A darker shade of black

Spring in the air? Poetry in the arena? The PM (holding forth a week ago) must be kidding. If the Prague Spring was brutally turned into a false blood-bathed dawn in Wenceslas Square in 1968, with Alexander Dubcek (he of Socialism with a Human Face) reduced to a menial number, the political climate in Malta is growing by the hour chillier than the days and nights of this angry February. Far too often I find myself recalling another February, that of 1962, when the politico-religious dispute dominated the first election after a period of direct colonial rule.

It was a time of bitterness. Of ashes in the mouth. Of profound sadness in the heart. Brother turned against brother, husband against wife. Friends became enemies. The history of the early Thirties, when the first politico-religious war broke out, repeated itself, but more fearsomely. It was a time when the Maltese psyche plunged into madness. Like Hamlet's, it had method in it - political opportunism abounded. But there could be no calculated method in the headlong rush of our society towards near perdition.

Opportunism was the least of it. What remains vivid in my memory is not the fact that I was among those Labourites who were interdicted by the Church, a sanction worse than political injustice, for it seared the spirit of those of us who, no matter how great our personal sins, believed in a mysterious God of Love and Mercy and recognised the bishops as His representatives. That particular madness, at least, ended in a true spring of hope, faith, and forgiveness.

What perseveres within me is an abiding apprehension of the intolerance that dominated the period. I was in the thick of the Labour Party, a fledgling of little weight, but one of the flock under heavy fire. I could write my early columns in the Labour press only on pain of mortal sin and it was also a sin to read them or whatever else was carried in the Labour Party newspapers, including foreign news. Along with others, I was not free to think and to express myself. Those of the public who wished to read me were not free to do so and then disagree with me and toss my words aside.

That is what is seared in my memory - the terrible intolerance of the time. It fed my early inarticulate, inner feeling that I would never accept to be told by any mortal what to think and not to think, what to believe and not to believe. That I would view authority with suspicion and bridle in its presence. I was not necessarily right, and could have been very wrong. My intellectual growth, such as it was, may not have travelled along a correct path. In disdaining and rejecting intolerance, I may have become intolerant or not tolerant enough myself, though I sincerely hope not.

Whatever. Over 40 years on, having traversed life from my early 20s to close to my middle 60s, my mind and spirit are branded in a manner that might as well be a glaring mark on my forehead. To repeat Patrick Henry's 1775 patriotic cry, "Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death", would be to sink into melodrama. But, there is a parallel that is no more than simple fact - without the freedom to think and act for oneself, one becomes a slave, a human vegetable.

As winter's cold weeks move by, our latest political winter grows more severe. Our society has a choice before it. It is not one of political principle. It is not related to religious belief. We have to choose whether to become members of the European Union - which includes Socialists and Christian Democrats, believers and atheists, Christians and minority Muslims who will grow massively should Turkey join later on - or to remain non-members, and have a different positive relationship with the Union.

It is by no means a simple choice. There are arguments in favour as well as against one route or the other. There is no guarantee that either road will yield success and its net gains. There is no definite conclusion that either path will lead to failure and its balance of hard consequences. There can be no prophets other than false ones to claim they are divinely touched and that it falls to them to see the true vision of the future.

There is no dogma involved. One way or another, the route one chooses is largely an act of faith in the context of a process of reasoning it out. There are assessments to make and views to put forward. Everyone should be free to think out a position and to argue it. Everyone should be free to disagree with an opposite position, and to back such disagreement with counter arguments.

That is what freedom of thought and freedom of expression are all about. Such freedoms are the first buds that signal the true spring of democracy. If they do not appear, the earth is not yet tilled for democracy. If the buds are not allowed to flower but are crushed, democracy is maimed in the womb.

Democracy was cruelly maimed at the time of the general election of February 1962. I fear it is being badly maimed now.

The issue of Malta's relationship with the EU is not being discussed within the parameters of freedom. Not even of tolerance. Tolerance is a concept secondary to freedom. If I say I tolerate your views, I am being patronising. I suggest thereby that your views are inferior to mine but that I allow you to hold them. Freedom is not about allowing anything to others. It is the right of each one of us. It belongs to every individual.

We give up a small part of it to the state to secure the good organisation of society according to the rule of law. To rules that restrict a little of our freedom only to ensure we can enjoy the much bigger part of it. Within that is the freedom to think and to freely express what we think, provided we do not do that in a manner contrary to laws that we have agreed to bind ourselves with and to respect.

Yet, as February peters out, as we approach the day set for the referendum on whether Malta should join the EU at its next enlargement on May 1, 2004, the right to freedom of thought and the companion right of freedom of expression are being crushed. The prime minister argues his case in favour of joining the EU with conviction and passion. But he also repeatedly brands the leadership of the General Workers' Union as betraying the union's members because it does not agree with him. He does not exercise his own freedom of expression to say that he disagrees with the GWU.

The PM incessantly dubs as traitors the leaders of Malta's largest union. Did the man honestly promise spring? Spring is not as the painter sets it on his inanimate canvas.

One may disagree on how the GWU's anti-EU's stance was reached, as well as with individual positions adopted in the union's administration in that process. Fact is that the process was according to the rules of individual freedom, which cannot be fettered by anybody's zeal or passion, and to the rules of procedure of the GWU. It is legitimate to disagree with individual members of the GWU's administration or council. And also with the established procedure, though only union members have the right to change that if they want to. But to yell Betrayal! Betrayal! reflects not just intolerance, but also a disregard for the true meaning of freedom.

The labour leadership follows suit. The party leader heads the virulent attacks on those who come out in favour of membership and against his position. Apart from prime examples among the constituted bodies, like the MHRA, rather oddly he too targets a union, in his case the Malta Union of Teachers. It has revealed that in its case the leadership was not split over its ultimate position, though had it been that, as in the case of the GWU, that too would have been legitimate. Nevertheless, the targeting continues. It does not stop there.

Technical individuals who argue in favour of membership are not simply dismissed on technical grounds. They are ridiculed. Economists are charged with being jukeboxes that play a tune according to the money put into them. Paradoxically, that tears to ribbons the expert or experts who, it was formally announced by the Labour leader, have been formulating a technical platform for the MLP's position, on tourism and other sectors.

Economists cannot lay claim to infallibility, to Absolute Truth. Certainly not those of them who - like myself - reach their conclusion by evaluating different potential scenarios through critical reasoning, rather than by building statistical models. Anyone can reach different conclusions through this approach, which is ultimately subjective, even if intellectual rigour and honesty are uniformly applied on all sides.

Where studies are of a technical nature, using models and simulation, as in the case of that carried out by the analysts headed by Professor Ali Bayar the result can be challenged with alternative technical studies, which may among other things disagree with the underlying assumptions made, though probably not with the methodology used.

Whatever the approach, any publicly expressed opinion, whatever the platform or forum where it is put forward, is and must be subject to critical appraisal and to criticism. Nevertheless, the concepts of freedom of thought and expression dictate that challenge to and disagreement with any set of conclusions should relate to the argument, not the person making it. Not so this chilling political winter.

Among other things, technicians who, not uniformly technically, spoke or wrote in favour of membership were glibly and sanctimoniously rubbished as pipers paid to play a particular tune. They were classified as "a handful of puppets". In contrast, anonymous technicians who compiled anti-membership reports were exalted.

There is no doubt that the Opposition Leader and his parliamentary deputy, the key Labour protagonists, have been and continue to be attacked in personal terms that crunch the concept of freedom with the vicious intent to undermine their political standing. When that led the Labour leader to warn that he would respond with an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, there were those who were scandalised, even though they did not utter a word, and some may even have tittered, when he was shamefully targeted in his private capacity, unrelated to his political role.

Personal attacks, open or surreptitious, generate reaction according to one's temperament and state of mind. Virulent personal attacks upon individuals on the basis of their opinions are something else. Something that some Nationalists have grimly practised for decades, but which I would have hoped, in view of Labour's fight for freedom of thought and expression serious party exponents would consider beneath them.

If those of us who endured it recorded the election month of 1962 as Black February, this winter's short month is certainly of no lighter shade and if anything, in its own way darker. That was also demonstrated through the treatment meted out by some University students to former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff when he went up to the University this week.

God forbid that the irreverent exuberance of youth should be extinguished out of season: the dampening effect of maturity and aging will take their toll surely enough. And of course, there is always criticism to level at the past. But boos and jeers are hardly the stuff that freedom of thought and expression are made of.

Perhaps a national revision course in the true meaning of those pillars of the great and essential concept of democracy is long overdue. It is painfully evident that it would do young and old alike good to attend it.