Some people told us they meant to join us yesterday evening at the demonstration in Valletta but decided not to because they felt offended by Helene Asciak, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s youngest sister, telling Adrian Delia and a delegation of PN suits where to stuff their funereal wreath. And drawing a picture for them when they seemed unable to understand her explanation in fairly simple words.
Those people who did not show up last night for this self-described ‘reason’ were not missed. Not because we wouldn’t like to be in even greater numbers. But because for two years we have wanted to keep the company of people who understood, admittedly for many of us too late, that the trembling voice of a lone woman speaking the truth in spite of convention and ‘proper behaviour’ to a bunch of men in suits who only survive in our society because of those hypocrisies and those conventions, deserves protection. She deserves not to be left alone but instead we serve her the pretence of mock outrage because she must be hysterical and cannot keep her place.
Consider this comment given to Lovin Malta by Dione Borg. The poor soul is ‘hurt’ because of the way all of Helene Asciak’s slender and tremulous five feet handled 7 men and their wreath of flowers. He thinks trashed flowers are painful, does he? I never heard him speak a word at the 700 days’ worth of flowers trashed by the government his party is paid from our taxes to oppose. Not once did they place themselves between the protesters laying flowers and candles at the memorial and the aggressors who come to shout abuse at them, kick and trash the flowers they leave in front of their very eyes and physically assault them.
Consider the presence of Herman Schiavone who is an inappropriate component of a PN delegation in any context but who the PN specifically selected to scowl on this trip having just declared he had done nothing wrong asking for a sponsorship from Yorgen Fenech. Knowing what we have known for some time and surely, sharing the suspicions the entire country is now so grossly disturbed by, the PN made an especially cruel choice dragging that particular cat along.
But of course, this is about Adrian Delia. He had the temerity to haughtily tell the visibly (and understandably) distraught Helene Asciak that he was there to pay his respects. Under those rules of convention and accepted hypocrisy that would have been expected to shut her up. But Helene did not allow him to gaslight her.
I was reminded when I saw the video of yesterday’s incident of the righteous anger of her nephew, Matthew Caruana Galizia, when at his mother’s funeral he saw a wreath wreathed with a ribbon “L-Ispeaker” from Anġlu Farrugia, the man who had thrown her in a shit-strewn cell when she was a 19 year old waif in a form of legal torture intended to extract a false confession out of her.
Somehow, we expect the dead to forgive us the ways we have wronged them, though that does not work the other way around.
Adrian Delia would have us all oooh and aaah about how big it is of him to be paying his respects to someone who had inflicted so much damage to his political career. In the process we are supposed to forget that 10% of the lawsuits Daphne died defending were filed by Adrian Delia with the vexatious dramatic flair of filing them at 1am like a cherry on top.
He was, exceptionally for a PN politician, part of the vicious campaign of people in power in Malta who used that power to bash a journalist for doing her job, to use the courts to exhaust her, to use bullying and the mobilisation of his rabid supporters to scare her, to use the political opportunity of the Labour Party that want him to lead their so-called opposition to frustrate her revelations by roaming about with impunity.
He was both as bad as the Chris Cardonas, Konrad Mizzis, Keith Schembris and Joseph Muscats and at the same time worse than them because in sapping the Nationalist Party he dismantled the last mainstream political bulwark that used to be on the side of free speech and journalism.
Adrian Delia is not seeking rehabilitation with the thousands who deserted his political party and marched demanding truth and justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia. He is up to his classical gaslighting making us – through Helene’s obvious vulnerability – feel like we’re mad not to love him, after all he’s doing everything right and we’re the ones too crazy and too hysterical to accept him.
You could yesterday see the same agonised face of self-pity he wore last Christmas on Xarabank speaking about what a good father he really is but his wife, alas, was not taking her medication and he had to suffer for it. Poor him.
The fact that people continue to fall for that crap is why abusive men everywhere remain in business. As people thought about the bad optics of his wreath in shreds, they forgot to think the obvious. Why wasn’t that PN delegation simply marching along with the other thousands at the evening protest? Why was it necessary for them to go separately organising their own event at a memorial that they do not even acknowledge for 364 days a year?
Because if they did show up in the evening – scratch that. Because if Adrian Delia showed up in the evening it would not be Helene alone telling him where to eff off. It would be more people shouting his name in anger in his general direction than he’s ever had people applauding him in the poor excuse of a political career he’s had.
So, he has, consciously and with pre-meditated intent organised a scene where his unlikely odds are shifted and at the feet of a protest memorial to the woman he called a biċċa blogger until she was killed in a car bomb, he can manipulate us all into thinking he’s a changed man. It is just the blinded, hysterical “Daphne crowd” that refuse to see it.
It is a testament to the success of that manipulation that so many of us were prepared to assume he was being naive yesterday in not expecting the reaction he got. No one is that naive. He went there, precisely because he expected that reaction and wanted to be seen as a victim of it. A victim of a woman half his size eyeing him down alone while he stood with an army of lobotomised droogs who are willing to lend him whatever credibility they still have left for reasons that entirely escape me.
That includes Louis Galea who is fast exhausting the good will he enjoyed on the eve of that fateful handshake when Adrian Delia first wheeled him out to survive the vote that should have kicked him out for good. To the many ex-PN supporters who say they will withhold their support to their old party while the new leader remains in place Louis Galea says he accepts there is no saving Adrian Delia. But he wishes instead to save the PN.
Weird way he has of going about that forlorn mission. Adrian Delia – and I say so because of my claim he knew exactly what he was going in for yesterday – thrives on the opposition’s division. He went there yesterday because he knew that scene would dissuade his core supporters from the temptation, they may have had of joining yesterday’s protest. The larger the protest yesterday the worse he looks for so completely incompetently leading an opposition to a government that has the blood of murder and the sooth of corruption smeared right on its face.
A united opposition has no job for Adrian Delia. A divided one is as vital for his political survival as it is for Joseph Muscat’s.
A PN leader should now be leading legions in the street. But Adrian Delia can’t even take Jean Pierre Debono to dinner anymore.
In Helene yesterday we saw Daphne again. Unhindered with the strategic concerns of how people might perceive the way things look she spoke her mind. She politely said, repeatedly, ‘step back’. She was too gentle.
The organisers of yesterday’s protest are also unhindered by the partisan imperative of numbers. We did not miss those who stayed away because they fell for Adrian Delia’s manipulation. They are not yet ready to see through the gaslighting of powerful men. We’re not worried. We’ll keep at what we’re doing.
Eventually, like many before them, they’ll see it too. As Don Luigi Ciotti said yesterday in a very long speech: the revolution must start within us.