Left, right and centre

History is a strict but harassed taskmistress; it is continually teaching us but is cursed with the fault of constant repetition simply because many of us find it too implausible to believe that lightening can strike twice in the same place. From the beginning of history as such, the time when our deeds or, rather, misdeeds began to be recorded for posterity, we have craved for security at whatever cost. We have bought this fleeting sense of invincible superiority by waging war in the vain attempt of knocking all opposition or rivalry out of the running only to find that, human nature being what it is, our one-time victims will one day exact a terrible vengeance.

As in Carmina Burana, fortune is a wheel; one day we are on top and another we are at rock bottom. Empires have come and gone and others invariably take their place. Those who may one day have seemed unassailable and invincible may from one moment to the next show out to have been idols with feet of clay, as we all are in the long run, for are we not all doomed to die? A man who once commanded legions and cohorts of men and at whose slightest word the world trembled will one day succumb to the inevitable.

It is because our lives are so comparatively short in the context of world history that its lessons are never properly learned or remembered and it is because there is nothing new under the sun that political developments, to a historian, can be as much of a foreseeable platitude as the sun rising in the east.

This reflection occurred to me when I saw the photograph of an unrepentant and unbowed Saddam Hussein at his trial and read about his superlatively arrogant behaviour. War-torn and occupied Iraq is being dragged kicking and screaming into a democratic world that it does not understand. Imposing democracy on an extreme Sunni or fanatical Shiite is like trying to make a cow lay an egg. At the same time that Iraq is voting for a constitution it is too hurriedly bringing to justice a man who for several decades held it in thrall and who unsurprisingly still commands vast support within and out of Iraq.

The charge brought against this man, who by all Western accounts is nothing more than a human ogre, is a crime committed in 1982. Albeit the crime was horrific enough per se, the fact that the Court of Justice set-up has pinpointed just this one to speed things up and make a scapegoat of Saddam will merely serve to fuel his supporters into committing even more atrocities. I strongly feel that ex-President Hussein should have been tried in The Hague along with Slobodan Milosevic. In that way the legitimacy of the trial would never have been questioned. Giving in to pressure by overspeeding the legal process reminds me of the bloodbaths during the French Revolution wherein the Dantons, Robespierres and Desmoulins who had instigated the Reign of Terror, themselves ended up on the scaffold to make way for yet another dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte. One extreme simply breeds another.

I am not a Bible basher, far from it, however the parables of Jesus as recorded in the four gospels provide a simple and easy blueprint about how a good life should be led. Their universality outshines the common sense of even Aesop's fables and therefore I am appalled at how our own newly home-grown ANR has seen fit to take Joseph Friggieri to task for quoting, as I did myself last week, the parable of the Good Samaritan when discussing the irregular immigrant crisis. A peek at their website will show all those with access to a PC that ANR puts Christ's teaching in the following terms; "Professor Joseph Friggieri reminds us of the parable of the Good Samaritan, conveniently ignoring the fact that Christ did not burden anyone else with his charitable deeds, conveniently forgetting the biblical lesson of Babel. Charity at other people's expense. Mr (Professor) Friggieri has no charity at all. Charity without prudence is an act of stupidity".

The whole point of the parable and why the son of God came down to earth to redeem us in the first place is cast to the winds and what is said in the quote is a blatant aberration of Christ's teaching. While openly declaring that ANR is in synch with the Church's magisterium, the party states that "Christ did not burden anyone else with his charitable deeds". So what did He do in actual fact? Tell lots of pretty bedtime stories to be told and retold for 2,000 years? Get nailed to The Cross for fun? Do the Good Samaritan, the Widow's Mite and the Prodigal Son have the same moral weight as Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots or Cinderella? As for the Babel lesson... the mind boggles! I leave it to the deafeningly silent Maltese Church to put this one right.

So now we have a left, right and centre in this little microcosm of Malta; the ideological circle is complete and the race to win hearts and minds has begun in earnest.

With the situation of the world as it is and a budget that promises to be none too jolly hanging over us, we have a centrist government trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, an equally centrist opposition waiting avidly to take its place (I sometimes wonder why), a leftist Alternattiva with ideas that are idealistically impractical and a new rightist movement that is doing its best to grab hold of all the disaffected by appealing to the lowest common denominator, unreasoning fear.

Last week I said that should right wing ideologies infiltrate our Armed Forces we should tremble. The very next day a meeting for the families of the armed forces was advertised on Page 56 of this newspaper. I am now feeling more and more like Cassandra than ever. For those of you who are unaware of who poor Cassandra was, she was a Trojan priestess who was given a double-edged gift of prophesy by a vengeful Apollo, as he also cursed her with the burden that nobody would ever believe her. By the time you read this, the reportage of the meeting will possibly be old news. All I can say is that to me the pattern is becoming so familiar and predictable that it makes me shiver. In 65 years' time Fr Mark Montebello will be canonised!

All extremes, whether they tend to go left or right, are, to the intellectual world, totally abhorrent. Marxism created its own monsters as did Fascism. A strong moderating voice of reason that will quell the fears that fuel extremism in this country - which we all know, but choose to forget, came dangerously near to anarchy in the 1980s - is urgently needed. Prosperity and the belief in the divine right to live in a charmed goldfish bowl have seen to it that the slightest threat to the status quo can induce the sleep of reason that brings forth monsters.

kzt@onvol.net