Most of us were stunned by the European Court of Human Rights' (ECHR) ruling over the presence of crucifixes in classrooms in Italy; adding injury to insult the court fined the Italian State €5,000 "for moral damages". If we wish to know more about the debasement of language, revisit those last three words. The entire episode becomes hilarious were it not so unrelentingly dotty.

The facts are straightforward enough. An Italian citizen of Finnish origin, Soile Lautsi, asked her local public school to remove crucifixes from wherever they hung. Lautsi found them offensive. When the school failed to do so, she took the matter to the ECHR, which ruled in her favour.

Reaction in Italy against the ruling was understandably strong; so was it here. Which is why, once both our Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition declared themselves against the ruling, I cannot understand why they did not take the next step and protest against it formally, and in solidarity, with our Italian friends.

A newspaper in the Veneto region declared "secession from Europe" - for one day. The Senate chairman was quoted as saying that, "...no one can impose rules that are against our history and our culture". PD leader Pierluigi Bersani remarked that the decision showed how "common sense becomes a victim of the law... an ancient tradition, such as that of the crucifix, cannot be offensive to anyone".

Yet, for bewildered people, in Malta, too, it apparently is; for normal people it demonstrably is not; rather the crucifix is recognised for the supreme act of love it is, a sacrifice offered not only for friends but for the victim's enemies and killers, too; than which there is no greater love. That Lautsi could not see this is bad enough; that the ECHR should be as myopic is not only regrettable. It is offensive to Europeans who owe their identity, their culture, their Europeanness in great part, to that figure on that cross.

There are those who recognise a Christless Cross (communism provided one and liberals are at home with it, too); but Cross and Christ - that's too difficult for some to take on board; better by far, a Crossless Christ, whom different fools are ready to follow. History is against them. There is no such person.

There has been a rush by some Maltese EU-ites to point out that the ECHR's ruling has nothing to do with the EU. My information is that under the Treaty of Lisbon the EU is expected to accede to the European Convention of Human Rights. This, in turn, would bind the European Court of Justice to judicial precedents set by the ECHR and make member states subject to the court's human rights law.

That was the year that was (1)

To resurrect the story of what happened in 1989 is to highlight the post-war European tragedy. In this drama an Iron Curtain forcibly divided a continent the tyrannical Hitler had destroyed. His doppelganger in Moscow then staked out the frontiers of what Ronald Reagan, to the horror of liberals was to call the "evil empire", all the way to the Elbe.

I wonder how many people under 20, or over, for that matter, can trot out the names of the men who were in charge of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania in 1989? I ask because they were the last rulers of these countries and after 1989, a miracle of solidarity, they were out of office.

In East Germany there was the man who built the Berlin Wall, Erich Honecker, and his successor Egon Krenz, who applauded the massacre on Tiananmen Square; in Poland Wojciech Jaruzelski on one side, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and Solidarnosc on the other; in Czechoslovakia there was Gustav Husak on the left and the philosopher Vaclav Havel leading what has come down in history as the Velvet Revolution; in Hungary, where the executed Imry Nagy was being rehabilitated, there was Janos Kadar his hangman, about to commit suicide; in Bulgaria a forgotten nonentity, Todor Zhivkov; and in Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu, who for some black, hilarious reason failed to see that his end was nigh.

The year 1989 probably has no equal in European history. Millions of people who had known nothing but war, occupation and dictatorship since 1939, brought down communism.

None nailed that lie with a greater sense of drama than those least expected to rise against their masters. East Germans and East Berliners before November 9, 1989, breached the wall their masters built to keep their people in - and became Germans and Berliners. It was the greatest mass break-out in history. Well, not quite true; even before and while the wall was being built, and after, more than three million East Germans had shaken the dust of the communist paradise off their shoes and headed for the hell of the West.

A month earlier, that said, charismatic figure, Mikhail Gorbachev, took part in the GDR's 40th anniversary celebrations. He warned its leaders that Soviet troops would not this time help put down a revolution, as it had in 1953 (East Germany), 1956 (Hungary), 1968 (Prague), 1970 (Poland). More enigmatically, he warned, "Life itself punishes those who delay". Hungary's prime minister did not delay; he opened his country's borders with Austria. Thus porous, East Germans poured through the no longer Iron Curtain.

Unbelievable things were happening in Leipzig; peace prayers spilled out into the squares.

At their highest, the numbers of demonstrators reached half a million; as one historian put it, "The whole of East Germany suddenly went into labour, an old world - to recall Marx's image - pregnant with the new."

False prophets pre-empted the end of history by proclaiming it. Others declared a New World Order. History, patient as ever, waited in the wings.

Twelve years later, on a sunny day in September, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and, it was said, the world had changed forever; but nothing is forever.

That was the year that was (2)

What a way to celebrate his first year in office. The Republicans regained the governorships of Virginia (23 point swing) and New Jersey, which Barack Obama won last year by 15 percentage points, with a swing of 19 points. The reversal is being touted by the White House as something even less than a blip.

Still, the President has been alerted to a simple fact of life at the top. You stay there only for as long as you can convince voters that you deserve the top rung. In Obama's case the conviction has evaporated faster than it has done with most Presidents in their first year of office.

It may turn out to be the case that Obama's tragedy is that the whole world fell in love with him - hell! He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for what he intended to achieve (another first) - and he fell in love with himself. Power does that to one.

So he took himself off to Istanbul and Cairo, wand in hand, there to display his credentials as the man to unlock the West-Muslim conundrum, solve the Iranian Question, engage with North Korea, engage, engage, engage, and to resolve the Middle East impasse. Not happening. Hillary Clinton's recent visit there was described as an "amateur night at the Apollo Theatre".

We are still trying to find out what engagement is doing in the case of Iran; what is certain is that for the most part it has meant looking the other way when the Iranian bully boys break up demonstrations and beat the living daylights out of those they put in prison. Human rights are no longer on America's agenda if it upsets people she wishes to engage with. In Afghanistan, his new strategy is already in need of a new strategy.

Then he bestrode the G20 meeting like, well, a Colossus, lectured the world on climate change and seems hardly able to deliver his side of the bargain. He flew in to bid for Chicago as the Olympic venue for 2016 and flew out empty-handed - always an embarrassment for an American President. He gave up the missile defence system because it irked Russia and received nothing in return. He collected the Geithners and the Summers and Axelrods and Emmanuels and thought they would change the world only to discover otherwise; so he and they - shades of Richard Nixon - decided to attack Fox News viciously, never a good sign, using the style and manners of, well, Chicago.

And way, way, way up there he staked his future on an abortion-funding healthcare bill that will cost the country $1,055 trillion. Let me write that out in round figures: $1,000,000, 000,000 - or Malta's budgetary expenditure for the next 5,000 years (I may have got the odd zero and my sums wrong; either way, we are talking astronomical figures). As if that were not enough, I have just read that America's projected accumulated deficit for the next 10 years will be in the region of $9 trillion.

Last week a couple of governorships were lost - not because Republicans voted them out; far worse. A swathe of Independents deserted them; a bad sign.