The President is in no position to speak, and Bedingfield is a threat to freedom of expression, not a manifestation of it
The Sunday Times columnist Mark Anthony Falzon, who is also a professor of anthropology at the University of Malta, has written today about the President’s message last week, in which she spoke about ‘social violence and social media’.
I won’t go into the merits of her speech. I was around and sentient back when Marie Louise Coleiro was secretary-general of the Malta Labour Party and the party’s mobs and politicians were wrecking the country, setting fire to buildings, ransacking Opposition clubs and homes, and killing people in the Police lock-up, while its thugs extorted protection money, bribes and corruption payments from anybody and everybody they could. It is an insult to everybody who lived through those horrible years to see her now installed at San Anton Palace, living off the fat of the land for five years, playing at being Santa Maria Goretti and preaching to the rest of us.
Comments on social media shatter private lives and families, the President said in her message. Oh, I’ll say they do. Nobody knows more than I do how extreme, vile, slanderous and revolting those comments are, and the distress they cause to those around me, when my only crime is that I am a journalist who criticises the Labour Party, the government, and exposes its wrong-doing. Where in the world, other than (notoriously) Azerbaijan and other totalitarian states, do politicians sponsor and encourage discussions of ‘enemy’ journalists’ sex-lives, body shapes and private affairs?
The Malta Labour Party/government’s response to my revelations about its politicians’ activities is to encourage a troll-led discussion about the body and sex life of a woman in her 50s. Is this normal? Of course it isn’t. But Maltese society is not normal. It is toxic. The Malta Labour Party’s supporters and trolls are like those awful people around the guillotine, taking pleasure in torturing and killing those they perceive to be their betters. And just as it was in the Great Terror in France back then, they are joined in this by some of their perceived betters who, to escape similar treatment themselves, or to move safely into the new era under another power, mix with the savages around the guillotine and behave like them.
What makes Marie Louise Coleiro’s message more offensive still is that she should be the last one to talk about “shattering families and private lives”. Her only child, a daughter now grown to adulthood, is the result of an affair she had with a married man. She shattered (with his help, of course) his family and the private lives of his wife and children, who continue to suffer from the wound that will never heal, to this day. Seeing her installed in the Presidential Palace was deeply offensive to them, too. Unfortunately, the Labour Party is literally infested with marriage cheats: men who cheated on their wives or women who broke up other women’s families.
On this subject, Coleiro should simply keep her mouth shut. It is bad enough that we have to deal with the five-year insult of having her as President.
Beneath Mark Anthony Falzon’s otherwise very good piece which focusses on the President, I have posted the comment which follows.
I beg to differ on your fundamental premise. Glenn Bedingfield’s blog is not about freedom of expression but its polar opposite. It was set up, and exists, specifically to target, criticise, harass, intimidate and frighten critics of and perceived threats to the government for which Bedingfield works, directly in the Prime Minister’s Office.
That would be inexcusable even if he were only doing it to politicians of the opposite camp (bearing in mind that he now works for the government and not for the Labour Party).
But used against journalists, entertainers and ordinary people whose only crime is to post comments on the internet criticising the government, it moves into the realm of totalitarian tactics.
Glenn Bedingfield doesn’t only work for the Office of the Prime Minister. He is also one of the Prime Minister’s closest aides and associates, even travelling with him on family holidays. His targeting of journalists, Opposition politicians and ordinary people who criticise the government is therefore significant and represents a threat to freedom of expression, rather than being a manifestation of it.
The fact that the current government is widely perceived (correctly) to be malign rather than benign serves to make Bedingfield’s choice and method of targeting individuals who criticise the government seem more threatening still. This has the effect of silencing people or making them pull their head safely beneath the parapet.
Of course, in their fear they will grow to detest the hostility and threatening nature of this government, and support for it will collapse in silence. But this government seems to prefer that, in its fascist nature, to open criticism.
