The significance of the life and death of Daphne Caruana Galizia is lost on us. I have spent the past two months thinking about her impact and struggling to articulate some of those thoughts in writing. But the deeper I burrow, the more I realise this will be a job for the historians.

As chroniclers of our time as well as actors on the same stage as the late journalist, we are deafened by the white noise around us, and blinded by the illusory reflections we mistake for reality.

As the year of Daphne’s death draws to a close, we can barely decipher the smoke signals.

In the first instance, as a country, we have failed to recognise Daphne’s killing in the way other countries have. Some of us still think that the interest of the international press has been, somehow, orchestrated by traitors keen to embarrass the Maltese government.

Some of us still fail to understand why La Repubblica named her Person of the Year; why Germany includes her in its exhibitions; why Paris keeps refreshing flowers at an improvised memorial outside the Notre Dame; why countries as far as Japan have read about her murder; why Israel is reviewing its security assessments of the region; why public authorities across the continent are lining up to decorate her with their highest honours; why Italian journalists are forming a network to take up Daphne’s work where she left off.

Secondly, as a country, we persist in failing to appreciate the opening that has been created for corrupt people in power to accelerate their plans. Many of the connections made by Daphne in her writings were the serendipitous product of the combination of sources who trusted her and her own stupendous capacity to connect the deceptively isolated.

Just last week, the government has committed to purchase electricity from a power station that appears broken and a long way from repair; allowed three of our hospitals to pass from one unaccountable private owner to another without any public scrutiny; manoeuvred itself into a stronger position at Bank of Valletta using revenue from the sales of passports pro­mised for community benefit programmes; extended with no discernible limit the passport sales programme that remains as secretive as ever; and opened a nature park to daytime hunting.

Each one of these developments hides a bigger picture that would not stand up to scrutiny if scrutiny were indeed possible. It is less possible now that Daphne has been removed from the picture.

Thirdly, we seem to have forgotten the democratic virtue of dispute, criticism, disagreement, controversy and dialectic. And we have ended up here in the most histori­cally frightening manner possible. Labour opposition under Alfred Sant and Joseph Muscat was cynical, vicious, relentless, dishonest and deceitful. But it did the job of presenting a contrast to government poli­cy. But when the roles switched, Labour’s retort to any opposition was that it was ‘negative’, and as such wrong, treacherous and morally reprehensible. And rather than being ignored as just so much hot air, this tactic has actually worked.

How quick we are to deny rights to men who have just been denied their mother. How swiftly we justify the padded walls closing in on them by the small politics of the survival of the powerful

Call me negative and I’ll wear it like a medal. The Opposition today has adopted the old maxim that if you cannot beat them, join them. Its criticism of the government has become timid, and its boot-licking praise of the government is laced with unintended irony. I recently overheard a PN shadow minister praise the government for its handling of traffic congestion. But the situation becomes truly desperate when the absence of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the desertion of the PN as a proper party of opposition allows the government to bustle about without restraint.

Fourthly, after the initial shock, we have all gone back to seeming rather detached from the emotional fire that should still be burning, this soon after the explosion. We are trying too hard to make sense of this shocking crime by searching for reasons and explanations in Daphne’s behaviour, rather than within the wider social context in which we live. And as we hasten to move on, we forget that tomorrow, four Caruana Galizia men are sitting down for Christmas lunch without their wife and mother.

The day after tomorrow, Malta will go in its yearly orgy of self-congratulation, translating our capacity for human compassion into millions and other such record numbers. But for all those compassionate givers, a political killing has been suffered by a family that cries mercury and sleeps on lead. How quick we are to deny rights to men who have just been denied their mother. How swiftly we justify the padded walls closing in on them by the small politics of the survival of the powerful.

Fifthly, our residual belief in a Platonic truth conditions us to be comfortable with the idea that truth is unattainable. Since no one is completely objective, we need not even try. And that visceral tribalism, that hate of the others, that willingness to exchange our conscience with the benefit of our own team takes us up the fearful road of nothingness we now inhabit. We shall stamp on the opponent’s shin when the referee is not watching and we shall pretend to be hurt if the whistle is blown.

And the greatest compromise to tribalism is the assumption that everyone must be doing it. For the accused, the accusers are traitors. And for the innocent bystanders, for the inveterate neutrals, the armchair cynics who take no risks, everyone else is a hypocrite.

As Antonio di Pietro put it a few weeks ago in Malta, in blaming everyone we end up accusing no one. We excuse the sale of our hospitals to Vitals and onwards to someone else, because the concrete at the A&E built by the Nationalists proved defective. We excuse handing our energy contract to Azerbaijan, because an agent received a commission when the Nationa­lists bought the BWSC plant. We excuse the sale of passports to crooks we don’t know, because the Nationalists fished drowning immigrants from the waves.

Finally, with all the inevitable imprecision of generalisations and the delightful relief of exceptions: our journalism is either starved or owned by the powerful; our lawyers and accountants are distracted by the shared profits of dubious trades; our planners and regulators are in awe of the political masters; our civil servants are quaking in their shoes; our policemen are agents of their party; our Opposition is leaderless, divided and complicit; and our educators are inhibited.

And Daphne Caruana Galizia, Person of the Year, is dead.

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