Malta's significant history

Deana Shanley states that throughout most of her history Malta was "an insignificant edge-of-the-empire garrison rock". She seems to forget many important facts regarding Malta. Apart from Malta being an archipelago and not a "rock" (we may consent that as a part of imaginative prose), Ms Shanley ignores the fact that 3,500 years BC Malta, and not the US, was the focus of mankind. But there is no need to go that far before the fateful declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

Just before the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon stated to the British ambassador in Paris that "Peace or war depends on Malta" and that "I would put you in the possession of the Faubourg Saint Antoine" (the area around Paris) "rather than of Malta".

On his part Lord Horatio Nelson adds that Malta was "a most important outwork to India" and that "I hope we shall never give it up".

What sort of "edge-of-the-empire garrison rock" would accommodate, in the period called Pax Britannica, persons like Lord Byron, Benjamin Disraeli, Sir Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray and many more? The fact is that the "edge-of-the-empire garrison rock" did accommodate such famous personages.

Also to clarify her hidden "Stalinist claptrap", one has to remember that Stalinism meant depriving many people of consumer goods and amenities of life so as to cover military expenses, a policy which was not, is not, and shall never be followed by the neutral Maltese republic.

If she does not agree with my last point, she ought to open the mythical Encyclopædia Britannica (which, comically, is printed in the US, the heaven of low prices according to her) from where I took the source of my last reference about Stalinism.

I agree with Ms Shanley about her rhetorical questions (as nobody can possibly answer them without going mad) on the price-mechanism of our economy but, please, Malta was never created to accommodate the meaningful adjectives Ms Shanley gave us Maltese people in her article.