Strickland: cards and players

I am sorry that Mr Anton Cassar (The Sunday Times, April 17) took my critical appreciation of his publication Il-Konkordat (March 27) as some kind of personal attack, which it certainly was not intended to be and was not. I only undertook to write the review on his own insistence, and the editor's, out of respect, although I am very busy with other projects.

At no point did I say that Mr Cassar was distorting history, as he seems to think. What I did say was that there was not a single footnote, although I gave due credit to the sources that he relied on. Nor did I say that Strickland's "card" was wrong (although it would be wrong to restrict that to preventing ecclesiastical participation in politics, as Mr Cassar now does). On the contrary, I said that "admittedly" most high-powered ecclesiastics between 1921 and 1933 were Nationalists, specifically mentioning three of them myself. The point I made was whether Strickland had not overplayed his hand in that context by asking for too much; and moreover that "he may have wanted the right thing but he did it badly" .

All this seems to have been lost on Mr Cassar, who retorts by attempting to personalise the whole thing very selectively and irrelevantly in my own regard, to have his own back, as it were.

I certainly was not the only person, of whatever alleged political hue, to take issue with some very disturbing aspects of the 1977-1987 decade (when Mr Cassar led the Union Press). By 1981 enough electors (including thousands of former MLP supporters) had changed sides to lose the MLP its absolute majority, won for the first time ever (under universal suffrage) by the PN instead.

Although I mentioned positive points in Il-Konkordat, what I took particular exception to were some aspects of its author's loose structure and discourse, in a publication which was supposedly about Strickland's proposal for a Malta-Vatican 'concordat' in the first decades of the last century.

This was not a history of Malta's recurring 'politico-religious' disputes et al. In view of Mr Cassar's unwarranted outburst, by which he defeats his own cause, let me repeat exactly what I wrote:

"The worst example of this partisan-propagandistic trait is on p. 185: 'Just as the Nationalist Party today fills the European press with lies so that these then wage a harmful campaign against Malta in our time, so too the pro-Italian and fascist Nationalists of that time used to feed the Italian Fascist press...' Today, Sir? Parts of Il-Konkordat must have been drafted much before it actually went into print last year, clearly before the EU referendum and election of 2003, if not before the advent of 'New Labour'. Perhaps the SKS have had the MS in their drawer for years?"

An epitaph on the subject lies unwittingly in Mr Cassar's own retort: "And I do not retract a single word of what I wrote in the 1970s and 1980s."

Fortunately, the times have moved on since then - on all sides. I am confident that old-time confrontational and ad hominem politics, be they religious or partisan, will fizzle out of a more open, better-educated European Malta. This is not to say that there will be less room for opinion or argument, but that gradually we should see an uplift in the manner of speech and more respect for merit.