Some people have stated that having a wine named after the Maltese Fascist Carmelo Borg Pisani is a trivial matter. It is not!

I have always been astonished at efforts by certain people in Malta who try to romanticize the historical figure of Carmelo Borg Pisani. The one inescapable fact about Borg Pisani is that he was a convinced Fascist and everybody knows what Fascism stands for.

So all efforts to paint a rosy picture of Borg Pisani as a young misguided idealist, a Maltese irredentist, are beside the point. The main point to keep in mind is that he wholeheartedly believed in the condemnable Fascist ideology.

Also beside the most crucial point of his being a Fascist but intellectually stimulating and worth debating are arguments about whether Carmelo Borg Pisani was a "traitor" or not.

First of all, how does one define a "traitor" in a colonial context? Borg Pisani did not recognize Great Britain's right to possess the Maltese Islands. He did not consider himself a British subject and he had opted for Italian citizenship. Can he, therefore, be considered as having "betrayed" the British colonial masters? If the answer is "yes", this begs the question : "what right had the British to be in possession of the Maltese Islands in the first place?" given that today we interpret history in a post-colonial context.

Did Borg Pisani "betray" his fellow Maltese?

This is rather tricky to answer because an objective answer depends on how you interpret Malta's contribution in the Second World War. Malta was British territory at the time and Great Britain was at war with Italy, Germany and Japan.

However, this was not just a war between countries, it was also a war between democracy and totalitarianism.

The Maltese, except for a totally negligible number of local Fascists, were all for sustaining the war effort in favour of the democratic countries.

How many Maltese wanted a Fascist Malta? A very small number of "intellectuals" at best!

Yet, Borg Pisani was one of those who worked towards placing all the Maltese nation under the Fascist yoke.

Remember that even the Italians themselves eventually saw the error of their ways and rose up in revolt against Fascism. Yet here we had a Maltese who would have subjected his fellow countrymen to the abominations of Fascism in their own country!

For me, yes, when everything is considered you cannot escape from the fact that Carmelo Borg Pisani did betray his fellow Maltese, after all.

Having said all this, I still think that his fate was a cruel one. I am all-out against the death penalty and the right of the British colonial masters to hang a Maltese on his home soil remains highly questionable although acceptable to some who also argue that Borg Pisani was a spy and spies are executed in wartime.

Given today's more humane views on this subject, I would say that Borg Pisani deserved to be sentenced to a long period of imprisonment.

To conclude, commemorating anyone or anything associated with Fascism is wrong. It is an insult to the many victims of this condemnable ideology. So let us stop trying to romanticize the Maltese Fascist Carmelo Borg Pisani.

There was nothing romantic about a person who joined the Fascist Party and actually fought in favour of the Fascist ideology when he could easily have avoided doing so.