The Labour Party would have us believe that evil forces in Malta are manipulating the world press

The Labour Party/government is so far gone into the toxic bubble that forms its entire universe that it cannot see itself with the eyes of normal people outside Malta.

Now it is promoting the idea, among fellow inhabitants of its toxic bubble of malice and ignorance, that evil forces in Malta are manipulating the world press. They believe that just because they can and do manipulate sections of the press in Malta, this means that manipulating the press is normal and possible anywhere else. It isn’t, at least not outside the Third World.

Nobody, let alone individuals living in Malta, can manipulate the world’s most influential media. It is impossible. Labour trolls and party apparatchiks like Lara Boffa – that corrupt person who slept (with another corrupt person) her way into a state council job after appearing in the Labour Party’s campaign collateral – have tried to do it. They have tried to manipulate the world’s most influential sources of news by writing to those which quote me (yes, literally) telling them not to quote me because I am a bad person and an enemy of the Labour government. They are that stupid. They are so far gone in their toxic bubble that they think what works with the vulnerable people in media and advertising in Malta works with news organisations outside Malta.

Why do news organisations outside Malta contact me in the first place? Precisely because I am quite visibly not in that toxic bubble. I speak a language they understand, and that language is not necessarily idiomatic English. The language I speak is the shared values of the democratic world. They contact me because I am somebody they recognise as belonging to their world and sharing their values.

If I am doing a story on Turkey, I will not contact, as a reliable source of information, some pidgin-speaking nut-job who thinks it’s quite all right to drag through the mud journalists who the government/ruling party/Labour Party does not agree with, and who backs the Turkish government on shutting down, in various ways, journalists who and newspapers which are critics of the government. I will contact people like the writer I heard interviewed recently on the BBC World Service, who spoke of what it is like trying to live in Turkey when you have European values.

“The people voted for this government, though, so you cannot say it hasn’t been democratically elected,” her BBC interviewer said.

“Democracy is not a vote once every five years,” she said. “It is a way of life, a set of values, it is built into the systems of truly democratic countries. Here in Turkey, critics of the government, journalists who write articles that are critical of the government, are systematically exposed to abuse on the internet, on social media, in government propaganda. That is not democracy. That is the opposite of democracy.”

She spoke for us, but I didn’t even get her name because I missed the start of the programme and also the end.

Many people in Malta, and practically the whole of the Labour Party and its supporters, it seems – but certainly not only them – do not realise how crazy Malta seems to people on the outside. Maltese society looks toxic. Maltese politics look corrupt. Things that are taken for granted in Malta, like the systematic targeting of critical journalists by the Labour Party machine, are seen as horribly abusive and anti-democratic by those looking on. Malta is not held to the European standard. It is held to a Middle Eastern/North African/Azerbaijani standard.

People in Maltese public life are viewed, by Europeans standing on the outside and looking in, with the same sense of alien distancing that they use when considering behaviour and values in non-European societies like the Middle East. There is absolutely no sense of familiarity. Europeans dealing with Maltese people and Maltese politicians are – certainly nowadays – dealing with strangers who have different values and who don’t speak the same language. So when they occasionally come across somebody who strikes them as European – the rare politician or public official in the last government (there are none in this government) – or others in public life in Malta, they seize on that person with relief as somebody to whom they can relate, somebody who is recognisably as they are.

Living in Malta is exhausting and extremely trying for those who have fundamentally European values. They are seen as ‘not Maltese’. Their way of thinking and behaving is constantly in conflict with the received wisdom that democracy is just a vote once every five years. They protest in vain that no, it is not all right at all for journalists and critics of the government to be targeted like politicians are targeted, because journalists and politicians are not equal and their roles are very different. And no, it is not all right to use the party media to attack the government’s critics. It is shocking.

My main objection to the Labour Party, throughout all these years, has been a single one: that it does not understand democracy, that democracy is alien to its way of thinking and that of its supporters and its politicians, that it is totalitarian at root. The failure to understand democracy is the root from which all of the Labour Party’s other failings, major and minor, spring. Think about it.

Joseph Muscat and his chief of staff, Keith Schembri, look on as Konrad Mizzi is sworn in as Energy Minister in March 2013. Three days later, Nexia BT began the process to set up companies in Panama for “sensitive individuals”.