The Golden Years of Mintoff (“but u ejja come on, he wasn’t so bad ta…you’re just prejuduced”)
Three execrable violators of human rights, Muammar Gaddafi, Dom Mintoff and his blackmailer Lorry Sant, who Wenzu Mintoff resembles so closely in physical appearance – if you believe in hell, their souls are rotting there together
I was sitting next to somebody at lunch the other day (not Maltese) who in passing remarked how tired he is of hearing otherwise educated people say that Dom Mintoff “wasn’t so bad after all”.
When he responds that surely they must be joking, he said, they tell him that he would obviously think the way he does because he is “prejudiced”.
“I respond that actually it is because I am rational,” he told me.
I so agree. The people who talk like this remind me of those battered wives who, after being abused in all kinds of horrid ways for years, manifest signs of Stockholm Syndrome and will tell you that the man who did all that isn’t so bad really, while recalling the one time he brought them a sandwich three years ago or that other time he picked up the children from school 10 years ago.
This morning I read this in Times of Malta to remind me of the insanity of what Karmenu Vella (soon to be EU Commissioner) calls the Golden Years of Labour, and how those who say that ‘Mintoff wasn’t all bad’ probably need to get their heads examined if they know the facts and still think that:
(Giovanni Bonello) recounted his challenge in the Constitutional Court alongside Prof. de Marco just after the 1976 election, when the whole population of the government’s St Vincent de Paul old people’s home – a thousand eligible voters – mysteriously voted Labour.
The judges in the Constitutional Court were replaced within a few hours, during the actual hearing of the case.
“Since the new judges included the father and the brother of the government’s defence lawyers, we decided there was no point in hoping for a fair hearing and dropped the case,” he said.
Knowing Judge Bonello a little, I’d say that the timing of his anecdote about the appointment of judges is pointed and deliberate.
The story itself will give some of the stupider, sillier and more vacuous people in our midst (and that’s saying something on an island literally full of them) some indication of why my view of Dom Mintoff is: may he rot in hell alongside his mates, those other execrable violators of human rights, some of whom were murdered by the people they oppressed so horribly.
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http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140725/local/Guido-was-never-on-time-as-he-loved-life-.529114
The colonel and human rights.
http://markanthonysammut.blogspot.com/2011/02/colonel-and-human-rights.html
When Lou Bondi still spoke sense:
http://loubondi.blogspot.com/2011/09/dom-mintoff-in-eddie-fenech-adami-out.html
I’m lucky enough never to have experienced life under Labour before March (unless you count Sant’s brief stint), but even I know what that sad sod and his collaborators were and are.
People lived in fear, many died due to the emotional turmoil inflicted upon them by Mintoff and the rest, and many more survived by leaving the country altogether. They were bullied in every respect, there was absolutely no respect for human rights and violence was rife. Whatever benefits Malta could have gained in those years can in no way justify such a situation.
Mintoff was bad to the bone, and he deserves neither pity nor justification. Whichever he receives is only a hangover from the benefits his supporters enjoyed and the praise they regurgitate daily to those around them. There is no rationality involved.
People who voted Mintoff in at the start of his reign of terror need to feel justified in that irresponsible decision of theirs, so they tell themselves and anyone who will listen that “he wasn’t really that bad.”
I was at that event yesterday and while listening to Tonio Borg I wondered how Il-Guy can replace him as the next EU commissioner. Poor Malta.
A friend of mine was telling me about the time he was summoned to appear before prime minister Mintoff. His head of department advised him to admit he was mistaken whenever Mintoff pointed to an imaginary irregularity otherwise, “You would never be let off”.
I realise your frustration, Daphne, but how can any Maltese see it any other way if the national narrative says precisely that?
Every country has an official history, call it the peer-reviewed version, the accepted truth. Malta has it. It’s the one written by Andrew Vella, Stanley Fiorini, Godfrey Wettinger, Dominic Fenech, Henry Frendo, Giovanni Bonello and others. Some countries also have a revisionist history, which often struggles to make itself heard, but which gained strength since the 1980s.
Malta has nothing. There is the official national narrative and nothing else.
The official history says that Mintoff, for all his faults, was essentially good for Malta.
So there.
Until Malta gets its own counter-history, we will forever read the script off Grajjet Malta.
The only flash in the pan was the rather silly schoolyard spat between Fiorini and Wettinger over the Dhimmi. The real debate should have been over Mintoff.
I think it’s more a matter of time. Mintoff has barely become a memory for quite a few, and you can’t discuss him objectively with someone like Fenech in charge of the History department at the University.
It’s also a shame that books written by foreigners abut Maltese history, like Edith Dobie’s ‘Malta’s Road to Independence’ aren’t made more readily available. They tend to offer a counter-history just by being more objective. In the example I mentioned, for instance, Dobie doesn’t shy away from showing what the whole ‘Ħelsien’ thing was really all about.
Matter of time? Really?
As time goes by, the consensus view on Mintoff is becoming more positive, not less.
Note too that it takes more than just modern or contemporary history to form an alternative pole to the consensus view on Mintoff. If the national narrative is that of an oppressed people, forever colonised, then anyone who was around during decolonisation automatically gains street cred. And so forth.
So the revisionism must start all the way back, from 7000 B.C.
It is the parents’ responsibility to teach their children the truth, even if history was taught correctly in schools which it is not.
I made sure my son knew what the Labour Party did to us and would take every opportunity to recount my memories of those terrible years.
Some might call this brain washing but I knew I had an intelligent boy who could make his mind up after knowing the facts. I wasn’t about to let the Labour Party seduce my son with their lies.
If I had a son, I would just tell him that Malta was part of – not a colony of, but part of – whichever kingdom or empire was most powerful in the central Mediterranean at the time. Then by an accident of history it became a British protectorate, was responsible for its own domestic policy, and was moving towards Dominion status, when a bunch of rabble-rousing lawyers and clergymen started agitating the mass for annexation by the newly-formed Kingdom of Italy. Then there was a world war, Italy was on the losers’ side, and suddenly integration with Italy didn’t look like such a good option. So they started agitating for independence instead. The British were planning to leave anyway since Malta was more trouble than it was worth, so they did, in 1964. That’s it.
And blessed with shit luck we ended up with only the first three letters of Dominion Status.
For some reason I can’t recall this incident, probably because there were so many to contend with at the time. I remember clearly though that Labour thugs had taken over the counting hall with the majority, if not all the PN counting agents, abandoning their posts for fear of their lives.
Chances are that the PN already had a majority in 1976.
That there was no repeat in 1981 of the the total anarchy that reigned in 1976 was mainly thanks to Austin Gatt and his disciplined and brave group of counting agents better known as tal-gaketta blue.
I just cannot fathom how people who lived through those ‘golden years’ could trust a party that still had within its ranks so many of the ‘stars’ of that best forgotten era.
Gaddafi’s worse replacements kidnap a Maltese worker and the Maltese government waits 8 days to tell the public about it.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140725/local/updated-maltese-worker-abducted-by-rebels-in-libya.529200
I remember a British comedian who once said it all in a nutshell.
‘Mintoff is doing to Malta what he should be doing to his wife’
I don’t think her performance at the Road House lasted very long after that.
The “Mintoff wasn’t so bad” mantra is perpetuated in Malta’s highest academic institution, the university. I can’t remember how many times a member of the Faculty of Education praised Mintoff for our education system, saying many times and I quote “he might have had a heavy hand in the way he did things but…”
By the end, I just stopped going to his lectures. I was afraid I was going to guffaw once too many times during his “Miskin Mintoff, he was just misunderstood” lectures and get kicked out.
Name and shame, please. Was it Ronald Sultana?
I would rather think it was KMB, as he was the one who was always going on how Mintoff was misunderstood.
Actually I was quoting Peter Mayo.
Professor Sultana didn’t excuse Mintoff’s excesses but he did tend to go on about the big, bad Partit Nazzjonalista and how they are the descendents of the tyrannical Knights of St. John who wanted to keep the proletariat ignorant.
Oh, the hours wasted hearing such drivel.
Peter Mayo? It figures.
The greatest tragedy about Mintoff’s legacy is that it’s the decent people who are the most persistent in singing his praises.
I couldn’t agree more.
My mother had her particulars taken by the police at St. Vincent de Paule hospital in 1976 when she went to check on her aunt during election day. Her “crime”? She was seen handing a packet of biscuits to her aunt. The police called it a bribe.
Can’t agree with you more. Mintoff was an egoistic, self centered, dangerous, crazy bastard, who was an utter imbecile and wasn’t capable of even passing his University exams. His friends helped him in his assignments, he even borrowed all their books. Born with a chip on his shoulder he turned against all those who had helped him once they disagreed with him. I too can’t hear those who state “u ma kienx daqsekk hazin, alla jahfirlu”. May he burn in hell.
No wonder he is Dr.Joseph Muscat’s idol. They sound so similar.
Malta under Mintoff’s rule was simply Hell on Earth. I grew up in it as a child belonging to a PN Supporters’ family. You tell us. He robbed my brothers and I, of the one thing we can never get back – our childhood. He gave my father Hell and thereby to the rest of the family. As he did to other numerous families who’s only crime was that they too were PN Supporters. Speaking of resisting pure evil for years on end. We have lived it and nobody will change that History, for as long as we live and our memories last.
The battered wife analogy is exceptional.