First get the facts, said Mark Twain, then you can distort them as you please. Or, to be less cynical than Twain, you can interpret them as you please. Bottom line: your interpretation should be disciplined by the facts.

It would be astounding if public discussion over Daphne Caruana Galizia’s memorial and legacy generated consensus. Power divides: powerful public figures are always divisive and so are people who challenge power.

Whatever Caruana Galizia represents to you – a power-wielding figure, someone who stood up to powerful figures, or a bit of both – you shouldn’t expect wide agreement. But you have every right to demand, and be held to, adherence to the facts.

Here are just five of the facts that should ground the discussion, but which are repeatedly ignored.

First, on her divisiveness. Yes, divisive she was. Since many people were ambivalent about her, you could even say that she left many torn between themselves.

However, if being divisive rules out public memorials, there should be far fewer of them. Anywhere. Certainly not for Charles de Gaulle (even though the airport in Paris is named after him) or for Margaret Thatcher (who never had a majority of Britons voting for her).

Closer to home, you’ll find that Dom Mintoff, as Labour leader (1949-84), was not only permanently divisive; he had the majority of voters against him for roughly half that period, quite apart from the post-1998 odium. Enrico Mizzi was also divisive, so perhaps we should reconsider the wisdom of the memorial opposite St John’s.

Fact: invoking divisiveness as a criterion to decide whether Caruana Galizia’s legacy has anything of permanent public value is to uphold a double standard: one for her, a different one for the rest.

The second fact should inform the debate over her memorial. The issue is already confused because two very kinds of memorial are often conflated.

A permanent memorial would concern her legacy. The Republic Street makeshift ‘memorial’ is about not forgetting that her assassination was (as I believe Prime Minister Joseph Muscat himself once put it) an attack and injustice against us all.

A permanent memorial would close a chapter in the life of the nation; the makeshift memorial refuses to close the case.

Now, I happen to think that Occupy Justice is making an unreasonable demand if it really expects the police already to know the identity of the person or people who commissioned the assassination. But the insistence on a highly visible, makeshift memorial, to keep the case open, is very understandable.

It is a fact that this is a country where even spectacular killings can be blotted out of public consciousness very quickly. Six years ago two men died of knife wounds in a Sliema apartment. Malta was shocked and agog. But no official account was ever given of what really happened. And no one has followed up.

It took a bomb to stop her. How many of us can have that etched on our gravestone?

We’re a very forgetful country. This might sound odd. In world history, never have so many grudges been nursed by so few. But that’s what makes us so special. We forget but don’t forgive.

In such a context, it is entirely understandable if some people insist on keeping Caruana Galizia’s assassination a highly visible, open case. As a country, we cannot be trusted to remember on our own.

We owe it to ourselves not to let her brutal murder become a residual grudge whose truth and reason we have forgotten.

The third fact concerns Caruana Galizia’s legacy. You’re free to think the world of it or to think nothing of it. But the ‘plain-speaking’ fashion for downplaying her role in the Panama Papers – on the supposed grounds that she was merely lucky to get advance warning on account of her son’s membership of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – is based on fantasy.

We have the truth from Luke Harding, the journalist who worked on the Panama Papers on behalf of The Guardian: “By 2016, Daphne was one of almost 400 journalists working secretly on the story...” She was the journalist who worked on the Malta angle for the ICIJ before the story broke.

Like other top European investigative journalists, Harding speaks of Caruana Galizia as a colleague, not as someone who was given a tip-off. ‘Daphne interrogated the Panama Papers from home; I worked out of The Guardian’s fourth-floor investigations ‘bunker’ in London.”

He makes it clear that she did the spadework: “The documents she unearthed told their own sorry story.” (Harding’s account may be found in the book Invicta, dedicated to Caruana Galizia’s memory. Disclosure: I contributed to the book.)

The fourth fact concerns her misjudgements. Yes, there were many. In a career of 30 years, with 20,000 blog-posts in the last nine, they would pile up for anyone. Let me also say, before anyone pipes up about how I can’t understand what it feels to have been at the receiving end, that a couple of her misjudgements concerned certain members of my own extended family.

She could be very hard. But that hardness needs to be judged against this fact: For three decades, she was at the receiving end of a steady stream of vulgar misogynistic language in private messages, phone calls, newspapers, television footage and blog commentary. Each of her three sons was targeted (in one case with collusion from within the police force) for abuse or punishment, as was her father, simply to get at her.

And that’s when they were not killing her dog or trying to burn down her house while her family slept.

I would challenge anyone to face all of that and not lose some sense of perspective. Objectively, she may sometimes have punched down. But she can be forgiven for believing she was swinging out, alone, against a mob.

In any case, in such circumstances you can give up or grow a thick skin. But you can’t reduce your sensitivity to others’ insults and intimidation without reducing your sensitivity to the feelings of others.

Nor do we have the luxury of saying that the country benefited from her best work while distancing ourselves completely from her worse showings. You can’t separate her from context. Insofar as we tolerated the environment that contributed to her hardening, we have to take collective responsibility, just as she was responsible for all she wrote.

She lasted for three decades in a country where the pressure to push her out was tremendous. Try to find other writers whose columns began in the 1990s and who are still writing. Apart from one or two, the rest have gone. She had staying power – in no small measure because she gave as good as she got.

The fifth fact. For 30 years, she was pressured, intimidated and threatened. But it took a bomb to stop her. How many of us can have that etched on our gravestone?

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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