives and now lives a ruined life himself.

Face it. What does the man enjoy most? The simpering pity of people like you or the ability to bully and terrorise? He’s lost the latter and resents the former.

As Anglu Farrugia once told him on Facebook: ad miltos anni, perit.