I write this while still in shock from yesterday’s events.  

Soon after news came in of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia’s execution – because that’s what it was, really, wasn’t it? The word ‘murder’ doesn’t even start to touch at the implications of what happened – I turned online to try and find some measure of comfort and understanding, as is our wont nowadays.

For the first half an hour or so, I felt cocooned in the safety of the outrage being shown by pretty much everyone I’m connected with on social media. It took a cold execution to achieve it, I thought, but it seems that the Maltese are finally united in condemnation of everything that is wrong.

Everyone around me was acting decently. Horror and disbelief were rife. We could be counted upon to show decency when it mattered, I thought to myself. Naive much? Yes. Barely an hour went by than I realised that what I was looking at was the carefully curated list of people whose opinions I actually follow on social media. And they tend to be like-minded.

Out there, in the real Malta, things took a disgusting turn pretty fast. I ventured onto the comments sections of different news portals and what I saw sickened me. I turned to the public social media accounts of strangers and my stomach clamped in disgust.

We are living in a country where people carcade when someone loses her life.

Malta is rotten to its core. There is no other way to justify what I saw yesterday.

We are living in a country where people carcade when someone loses her life. A country where the leader of the Opposition’s first instinct is to attempt to reap political mileage from a journalist’s death. A country where the entire legal system that is investigating said journalist’s death is compromised to the core. A country where human life is given secondary importance to partisan politics – and this applies to the entire political spectrum.

Yesterday’s events were an attack against Malta and against civilisation as we know it.

Yet, the majority of Maltese from both ends of the blue and red spectrum are too busy bitching about partisan politics to figure out that they are being taken for a ride. Because, of course, whoever is responsible for this wants exactly this.

Let the partisan bickering start. It keeps the populace nicely distracted from the cold reality of organised crime that couldn’t really give a damn about whether ‘their’ party is in power, because despite public perception they probably have a finger in every pie anyway.

The cold reality is that whoever is responsible for this execution didn’t do this because of partisan politics, but because something big was about to be exposed and the consequences had nothing to do with which party won the next election. Mrs Caruana Galizia’s work was way more high-level than that. No-one ordered a hit on a journalist because she criticised the dress sense of politicians’ wives and made political parties look ridiculous.

Someone, somewhere, was about to have their life ruined in a spectacular manner. This was not an act of PL vs PN or vice-versa, and the fact that most Maltese can’t seem to go beyond that is dismaying and disturbing. The tragedy is that we are likely to never know what really happened.

And the bigger tragedy is that we never learn, and we keep on plodding in our parochial mundanity without considering that there is a world beyond red and blue out there. And real evil always thrives on ignorance.

Deep condolences to Mrs Caruana Galizia’s family.