It had to do solely with anger against a coloniser that made the fundamental error of challenging Maltese ways of life, especially on matters of religion (a mistake the British never made, despite having a different religion, which is why they survived so long).

I would have had the same reaction.

The government then was very wrong to allow the head of state to accept the gift of a trip on an air ambulance from the Chinese government, but then the government was very wrong to nominate George Abela as head of state in the first place.

He was bound to let the side down.

Besides, a Minister on government business would be covered by a blanket insurance, as all those travelling on official business are, from top to bottom.

In other words, if an air ambulance was really required, the cost would have been covered.

Freedom from obligation is relative.

In Malta, one tends to remain beholden to one’s social and work networks.

That is distasteful to those who would rather freedom wasn’t relative.

Government should be beholden to society as a collective whole.
There are instances where the international supercedes the local.

The difference remains seated in the set of values in operation.

Where the set of values of one party, selected at the urns over the other, shows consistent major fundamental flaws, it is time to return to a responsible reassessment of the total set of values presented by the other party.

Malta’s tragedy is that people here think everything is a matter of opinion. It isn’t. Only relatively few things are, and they are generally clear.

All you have to do is ask yourself whether Queen Elizabeth, if taken ill in China, would have been shipped back by the Chinese. Or Joachim Gauck to Germany. Or Francois Hollande back to France.

And there you have your answer.

The trouble is people think ‘Malta is different’ because it is tiny. It isn’t. Malta is autonomous. And it is a European Union member state and a democracy.

Size has nothing to do with it.

Do you think Malta’s energy needs are that attractive?

After all, our main fuel energy need is going to be gas, and that is already accounted for, hasn’t it.

Not fully. But we are looking at a converging of interests and a common contact point.

In an international context, not just an EU context.
Libya’s lost influence in the energy sector. Qatar’s stepped into the breach.

Oh, I adore being Maltese. It gives one rarity value, like being Hawaiian.

But I can’t stand political propaganda projecting itself into the past and calling itself history.

People, societies, did not have the same concept of themselves 500, 800, let alone 1,000 years ago that we do now.

To project our present views, feelings and world view into the past is anachronistic.

Five hundred years ago, the Maltese population was still gelling together from random sources. And the enlightenment bypassed Malta completely.

So really, I don’t know what you’re on about. When the Order of St John arrived, ‘The Maltese’ were just subsistence farmers living in glorified huts. Their sole preoccupation was keeping body and soul together, not nationhood. How would they even have had any concept of nationhood?

Don’t swallow the propaganda. It’s propaganda, not history or anthropology.