GUEST POST: Joseph, you talking to me?
Joseph Muscat, thinking of himself as Eddie Fenech Adami circa 1987, a mistake he can make only because he wasn’t around to see for himself/never had parents who put him straight/doesn’t have the brains, nous or will to find out for himself, has told us:
“Let us break the vicious circle of retribution. We will fix injustices without creating new ones and this will be the biggest gift we give our children in this generation.”
Excuse me, but since when has the PN made ‘retribution’ its mission?
Eddie Fenech Adami was under heavy fire from some of his own followers in the early post-1987 period precisely because he wanted to bring the Us versus Them era to a close. His call to the thousands of men and women who had suffered in so many ways at the hands of Labour was as clear as it was wise: revenge was not the path to a different Malta.
This is the reason why his call for ‘rikonciljazzjoni nazzjonali’ and ‘biex nergghu insiru ahwa Maltin’ at the time was genuine and why it captured the very essence of what Malta needed to move forward and prosper.
And he was right.
The suppression of the revenge instinct felt so deeply and so naturally by so many people, was a bitter pill for them to swallow. But ultimately, it cured them and the country. It was the route which took us from tal-Barrani to Brussels.
This is the context which makes Joseph Muscat’s attempt to do an Eddie in 2013 both ridiculous and offensive. This is not 1987. No thanks at all to Labour and its morally and intellectually stunted leadership, Malta has been ‘taghna lkoll’ in every sense for over two decades. Institutionally, legally, educationally, economically we now have all our rights and opportunities protected.
My suspicion is that Joseph Muscat’s choice of slogan and his constant harping on ‘no retribution’ is a Freudian slip of sorts. He thinks that by doing a rerun of post-1987 Eddie Fenech Adami he is going to actually be him. The truth, however, is the opposite.
It is not Malta and certainly not Nationalists who need that lecture. It is his own tribe, advancing on the citadel they have coveted for so long, who do. They are preparing for the sack of Rome and nobody is going to stand in their way, including Muscat.
They are the ones who need to understand that if or when they ‘win’ they have only acquired the right to run the country and not to own it or plunder it.
They are the ones whose constant accusations of and obsession with The Clique, a group of people they think ‘take everything for themselves’, reveal exactly how their minds work and what their real intentions are in bringing Labour to power.
They think others are grabbing stuff. They want to be the ones doing the grabbing.
They are the ones whose mentality has not changed much since 1987. They might be on Facebook instead of at a Warda Kanta concert. But otherwise they are still stuck there with retribution, plunder and revenge burning in their hearts.
Malta Taghna Lkoll is meaningless to everyone who can think. For the rest, it is a meaningless restraining order from their leader, which they plan to ignore.
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I do not wish to raise my hopes high for a PN victory however, I am happy to note that now you are saying ‘that if and when they ‘win’ – before it was more that the PL will be winning.
[Daphne – It says clearly at the top of the page that this is a guest post. This means I didn’t write it. I still say WHEN Labour wins, not IF. The polls show clearly that Muscat will win no matter what the PN does or does not do at this stage, and I am not one to quarrel with numbers. Of course, you can hope and pray for a deus ex machina, but it doesn’t follow that there will be one.]
That is what I had said for the PN in the 2008 election as well.
Why does Muscat always have to stand on a pedestal ? The message seems to be he is looking down at people.
He is standing on a pool table that was a gift to the Labour Party by China in the Golden Years ™.
Seeing it like that, the problem here is that no-one seems to be focusing on the who the “tagħna lkoll” slogan is referring to.
As you pointed out, Labour is seeing politics as a zero-sum game where one Clique is taking everything for itself and its friends, so all Malta is theirs.
They want to be the new Clique for whom Malta is all theirs, “tagħna (il-Klikka) lkoll”.
Why is there NOBODY to listen to him?
Is everybody on Facebook?
This is an excellent post. However, I am not entirely sure I agree that Eddie Fenech Adami was right with the way he handled the pain that people went through.
I am not talking about exacting revenge. I am talking about acknowledging what people went through which is a different thing altogether. By handling it the way he did, the pain still exists for so many. We should have done what South Africa did with the Truth and Reconciliation. People were forgiven their actions but only once they admitted them.
As it is, not only have they not admitted fault (at Muscat’s attempt at this was nothign but a feeble election ploy) but have strategically and systematically rewritten what happened,seeking to eradicate all evidence of the wrongs committed. We now have the very real risk that the very same people who caused the injustices in the ’80s are going to be running the country again.
Muscat is ensuring that they keep a relatively low profile lest they upset his carefully managed marketing campaign. However, they are there, back in the fold. Unfortunately the one good thing Sant did by getting rid of them has been undone by Muscat’s manouvering. By his attempt to embrace all and sundry so that he can gather every single vote possible regardless of the expense.
There is no doubt that it is the Nationalists who have tried to make Malta Taghna Ilkoll – first EFA with his policy of reconciliation – then Gonzi who even awarded the highest post in the country to a Labourite. By nominating George Abela to the post of President of the country, when he had done very little to deserve this in the first place, Gonzi made a very clear statement that he was reaching out to the whole of the country.
The way this was repaid? the President’s own son and his daughter-in-law have been at the forefront of the Labour Party’s campaign instead of keeping a dignified silence as members of the President’s family. But then ‘ dignified’ is not something Labour understand.
I think the truth is rather more bleak. Eddie Fenech Adami and the Nationalist Party were wrong to practise reconciliation at the expense of justice.
Many of today’s Labour leaders would have been total nobodies were it not for their spectacular rise through the ranks in a system which co-opted and turned a blind eye to thugs, henchmen, criminals and corrupt officials from the Labour era.
It is so damned Southern Mediterranean to confuse justice with retribution or revenge. And so the canker grew and spread. Twenty years later, there is nothing that can be done.
You couldn’t have put it better, madam. Anything I will add will be superfluous. Thank you.
[Daphne – A man wrote it.]
“Eddie Fenech Adami was under heavy fire from some of his own followers in the early post-1987 period precisely because he wanted to bring the Us versus Them era to a close. His call to the thousands of men and women who had suffered in so many ways at the hands of Labour was as clear as it was wise: revenge was not the path to a different Malta.”
I must concur that I was (pleasantly) shocked and greatly surprised at the leadership of EFA immediately after 1987. I had grown up “knowing” that a Labour govt meant good things to Laburisti – at the top of the tree anway, and repression to Nazzjonalisti top to bottom, lack of freedom of expression even, that I simply thought this was normality, that now it was the Nats turn to simply get even.
Hence the “shock”.
From tal-Barrani to Brussels, love this phrase, so sad though that many young people cannot understand this
PN’s slogan for the 1987 election was ‘Xoghol, Gustizzja, Liberta’. There is no doubt that out of the three, justice was sacrificed in the name of reconciliation.
That’s why vicious characters such as Leo Brincat and Karmenu Vella are still around.