By trying to make him bigger and bigger, Dom Mintoff is only made smaller and smaller. While the 100th anniversary of the man’s birth was celebrated last month, hyperboles and platitudes were thrown around left, right and centre. While his devotees babbled, his detractors chose a stoned silence. Both are captives to a memory which is unable to separate the wheat from the chaff.

One might be tempted to talk of historical objectivity here. Only that such a thing, much like truth, does not exist. We can only talk of interpretations, one or more, which make an effort, if they can, to keep raw facts in perspective. This means considering the context or, rather, weighing the facts against a wider background. The broader and deeper the background, the more proportion is achieved.

For it is indeed proportion, or even a sense of it, that ails most accounts which have been hitherto proffered with regard to Mintoff’s story. Devoid of context, empirical or theoretical, the facts themselves, even if well documented, become distorted. Add to this that such accounts are often flagrantly partisan, in favour or against, and so emotionally loaded that the overall end result becomes utterly unreliable.

This is not all. Supplementing such narrow assessments is the appetite for grand narratives. That is, in this case, wrapping the whole Mintoff story in one enveloping abstract idea which is supposed to explain away, in a jiffy, an entire lifetime which, for more than half of it (or more than half a century), involved a nation’s experience.

Hyperboles and platitudes with regard to Mintoff are not helping. What they do is thicken the fog of misunderstanding

Whether this idea is marked by triumphalism or despondency is just a question of adornment. The fact remains that ups and downs, twists and turns, ascents and descents, the smart and the dull, rain or sunshine, are all heaped up in one undifferentiated mess.

Now I am quite capable of understanding why this is done by academically incompetent people. Nevertheless, what really irks is that such unprofessionalism may be observed right across the board.

This is worrying. Not merely because it does no justice, from a historiographical point of view, to Mintoff, but rather because it reveals an endemic helplessness when it comes to weighing our history, at least the most recent. Such ineptitude is almost embarrassing.

Perhaps all of this comes from the fact that, after all, we tend to see ourselves as islanders.

That is, as cut off from the world, as if our little world has a dynamism of its own, more or less unrelated to context and largely unaffected by it.

Though very often our thinking is grandiose, we find it difficult to think big. This means seeing ourselves as inseparable from the larger, much larger, picture or, better, seeing ourselves, however pertinent, as an upshot, rather than an initiator, of history. Imagining ourselves to be some kind of prime movers is pitiful.

Back to Mintoff, his story is worth telling yet. Some would disagree, and go as far as to try to ignore he ever existed. Or, if he existed, as something one should forget as quickly as possible. I empathise with the feeling, though I think it to be impulsive.

It strikes me as a negation of a thesis which still hasn’t been proposed. This attitude can even be regarded as illogical. Whatever the case, it may only prove the point that our historical reckoning of the last 60 years or so, both individual (Mintoff’s) and national, is still unacknowledged and maybe also misjudged.

Other people have even stopped taking an interest. The past, after all, they seem to say, is dead and gone; why bother about it at all? However naïve, this attitude appears to me a speedy exit, not altogether unreasonable, from the muddle of seemingly irreconcilable historical narratives about our recent past. It is not the past which may appear to be dead and gone but any hope of comprehension.

What’s certain, I think, is that hyperboles and platitudes with regard to Mintoff are not helping. What they do (and I suspect more of them are in the pipeline) is thicken the fog of misunderstanding and, worse still, deepen our helplessness in seeing through it.

The 100th anniversary of Mintoff’s birth last month presented us – on all sides of the political divide – with another chance to begin stepping out of our myopia. Alas, the opportunity was lost.

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