People lit candles in front of pictures of Dom Mintoff in between the Madonna and the local saint.The totalitarian image of uniformed, smiling schoolchildren waving the flag and cheering the great leader in Martin Scicluna’s piece (December 6) was chilling. He is one of the few around old enough to remember the Hitler Youth. He really should know better.
Autocratic regimes can mobilise enthusiasm from the crowd through a toxic combination of intimidation but also false positives: a bandwagon of loyalty and gratitude to a State on which masses feel they must depend. Not all those tearfully hysterical screamers in the main square of Pyongyang are there at gun point. Many are persuaded their misery is a boon granted by the wisdom of the great leader without whom there is nothing.
Martin Scicluna may have been in shorts at the time of the Hitler Youth. But he was in the Department of Defence when people lit candles in front of pictures of Dom Mintoff in between the Madonna and the local saint. At the time he looked down with haughty pity as people wailed in gratitude to the Salvatur ta’ Malta. He hissed at their short-sightedness and their self-destructive adulation of incompetent and corrupt thugs that had taken over their lives and their capacity to think as individuals.
Now he seems incapable of recognising the same familiar scenes around him and he has joined the adulation and seeks to lead it from the front.
It is not that he is not entitled to his views or that he’s somehow stupid for having them.
It’s that he shows himself to be aware of the issues and then proceeds to ignore them or at best belittle them.
He is aware of the Panama leaks but then says “regulatory and judicial processes are already underway”. The police stood back. The whistle-blower was hounded and threatened and an international arrest warrant issued on her. Another whistle-blower was fired and is dodging lynching every day.
The court’s order to the police to investigate was appealed by the alleged perpetrators where it’s still stuck. Three years after documentation showing secretive accounts of a minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, the two are still in office. What processes are underway?
Freedom of speech is the freedom to criticise even if one stands alone against a national consensus
He betrays his concerns about the civil service by declaring to no one in particular that it “still functions”. Its heads, Labour and Nationalists, were decapitated within a week of the coming into office of the new government. Super One staffers have been appointed above everyone else as political commissars.
Ministers are on record to have interfered in autonomous processes, including criminal investigations. And now revolutionary committees are permanently instituted to decide on alleged grievances of Labourites in order to ‘adjust’ the balances of authority to fit in the right dogma. How is the civil service functioning?
He declares freedom of speech is thriving and yet confesses to annoyance that political parties own most media. He fails to mention the State broadcaster that all but ignored the death of Daphne Caruana Galizia and took it upon itself to trumpet the government’s spin on reality.
We have three television stations with two versions of the truth. Between them we watch Pravda, Pravda and Izvestia. But we can trust none of them to hold power to account. And the journalist who took it upon herself to do so is blown up in an explosion while we’re supposed to believe three barely literate small-time hoods she never wrote about are the brains behind her taking off. How is freedom of speech thriving here?
And Scicluna adopts wholesale the fascist notion that criticising the government is motivated by tribalism and a seditionist aspiration to replace the recently and resoundingly re-elected government.
What is his much vaunted freedom of speech for if it is only to be used to praise the great leader, as he does? Freedom of speech is the freedom to criticise even if one stands alone against a national consensus. It is the freedom to offend, to satirise, to use irony, to object, to say ‘no’ to a regime everyone else applauds hysterically like their life depended on it. Because maybe it does.
Scicluna is not the only one to be articulating this mantra of imposed consensus breached only by fifth-columnists and traitors within. But he is primarily guilty because his education, his erudition, his experience and his knowledge should guide him to recognise fascism when he sees it.
It does not have to come in goose-stepping black uniforms with Jolly Rogers on the brow.
It comes in the monopolisation of truth; in the intimidatory oppression of a regime that always knows better; in the denial of what is known until it is forgotten. It is in displays he should recognise so well, of disproportionate military might and of a silencing propaganda machine that Scicluna seems incapable of seeing because he has become its microphone.
eddie@mirandabooks.com