Reconciliation is a second step in any “making-up” procedure. For two people to make up, they need to first acknowledge that there had been, at least, a tiff.

If they do not acknowledge that there had been some disagreement, and why that happened, then they cannot make up. In Malta, we have people who have lived in those Golden Years and yet they refuse to believe that life here was hell.

If Mintoff took away something from us as a people, it was the serenity and peace of mind. I was a child in 1987 (born in 1977) but I can never forget the palpable tension in our everyday life as a family.

The funny thing is that people, intelligent and otherwise nice people such as Dr. Frendo, are brainwashed so badly that they write things such as this Facebook post without reflecting.

How can you say that Mintoff had “human faults”? Being inordinately obstinate is a “human fault”, being a perfectionist or nonchalant can be termed as being human faults. However, how can ruining a country be hailed as a human fault? For God’s sake.

And this is the serious repercussion of this wrong policy of reconciliation. Unless there is real acknowledgement of the thousands of lives Mintoff ruined, even Laborites’ lives, then there can never be REAL reconciliation because we, the victims, feel that we’ve been short-changed and thwarted and rather than achieving closure and catharsis, our wounds continue to fester and we become even more resolute in our fight against “whatever”.

In my case, I’m relentless in my fight against all injustice, whatever and wherever it may manifest itself. I’m sure in others it is expressed in such others’ different ways.

In other words, forced reconciliation, when one party wants it but the other dismisses it as a sign of weakness, leads to the creation of myths. The Mintoff who was mourned in August was not the real Mintoff, but the heroic and mythical Mintoff (some) people used to think he was.

I do not blame people like Dr. Frendo. I blame the advocates of the reconciliation policy, who, unwittingly, have been instrumental in ensuring that people who had brought up between four Mintoffian walls remains essentially Mintoffian, in spite of living a very cosmopolitan and Western life.

However, they know nothing better. They regurgitate whatever used to be fed to them when they were children – because our education system never had the balls to call a spade a spade and call Mintoff by his real title: the Dictator.

The PN builds schools while Labour sells and closes them.

St Michael’s Teacher Training College comes to mind. It was sold to the Libyans by Mintoff while MCAST (Polytechnic) was built by the PN and closed by Labour.

Old habits die hard.

Our historians except for Prof. Henry Frendo, are ever so silent but then a couple are known for their extreme bias so cannot be relied on for objective fact. One, a former Secretary General of the Labour Party, even penned an article eulogising Mintoff just after his death. And he is the Dean of the Faculty of History. I wonder if this appointment too was sought out so as to be able to control what is written about our past and rewrite history to glorify their past master.

One myth for sure is that Mintoff was “missier il-Maltin”. There never was a more divisive figure than he and at best he can be considered father to half the nation at best.

Karen Bugeja, who was appointed to Airmalta’s board of directors, is Karen nee Borg of Bortex, Ramona’s sister-in-law.

It’s already happened. Even worse some have attributed this to Mintoff himself. Talk about rewriting history.

Indeed – a country run by liars. We have a prime minister that lies through his teeth, (jew kif jghidu bil-Malti; izjed milli jiehu nifs) now also the president was caught lying. Who else? Let’s keep counting.

What’s really unbelievable is that certain professors teaching in the Faculty of Education actually applaud Mintoff’s contribution to education in lectures to students.

Most of them have no clue otherwise because 1)they’re Labour and already believe this, 2)don’t care so they take it as face value, and 3)are to lazy to find out the truth even if they have heard at home that this might not be case. Not all, but the majority.

One professor admitted that Mintoff’s tactics were ‘a bit heavy-handed’ after he heard one older student snickering when he started going on about how great Mintoff was for education.

Ramona Frendo should thank her lucky stars she didn’t want to study English or Philosohpy, or any of the arts for that matter, during Mintoff’s time.

The Faculty of English was amalgamated into the Faculty of Education and you could only read English if you were going to be a teacher. She should ask the older lecturers how they liked Mintoff’s ‘heavy-handedness’.

The only ‘philosophy’ the Maltese were allowed back then was Mintoff’s type of philosophy that he spouted during Labour mass meetings.

The stuff she was brought up on.

Ramona Frendo, like many others, fails to distinguish between Prime Minister Boffa and Prime Minister Mintoff.

She makes the common mistake of attributing the introduction of pensions, for instance, to Mintoff rather than to Boffa.

No one is disputing Labour’s contribution to social welfare at the time, but it is their attribution to Mintoff that is fallacious.

So if these were Mintoff’s only redeeming features, and they are not to his credit after all, then this hero-worshipping is all based on false premisses.