Let’s talk history. Even if we keep hearing that we should not talk of what happened then and only talk of now, I think in the final analysis history can’t escape us. After all, if one had to be exact, we are only history and the present is but a nanosecond between the past and the future.
Garbage aside let’s get to the subject proper. Citizenship sale, secrecy clause, media coverage in Malta and abroad, the opposition and the about-time-too decision to remove said secrecy clause.
Long tall order to cover in a tiny blog-post. But let’s try all the mightiness of the pen.
Where does history—the proper one of long days ago, maybe even the last millennium stuff—come in? Let’s see. The modern men—and some women—at the helm of the Labour Party in 2013 sound dramatically, and worryingly, like the Labour party of old. The one discarded not just by the PN but also by most of the new labour crowd. Theoselabour leaders of old who talked of the Europe of Cain and Abel, the labour party which inflicted upon us a shameful, shaming sham called the foreign interference act which forbade foreigners, especially Western ones, from talking about Malta.
If those foreigners did speak out they could be barred from entering our country. And to our never-ending shame foreign nationals were hounded and deported like criminals. Yes, such stuff is made of historical lore and most people my age threw all such words into the freezer of memory like nightmares never to be relived.
But nothing in a country’s nightmarish history is ever erased. Echoes of it come back to haunt us. The sale of Maltese citizenship, which was paraded as the god-send for our plight and deficit, hit the foreign news like a storm that rocked us solidly and horribly.
Some apologists called it a storm in a tea-cup. Some teacup! Nothing like it has happened to our reputation since Mintoff decided to act all Chihuahuaish and growl at the big dogs and bitches of the East and West in Helsinki. The world was experiencing a cold war then—divided between the democratic west and the authoritarian East of the USSR. Mintoff by his actions managed to get both cold war giants most uncharacteristically together, in unison against tiny Malta.
Today our modern masters, our new style Labour, have taken a few feathers from the old Labour gang and blamed the entire storm in a teacup in the foreign press on the Opposition. So one day we hear that Simon Busuttil is ineffective, useless and needs to grow up. The next we hear he and he alone can orchestrate, manipulate and order the foreign press to issue reams and reams of stuff about the idiocy of the citizenship sale.
And thankfully the secrecy clause will now be removed. So if the Labour bigwigs had listened to the ineffective PN leader maybe no storm would have been leashed onto us. TIf the nefarious Act to stop foreigners from bad-mouthing Malta is brushed up a bit and made to look glitzy, Joseph Muscat could find it handy if he ever dreams up anything idiotic again. Like that no PN lackey who runs the newspapers all over the world would dare criticise anything happening in Malta.
Oh we sure are living in interesting times.