A hundred years ago, the liberal historian James Bryce remarked that studying real history delivers us from the temptation of drawing plausible analogies between our present and the past. History doesn’t offer Cliff Notes for our present circumstances. So consider what I say next simply as a laundry list of striking coincidences.

For tomorrow we commemorate the centenary of the events we call the Sette Giugno, and although so much of what’s being said is rightly about our generation’s historical debt, and how far we’ve come since then, there are a number of ironic similarities between then and now.

[attach id=721597 size="medium" align="right"]Photo: Chris Sant Fournier[/attach]

First, the significance of the Sette Giugno itself has been embedded in a debate about whether the bloody incidents are to be considered simply as a case of mob violence and house-breaking, or whether they are best seen as a great national event whose meaning escaped some of the participants.

Today, the balance of scholarly opinion has shifted decisively in favour of seeing the event as having national significance. In recent years, only a contrarian like the late Daphne Caruana Galizia continued to insist in public that the events concerned nothing more than a rabble driven by class envy.

The reason the scholars are right is not simply because they have access to more points of view than that of those whose houses and shops were burgled and smashed: the civil servants, the poor, the Drydocks workers, the anti-colonial professions... It’s also because scholars can understand the force of the events in an institutional context.

However accidental the deaths and injuries of that day were, whether or not the uprising was driven in part by hooligans with politics far from their mind, the fact remains that we cannot understand what happened without looking at the wider national context. It’s that context – which included the demand for a liberal constitution – that made the events national, and that gave those events a political afterlife.

Fast forward to today where, 20 months after the murder of Caruana Galizia, we are mired in discussing whether it’s a one-off private event, strictly a matter between the late investigative journalist and criminals unknown. Or whether, irrespective who the mastermind is – and, for the sake of argument, let us assume we have not even begun to suspect his or their identity – the killing of a journalist, systematically reviled by partisan machines, is necessarily a national political scandal.

Second, on the day after the Sette Giugno, an angry crowd gathered in Valletta, outside the Governor’s Palace. Its political leaders wanted the British authorities to undertake a full inquiry into the violence, including the authorities’ role in it. The British promised one, but then dragged their feet, and when they could drag no more they produced a report in sucha rush that it shed no real light on the events.

A century later, here we go again. There’s a demand for a public inquiry into the events leading up to Caruana Galizia’s murder. It’s logically separate from the criminal investigation of the murder itself. It’s a logic that is apparent not only to the late journalist’s family and friends but also to the Council of Europe. But the authorities are dragging their feet. Let us see if the result will also be, eventually, a perfunctory report inimical to the building of public trust.

Third, a hundred years after the Sette Giugno, we are still discussing Maltese political choices in terms of mob psychology. This is more pronounced and obvious when the discussion is led by government critics who are disenchanted with voters’ electoral behaviour.

A hundred years after the Sette Giugno, we are still discussing Maltese political choices in terms of mob psychology

But an alternative version can be discerned even on the other side of the political fence, where politics is couched as customer service, and voters as ‘consumers’. We know that ‘consumers’, even in economics, is often a euphemism for people driven by irrational desires and passions, suckers for marketing, fads and snake oil.

Now, some of this discourse has an international context. Some strands of international political communication are nowadays built on the idea that the human mind is, fundamentally, ‘irrational’. The picture is a caricature of the actual findings of experimental psychology, but it’s popular given the dark machinations associated with outfits like Cambridge Analytica and the rise of populism around the democratic world.

But all this is simply to say that the 19th-century concern with crowds and mob psychology has returned in our own time, once more dolled up in the language of science. It doesn’t dilute the irony that, in a country that should be sensitive to how a colonial power dismissed national aspirations, we are replicating that kind of discourse about ourselves.

Fourth, it is not often mentioned but, 100 years ago, the colonial authorities weren’t quite sure that the Sette Giugno happened on our own steam. After all, some months earlier, the same conditions were present for an uprising, yet it didn’t happen. A report written by Henry Casolani, the then Principal Secretary in the Office of the Lieutenant-Governor, speaks of a “secret force” working in “a mysterious and quiet way”. The hint is that it could have been a foreign power, perhaps fascist or communist.

Today, it is still our favoured way of evasively explaining away civic or political demands that discomfit the authorities. They are either demands serving the interests of envious foreign governments, or else international organisations are dupes of the secret agenda of a deep Maltese establishment, so deep its members are nameless.

Will there ever come a time when the authorities can acknowledge that their opponents are not dupes or traitors but simply legitimate opponents?

Finally, it is natural that, in discussing the Sette Giugno itself, we discuss the nation in terms that include victimhood. However, how natural is it that, discussing independent Malta’s affairs today, it is still considered normal to discuss nation in terms of victimhood and who is out to get us?

Behind the historic Sette Giugno was a demand for a liberal constitution. Let us hope it will not take another century for us to discuss nation in terms of constitutional patriotism, adherence to a common charter of articulate values, instead of a sullen insistence that powerless minorities should shut up.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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