With all due respect, Frans Said (‘The Sette Giugno myth’, June 7) seems to be living at best in a twisted time warp.
He alleges that the Sette Giugno was “a fascist victory”. The mob was incited with “false information and fake news”.
“Wake up, historians,” he appeals (sic), apparently unaware of the books and academic articles that have been published about these events at least since 1970, not to mention pre-war publications by inter alia Orlando-Smith and Scicluna Sorge.
Was the deterioration in the quality of wheat and the rising cost of bread “false information”? Were discharges from the dockyard “fake news”?
“The 1921 Constitution,” he writes, “provided for an assembly without any power, just empty talk that could not make any decision...”
He alleges that to commemorate the Sette Giugno is “a lie, if not an insult”.
I would refer him to serious writings with a bearing on this subject by J.J. Cremona, Paul Bartolo, Michael Sant, J.M. Pirotta, Dominic Fenech and various others, let alone my own in 1969-1970, which kick-stated the post-war debate.
The British inquiry at the time tried to exculpate the officer who apparently gave the order to shoot on unarmed civilian demonstrators with live ammunition and instead to blame some nationalist agitator.
There was comparable and bloodier post-war unrest in various other parts of the empire such as Egypt, Palestine and India, which also led to constitutional changes.
As I have shown in my review article in The Journal of Modern Italian Studies, there was a degree of Rome-based fascist propaganda by the likes of Francesco Ercole, Gioachino Volpe and Umberto Biscottini in Malta, as in Corsica and elsewhere, to whom one might add Carlo Mallia (on whom consult the name index in my volume Europe and Empire - Midsea, 2012, p. 861). But it is simplistic, reductionist and misleading to imply that the Sette Giugno was an Italian fascist affair. Fascism only started getting into its own in Italy after 1922, years after the Sette Giugno.
The Assemblea Nazionale demanding autonomy had been meeting at the Giovine Malta on February 25 and again on June 7. The kulħadd għall-belt (let’s all go to Valletta) slogan on dockyard walls was not scribbled in tar by Nerik Mizzi or Benito Mussolini.
Six unarmed Maltese demonstrators were killed in 1919 and the Sette Giugno became firmly, emotionally and politically ensconced in our anti-colonial collective patriotic memory, however much pro-British diehards may still try to deny and to and dismiss it. That is what would be truly deceitful and insulting.
According to Said, “the grassroots of Italian fascism are still active, awaiting every opportunity to spread their doctrine”.