A post-Christmas message from H. P. Baxxter

I. SITUATION

Nine months ago, I posted my last comment on this website, and disappeared off the face of the earth. A few days later, the Panama story broke.

Some of you were asking whether I’m still alive. Some women, I’m told, are still asking for my telephone number. Little do they know. I am penniless; so go and find a better, richer man, and live long, fulfilling and happy lives.

Yes, I’m still alive. But it’s so long since I started writing here that some others are not, like two people I know who used to post comments. One, who I met through this website, died just a few weeks ago. I had promised I’d include him as a character in a novel. Much to my shame, I never got round to it. Both were fine men. Both were friends. In the nature of things, it is always the best that go first. They both deserve more than an obituary, but they will be forgotten, like many other fine men and women.

So people I’ve known all these years are now dying. It’s been that long. I am grateful to Daphne Caruana Galizia for the trust she has placed in me. But I can longer do this. It’s been over eight years, and it’s all been in vain. Sometimes you just have to move on.

Some of you may think that writing here is some kind of game, or a form of amusement. It isn’t.

It’s been long, and so much has happened. I’m not talking just about the corruption and the Labour government, nor even about geopolitical upheavals. I’m talking about the global value crisis and the terrible things being done to us.

But let me talk about corruption first. Before anyone had even heard of Panama, I knew all about the web. I even wrote about it, and about the network now being so thick it’s turned the web into a carpet.

I do not write these things to show how clever I am. I write them to show how you don’t need to be a genius.

Every single action undertaken by this government – when it is not social engineering – has been a sale of some sort: power stations, the energy grid, hospitals, government properties, public land, expropriated private land, national heritage, government companies, government bonds, you name it. Every single time, they say it has brought in millions. The Maltese government stated that passport sales alone will bring one billion euros in revenue.

I went and checked the budget estimates for every year since 2013. These millions and billions are nowhere to be found. They are not in the national coffers. So they must be going somewhere else. Since we do not know where, they must be going into secret accounts and companies. Since the government controls everything, those companies and accounts must be owned by government officials – by the prime minister, his ministers, and their colleagues and friends. The only remaining question was the jurisdiction (I guessed British Virgin Islands). It’s as simple as that.

The problem in Malta has never been knowing the truth; it’s doing something once the truth is known. Hell, we have the incontrovertible truth about secret companies in Panama, and has anything been done nine months later? No.

A lot has been written here about the great divide in Malta. I will not replay that debate. It exhausts me. Daphne Caruana Galizia thinks it’s cultural. I used to agree, until I realised that the real struggle, the real fault line, is between the enfranchised (read powerful, and because money is power; rich too) and the disenfranchised. Between those who shape events, and those who must submit to them.

I am one of the disenfranchised. So I look on, sometimes with envy. And I ask questions. So should you. The greatest threat to freedom and democracy comes not from the tyrant, but from our complacency, from our unquestioning acceptance. You should ask questions. All of you. Especially if you’re one of the disenfranchised.

How do some people get rich so quickly? Where is our money going? Who is paying for what? Who controls whom? What is their agenda?

For about 30 years now, a national narrative has been constructed which goes something like this: Malta is an island of stability and wellbeing in a sea of chaos, big and small. We have it good! We made it! Everything is fine, so let us put aside our differences and let us unite in national brotherhood. We are a happy nation.

Then, every five years, you vote.

II. MISSION

I’ve been watching all this silliness. Ever since the Panama story broke, this comments board has gone into overdrive. You’re all busy analysing things and rationalising, and posting platitudes and what you think is welcome advice to the Opposition.

You see tyranny in front of your eyes. And what do you do?

I will not make a list of the acts of tyranny and corruption. I am not a political hack, and I told you it exhausts me. But I will say this: You have to understand the problem. You have to understand what’s happening. You have to understand, so you can solve the problem.

The system is broken. Where does the answer lie? Is there an answer? Maybe there is one in the short term. I believe we have a very small window of opportunity, a very short 12 months.

That short-term answer is a Nationalist Party victory in the next election, and a Nationalist government in 2018. But I said the system is broken, and electing a Nationalist government will not solve that problem. There has to be a long-term strategy.

Our long-term solutions will not be found in elections. I am not being dramatic here. I’m just laying out a truth you all know. Malta came out of almost 20 years of tyranny in 1987, and what did the Nationalist government change to make sure it never happened again? Nothing. As if all it takes is a majority in parliament.

We are surrounded by a group of defeated people cheery about their own enslavement. All the Nationalist Party wants to talk about is how they have better policies, or just a longer list of policies. They are fools. Add another hundred proposals – as if tax breaks and legislation are going to fix anything.

They won’t fix the police, the law courts, parliament, the civil service, the government, presidency, the constitution, or the people. I have explained my voting choices time and again. I’m tired, and I won’t do it again.

The window of opportunity is closing. Simon Busuttil is behind and his opponent is ahead. The way to fix that is to acknowledge reality, not to delude yourself. But the Nationalists haven’t changed a thing. Oh yes, I forget – they have. They took David Thake off air, just at the point when the balance was close to tipping.

Remember the heroic anti-corruption protest? It felt so good, didn’t it? International media coverage, wide-angle drone-borne photography, witty slogans. Oh yes it felt good. David Thake’s colourful callers, him saying “hemm ir-rabja…hemm ir-rabja”. Where did it all go? It got stuck in the treacle of protocol.

They’re heading for another election defeat. Obviously it can’t be their loss, or they wouldn’t be so serene about it. It’s our loss. It’s our tragedy.

I keep reading nonsense about how the Nationalist Party has this fantastic winning strategy up its sleeve, which it will unveil in the new year. What strategy? And which sleeve?

So what is to be done? We vote them in regardless, in order to vote Joseph out. We hold our noses if we have to. But we do it. Once again, the people are going to have to win despite the Nationalist Party.

Unlike many of you flag-waving Nationalists, I feel no nostalgia for Lawrence Gonzi. None at all. He was a disaster. And those of you calling him a statesman should take a look at the atlas before uttering such imbecilities. It takes great states to produce statesmen. Island microstates don’t do statesmanship.

I also have no wish at all to see Mario Demarco or Beppe Fenech Adami leading Malta. This is a republic, not a hereditary monarchy. It’s bad enough that we have all these political dynasties in and outside parliament. Nor do I relish the prospect of a Prime Minister Metsola. Simon Busuttil is the best man for the job. He’ll have to do. If he doesn’t get to be prime minister in 2018, he never will be.

And he’s a far better man than his opponent. Here’s Joseph Muscat, with his picture-perfect wife and her gingerbread and sequinned clutch-bags, and his picture-perfect kids in their frock coats, and his perfect family at the breakfast table in their Burmarrad house, and his perfect financial security and the VIP treatment and his perfect career path and his perfect life crowned with success.

I mean, what are these people? The 1950s King and Queen of Malta? Simon Busuttil has had a broken marriage. Good. It means he understands modern life, and he understands the hardships of our time. Trials of this sort forge a man’s character.

I’m damned if I’m going to have any more smug Percival MandevillesBut Baxxter, you’re just jealous. No, I’m angry at the hypocrisy. For remember that it was resentment over this kind of thing that fed the flame of independence. Oh yes, it was. Why, what did you think it was about, freedom? Malta fought for independence, so the national myth goes, in order to rid itself of the British officials living like royalty in palaces while the downtrodden Maltese lived in abject poverty.

We got rid of the governor-general and his wife, and got a prime minister and his wife instead, then got rid of the British sovereign and got a president and wife (or husband) instead, who live like royalty in the former palaces, plus a few more, and lord it over the rest of us downtrodden scum.

Oh but that’s all right, because they’re Maltese. And our vulgar head of state waddles daily out of her luxurious residence and onto our TV screens and bleats about fighting poverty. These people are beyond disgusting.

I am writing this to show how the very founding principles of our republic have been perverted. The Nationalist Party is too dumb to realise this, and so is Labour. So don’t expect the answer to come from the political parties.

When Labour’s social engineering started after 2013, the PN didn’t have a single argument to counter it. They let themselves be swept by the nefarious mass hysteria. It goes to show how shallow their much-vaunted ideology really was, and what a risibly poor document it was that Peter Serracino Inglott bequeathed them. A philosopher incapable of formulating a philosophy. Just fancy that.

Labour, on the other hand, are fully plugged into the global Leftist agenda (that is the commonly employed term; let’s not get into semantics), and they use half a century’s worth of Leftist thinking tools. This is why they call themselves Liberal Progressives. Did you think they came up with that term on their own?

To them, we are not people. We are atoms. They keep pigeonholing us into segments, and pitting us against each other. LGBT against straight, hunters against non-hunters, foreigners against natives, men against women. All the while, with breath-taking effrontery, they preach about unity. They outlaw our freedom and common sense – the freedom to undergo gay conversion therapy, the freedom to decide what form of family is best for our children, the common sense of letting children know the identity of their biological parents, the common sense of letting biology decide gender.

This, make no mistake, is social engineering. It is an anti-liberal and statist agenda. The classical definition of Liberalism is personal responsibility for personal freedom. What these tyrants call Liberalism is in fact State-Imposed Universalist Individualism. This is tyranny by the backdoor, because it is violently opposed to the notion of Common Good.

But the Nationalist Party’s intellectuals, for all their tenured fame, have never once, in 50 years, framed a counter-ideology. Many of them are ignorant and naive. Their argument against Labour is essentially that of the football stadium: morale-raising chants; team versus team.

What many of them rant on about is how stupid the Laburisti are. I keep saying how wrong that is. Laburisti are sublimely clever, and some are intelligent too. And they are all ruthless.

My indictment of the Malta Labour Party is stronger and heavier because it is real. They are tyrants, they are dangerous, they are traitors to Malta and the Maltese people, and they are a foul stain on our flag.

Treat them like a normal political adversary, and all right-thinking people will have justified contempt for the Nationalist Party.

Labour reject human nature, and history, and biology, and they impose social engineering with cynical brutality. I know of only three people who have understood this: Jozef, who writes here occasionally, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who has never articulated it properly because of the semantic confusion of “liberalism”, and the Archbishop.

We are engaged in the struggle of our time. There is a paradigm shift being foisted upon us whose product is human misery. The Nationalists think it’s just about corruption, but it’s deeper and darker than that. They desperately need to start looking for ideological inspiration beyond the narrow confines of this tiny island and its journalist-philosopher-academics.

There is, too, a pervasive ideology which is the direct consequence of post-1987 market liberalism. It may be called Fundamentalist Meritocracy: the belief that losers deserve to lose. It underpins the Nationalist Party’s cynical acceptance of corruption as long as someone, somewhere, is making money out of it. When it was the prime minister and his government itself that started making money from the corruption, they found themselves disarmed.

Let me try to introduce some clarity here. Let’s talk about that other part of the system which is broken: the economy. First of all, Malta’s economy is not doing well. The entirety of Malta’s GDP growth depends on the sale of passports. Stop the sales, and we have zero growth.

Secondly, Malta has an unimaginative subsistence economy: make money right here, right now, and future generations be damned. It is a perversion of the capitalism which enabled European genius to flourish.

Some of you are fond of saying that Laburisti will vote Labour even if Joseph Muscat were to rob them, their children and their mother. But he has. Joseph Muscat’s money is our money. It is the Laburisti’s money too. Muscat is the embodiment of all that’s wrong with Malta. He gets rich by making us poor.

The money’s pouring in. Labour people are buying influence. The Nationalist Party used to have a problem with that. But now they take a cut, so they’re fine with it, as long as it’s legal. Of course it’s legal. Joseph Muscat and the European Commission made sure it is. And that’s why I say the system is broken and why the Nationalists fail to see this.

You cannot let Joseph Muscat get away with his corruption, his cronyism, his criminality, his evil. I don’t care who you support. He’s detestable. He must go.

III. EXECUTION

I am not a groupie or a cultist. Simon Busuttil will not be our saviour. But by replacing Muscat, we will remove the greatest obstacle to a solution: fear.

Once we get rid of the tyrant, we can start to fix the shattered system. We need to accept that some problems can never be solved. The massive building spree that has turned Malta into an overcrowded concrete monstrosity can never be undone. Much of the ugliness that surrounds us is there to stay.

But we can, at least, remove the oppressor. So we can start having that debate about policy, about 50 years too late. Ask any politician, of any party, what they want Malta to look like in 20 years’ time. None of them knows. This is what our political class has been reduced to. This is what we must fight.

Muscat intends to stay. There will be massive electoral fraud. Of that, I have no doubt. He empowers the enemies of Malta, so expect them to intervene in his favour.

Do not accept this fate. Fight back.

There are still certain things we can do besides electing governments. Embrace democracy. Do not depend on the government. You’re on your own. Be free.

Or the election will just be another exercise in self-enslavement. As a wiser man once said: “It is in vain to summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.”

I don’t think I have really made a dent, even though I helped in my own small way. I am proud to have introduced the word haxi in political discourse. Now I see it used in the printed press. Good. It’s a trifling achievement, to be sure. But I like to think I have provided you, at least, with a few thinking tools.

I suppose you expect me to end with the usual Christmas wishes. I cannot. To wish good cheer upon others I would first need to be cheerful myself, and there is nothing to be cheerful about. So let me give you this, by way of a carol:

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.