“Fuck the fascist PN” says the executive chairman of Malta’s National Book Council

Imbagħad taparsi jieħdu skandlu għax Ann Fenech tkelmet dwar pastizz. Are we going to have a stream of manufactured articles and Facebook shock-horror comments now because the salaried chairman of a state council speaks that way about the Opposition party and those who vote for it?

Of course not – because unlike the Labour Party, the Nationalist Party does not have an organised army of internet trolls and social media lobbyists pretending to be ordinary citizens with an opinion, who will go out and fake it, in turn driving real opinion.

Mark Camilleri was quoted in LovinMalta’s piece on the subject without readers being told that he’s not just a regular citizen with a shocked opinion about what Ann Fenech wrote, but an irrational Labour extremist and ideologue who the incoming Labour government appointed executive chairman of the National Book Council and then gave a Gieħ ir-Repubblika in its first Republic Day honours list.

So his was hardly your random reaction from a member of the public, but that’s how it was presented to readers, which is wrong.

Fuck the fascists and the bourgeois pigs, eh? I hadn’t realised it’s still 1976. Must bring out my Sex Pistols LPs. Jaħasra kemm bqajna lura.

This backwoods billy who the 21st century left behind thinks that, in the exalted position for which he is unfit, saying that he would like to see half the population “fucked” because they’re “PN fascists” is an appropriate reaction to a Nationalist Party official’s view that the prime minister shouldn’t have taken other prime ministers to a shoddy joint for tea in a glass and the kind of heartburn-inducing carb-laden greasy food that people elsewhere now carefully avoid.

The way Ann Fenech said what she did was wrong, an error of communication and a failure to understand how the highly organised Labour social-media machine would pick it up and make use of it. But her view is completely right. And the reason why Muscat thought it was OK to take other prime ministers to the kind of place you might go to if you want a brawl and a pastizz at 5am is exactly the same reason he made Mark Camilleri executive chairman of the National Book Council.

Work it out for yourselves. It’s got nothing to do with ignorance, as Dr Fenech suggested, and everything to do with destructive contempt for social norms and institutions. It is not done out of ignorance but is calculatingly deliberate – and he also got to promote a pastizzi shop owned by one of his employees at the Labour Party’s television station and her husband, whose brother is Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s loyal factotum.