I just can’t believe they haven’t changed for the better
This is my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, today.
I lived the first 23 years of my life, bar the initial six which really don’t count, in a Labour hell. The worst of it was not the economic disaster, the lack of jobs and opportunities, and the consumer nightmare.
No. The worst was the perversion or destruction of every one of our pillars of democracy, and the removal of safeguards against widespread abuse.
The individual was completely vulnerable to the excesses and depredations of the state. Despite having an elected parliament, we had no democracy whatsoever.
Almost every one of our rights was trampled upon, we could seek no redress and there was nobody to save The People from themselves and their poor choices at the polls. It was a disaster, and Malta made the news regularly, for all the wrong reasons, in those European countries which had true democracy and not just the parliamentary sort.
So I am not surprised at anything that Labour can and will do, but as I said yesterday evening to somebody half my age, what shocks me now is the sight of people like Leo Brincat and Karmenu Vella and Alex Sceberras Trigona and Joe Debono Grech and George Vella still there and still doing it.
I find this offensive and frightening at a level so profound that I cannot even begin to understand it myself.
What it tells me is that democracy in Malta has continued to fail at a less visible level than it failed before. We have all the instruments in place now, all the systems and virtually all the safeguards – except those, apparently, against dragging ambassadors before a parliament to which they are not answerable or accountable.
But we don’t have the democratic spirit, and because of this, the safeguards can be and are sometimes negated, undermining democracy itself.
We have large numbers of people who now subscribe to the view that democracy is the will of the people, or the will of the majority. They are egged on in this catastrophic reasoning by dangerous fools like that woman with her megaphone and the Labour leader with his all-consuming self-interest.
No, my dears – democracy is not necessarily the will of the people. The will of the people, the decision of the majority, comes into play only when the decisions taken, and their consequences, do not fly in the face of the spirit of democracy or the rights of the individual.
It is not democratic to deny women the vote, restrict Jews to ghettos or force black people to sit on one side of the bus, just because the majority have voted that this should be so.
It is not democratic to round on an individual because the mob has decreed it.
It was not democratic to do so very many of those things – practically everything, in fact – which the Labour government of 1971 to 1987 did. It did them, between 1971 and 1981, with the backing of the will of the people, most of who were mired in the most appalling ignorance and hate.
And between 1981 and 1987, Labour continued to do them, with the situation worsening to the point where people were being shot at in the street and the police were the enemy, justifying it all by saying that they had the majority of seats in parliament.
Similarly, it is anti-democratic to use the parliamentary vote to lynch an ambassador on the basis that the majority don’t like him, bear him a grudge, or want to pay him back – in Labour’s case – for being instrumental in six general election victories against them, to say nothing of his significant involvement in undoing their project to keep Malta out of Europe.
Regardless of who the person lynched by parliament last Monday is or does, the lynching itself was horrendous. A man without a seat in parliament is brought before parliament and beheaded, and not because of any particular issue, but because the palace eunuchs are jealous of the sultan and his perceived favourite, the prime minister and his adviser.
The eunuchs then emerge from parliament and crow that the majority have decided and democracy has won the day. They are disturbed to see the visceral reaction, and that few are crowing with them except those who would have crowed anyway, whatever Labour might have done.
They wonder why others do not think it democratic as they do. They wonder why others are shocked. But they thought we didn’t like Richard Cachia Caruana, they protest between themselves, so why aren’t we pleased and grateful for what Labour has done for us?
I’ll answer that question for Labour.
People are shocked because no matter how little they might like a man, and no matter what was said to them about him, the more decent, civilised and truly democratic among us cannot bear to watch a kangaroo-court lynching, whatever our covert or overt views of the mob’s victim.
It fills us with fear.
Its ugliness instils revulsion and dread, because unlike the false democrats in the Labour Party and the rats on the government benches, we know that this is not a game.
We know that this is how bad things were done to enemies of the state throughout history.
As I shouted with relief and breathed freedom and a semblance of normality for the first time ever at the age of 23, if you had told me then that 25 years down the line – with the babies I hadn’t yet had now grown up and gone – I would still be looking at those very same political ghouls and worrying about them being back in government, I wouldn’t have believed you.
It barely seems possible. How in Satan’s name have these individuals survived in politics for a quarter of a century after 1987, when we thought they had been thrown into the dustbin of history?
At 23, I cheered and celebrated because I thought I had seen the end forever of people like Leo Brincat. At 47, I wake up almost every day, like I did back then, to the sight and sound of him and his friends from the Golden Years, spurred on by neo-Mintoffian Joseph Muscat, knowing that these individuals who ruined Malta while I was growing up will ruin it again yet.
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“…the more decent, civilised and truly democratic among us cannot bear to watch a kangaroo-court lynching, whatever our covert or overt views of the mob’s victim. ”
It is even worse than that.
According to Luciano Busuttil, the Labour MP, this was not a kangaroo court at all. This was a barbecue in the House of Parliament, in which the mob’s victim was grilled in the place of the sausages.
I believe that this very well summarises Labour’s all-inclusive concept of democracy.
Jurassic Park has arrived in Malta. Fossilized dinosaurs have reared their ugly heads on the rock.
We are now in deep shit.
“It barely seems possible. How in Satan’s name have these individuals survived in politics for a quarter of a century after 1987, when we thought they had been thrown into the dustbin of history?”
Ciccio answers:
1. They never regretted their mistakes seriously enough to bow their head and exit the scene. Probably, like one of their former leaders, they have “no regrets.”
2. They were never brought to justice for the injustices their government made others suffer.
3. They are power-hungry. And now they’ve been power-starved for, let’s say 25 years.
4. In Labour, the more things change, the more things stay the same – Evarist Bartolo.
25 years? What happened to 1996-1998, when Alfred Sant was PM, George Vella famously was Foreign Affairs Minister, and Evarist Bartolo was Education Minister?
What worries me the most is that these people are also choosing their star candidates – are they looking for the same pedigree in their new stars?
How I wish I could put my thoughts on paper so eloquently.
No wonder the people in the Labour Party hate you so.
They would love to have arguments like these against the PN, hence the insistence on calling what they are doing “democratic”. As you have shown here, they do not know the meaning of the word.
I always said that Dom Mintoff and his Labour Party actually hated Malta and the Maltese.
Young il Duce at the helm of this political party will not change a thing.
Actually the hated the electorate that did not vote for them even more so, now.
Very well said.
In 1987 I was 12 years old and I still remember mum and dad almost crying with joy when PN won the election.
In the subsequent years I learnt a lot what it meant to them. My dad suffered political transfers just because he was a Nationalist supporter, but in those golden years living in Zurrieq and being Nationalist meant political hardship.
Today, unfortunately both my dad and mum are gone, having flown across the ocean to the other life. Like you, Daphne, I just cannot believe that in month’s time I could again see Karmenu Vella in government as a minister.
I will trust these people, your feelings says it all and am sure that many others are on the same line of thought as yours. Will wait and hope for the best, otherwise God help us all.
Quite frankly – they don’t need to, judging by the pile of excrement that is posted on timesofmalta.com by rabidly Labour supporters. The evidence of incapability of logical reasoning and provision of any vaguely intelligent contribution is omnipresent.
It’s just “Viva l-Labour, Viva l-Labour, Hey Hey Hey” all the way – does anything else matter?
Oh, to which one must include the customary “GonziPN” on every other line, just to further prove one’s complete incapability of independent thought, but only of that of which is conditioned by the PL.
And, “LOOOOOOOOOOL” the more “O”s the greater the inter-aural vacuum.
The problem is that democracy is like air. You do not normally notice it until it is gone. By that time it may be too late.
Would the Romanians bring back Ceauşescu if they could? What about the Poles and their cry for Solidarnosc? Are their twisted politicians still around. Most if not all Labour candidates are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They should be hiding in shame not flaunting themselves.
The electorate of 2013 is going to have a very important mission: give the Labour wolves the boot once and for all and let’s not see their socialist Mintoffian faces any more.
Democracy as practised by the MLP was degraded into an obscene word devoid of elementary justice and actually a tyrranical suppression of fundamental human rights such as the freedom of peaceful assembly without being gassed and shot up by thugs and state police, the freedom to hold and express opinions in newspapers without their printing presses being burnt to the ground and the freedom of access to independent law courts free from manipulation of the presiding judges or suppression even of the Constitutionsl Court.
Il-meritocracy l-aqwa.
Dan ezempju ta’ meritocrazija.
Did anyone else catch the article in The Times about how Dr Muscat has more proof of a clique in the PN because Dr Gonzi described Mr Cachia Caruana as irreplaceable.
“For while in a movement members could step in for one another, in a clique one only worked and looks out for oneself.”
Another one a victim of his own ignorance and inability to understand idiomatic English. However he is the leader and possibly our PM one day, which makes all of this all the more worrying.
iT IS GOOD TO REMEMBER THIS CARDINAL POINT;
Democracy , human rights , free speech. justice and work as seen from the point of view of Joseph’s Muscat’S Moviment Laburista have little in common with what we have been accustomed to since 1987.
i will be proved right within a week of Joseph Muscat; denizens crawling up the staircase of Castille.
‘How in Satan’s name have these individuals survived in politics for a quarter of a century after 1987, when we thought they had
thrown into the dustbin of history?’
You know the saying: ‘the devil protects his own’.
Meanwhile, in the other Mexico, polls indicate that the PRI, a.k.a. the political “dinosaurios” who ruled that country through patronage and corruption for 71 years, are poised to make a stunning comeback in the presidential election on July 1.
At least in that case, critics have tried to explain the return of the dinosaurs by showing that Mexico’s flirtation with democracy, following the PRI’s massive defeat in 2000, has failed to raise standards of living or strengthen democratic institutions by any significant degree.
What’s Malta’s excuse going to be when it returns for yet another taste of strident Mintoffianism?
It is revolting to even think that they still exist but more so that they may still rule. It is even more disgusting to even conceptualise that the man on the street just hasn’t even understood this.
The reality is that these people and their cohorts have been acting this way in Government departments from 1987-2012. The issue is what did we do about it and what can we do to stop it now.