I tend to subscribe to the de mortuis nil nisi bonum (or at least, nil if bonum sticks in the craw) convention, though the extent to which it is employed sometimes smacks of hypocrisy rather than anything else.

I mean, you’ve been slagging someone off for every waking minute of your and his or her life, and sometimes dreaming about slagging him or her off to boot, and then as soon as the object of your dislike is pushing up the daisies, out comes a pouring of praise and a cataloguing of such a paean of positive attributes that it’s amazing that beatification doesn’t follow automatically.

Someone with a stronger distaste for hypocrisy than I – or even with a lower level of intolerance for it, anyway – would therefore ex­pect a level of comprehension if he or she were to express real sentiments and it is a comprehension that I, for one, will readily extend. Not that anyone with such strength of feeling would give a monkey’s whether I do or not, of course.

This all came into stark relief over the last few days when there was news that Dom Mintoff had been admitted to intensive care at Mater Dei. As part of its rehabilitation process with its core market, the Labour Party issued progress reports, for all the world as if the world would come to an end if Mintoff did, with Joseph Muscat overcoming his various debilitating malaises to visit him three times (and counting).

As is her wont, Daphne Caruana Galizia was forthright about whether or not praises should be sung about Mintoff – not that he was dead, of course, but at the age of 94, you don’t need anyone to do the math for you – and you certainly don’t need me to do the math about where DCG is on the question put.

The reaction was predictable and savage: the number of threats and insults that were put out into the net, dutifully carried as comments to the various portions of DCG’s blog, was immense. Labour’s carefully camouflaged marmalja, the ones that the Marisa Micallefs and all the other Labour groupies try to keep out of the public eye, were out in force, lousy spelling, horrendous grammar and foul mouths to the fore, reacting to what they saw as a foul slur on the legend that is Mintoff.

Almost to a man or woman, these sons and daughters of Shakespeare and Dun Karm took as the main plank of their defence of Mintoff his munificence and benevolence. To read, after you decipher the spluttering venom and barely comprehensible syntax, the comments made, you’d think that if it wasn’t for Mintoff, Malta would be a horrendous backwater, peopled by trolls with barely two farthings to rub together and no nutrition to speak of, ill-educated and backward to a man or woman.

Excuse me? Now that we’ve embarked down memory lane, and if Labour’s babes don’t like it, they can avert their eyes at this point and from here on in, let’s just have a look at what Mintoff left us, shall we?

The list that follows is in no particular order of demerit. And let’s not have any guff about Mintoff not being the only member of the Cabinet: for all intents and purposes, his ministers were hardly renowned for their independence of thought and strength of character.

He was a Rhodes scholar under whose government educational standards in Malta plummeted to depths from which it took years to recover. He virtually destroyed the university and the Medical School and my abiding image of him scuttling past the medical students chained in protest against the railings of Castille encapsulates the cravenness of the man like no other.

His economic policies, if they can be graced with the somewhat exaggerated description of policy, took the country into a three-day week and a level of unemployment that could only be solved by the creation of labour corps and other quasi-totalitarian remedies. And this while his government was cosily snuggled up in bed with the General Workers’ Union.

What can be said of his attitude towards progress, technological or otherwise? Colour television, if you want a puerile example, was to be introduced over his dead body, though the latter was not the only reason why so many people wanted a colour telly. Computers were seen as the work of Satan and the phone and power systems were ancient when de Vallette was rowing stroke on the Turkish galleys.

Was the country a nice place to live?

Was it heck: any protest, the mere hint that you were not four square with the regime, any slur on the good name of “The Labour Movement”, real or imagined, was met with an iron fist in an iron glove, and a visit to the Depot, or worse, was not unheard of – and the mealy-mouthed whingers have the nerve to whine today. There was violence around, real, hard, violence, and the class hatred and vile envy that Mintoff whipped up at every opportunity did nothing to stem it.

Quite the contrary.

There’s more, plenty more: ask the architects, the air-traffic controllers, the bank employees, the teachers and the civil servants.

Ask anyone who had a modicum of independence of thought and who therefore became a target for Mintoff and his henchmen.

And then put your hand on your heart and say that you don’t understand why anyone should think that just about the only good thing Mintoff did for Malta was get us into the European Union, even if this was only because he couldn’t stand Alfred Sant.

Incidentally, it was Dr Sant who called him a traitor, though one assumes he meant to the Labour Party, not to the country. It was Mintoff who was incapable of differentiating between the two.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/blogs