Ian Borg, all haughty and la-di-da, went on Facebook to accuse people who draw bitter conclusions from the killing yesterday of Myriam Pace for no reason except that she lived near to yet another enormous and growing hole in the ground of exploiting the tragedy for votes.
Speaking as someone who is often contradicted on Facebook I am impressed by the fact that Ian Borg’s post attracted over 1,000 comments almost none of them in support of him.
Impressed, but I should not be surprised.
It seems that people like Ian Borg want the citizens of this country to be grateful for the catastrophes visited upon them by the hand of the corruption of its government.
Let’s put it in perspective, shall we? In the weeks and months after the Chernobyl power plant explosion in Soviet Ukraine in 1986, 60 people were killed. That’s out of a population of the USSR at the time of 291 million or 0.00002% of the population.
In the collapse of yesterday one person died out of a population of some 470,000. That’s 0.0002%. Proportionately therefore the Santa Venera collapse was a 100 times deadlier than Chernobyl.
Sure thousands of people died prematurely because of residual radiation over the years in Ukraine and Belarus. But it’s not like we’re counting the people dying from respiratory disease due to Malta’s construction industry, are we? Something tells me that when we start counting the deaths caused by dust and the pollutants from heavy construction machinery we’d find Maltese construction to be just as unhealthy as Soviet nuclear technology.
Why the comparison? Because after Chernobyl the Soviet state played the games Ian Borg and Robert Abela are playing. They made swift arrests of people who had clear on the ground direct responsibility for the incident. I am speaking about Chernobyl here since the responsibility of those arrested in connection with the Santa Venera collapse still needs to be proven in a courtroom.
And then they proceeded to accuse anyone who might question institutional failures that allowed Chernobyl to happen to be acting for the dreaded American interests or other undesirable counter-revolutionaries.
In the case of Ian Borg his maccarthyist equivalent of the hated western imperialists was the naughty Nationalists who were exploiting “the tragic death” of Mrs Pace “to gain some votes”. Ah, we wouldn’t have that now would we? We’d do better not to ask questions about failures of Minister Borg in case someone might decide to vote for the scary, nasty Nationalists.
There’s a repeated line in Orwell’s Animal Farm that the spokesman for the governing pigs keeps using every time one of the farm animals wonders aloud if the running of their farm could not be a little bit better and easier on them. The pigs would ask rhetorically and threateningly whether the other farm animals would want the old drunken human farmer back. No one wants that. And that puts an end to the inquiring discussion.
Chernobyl happened because poorly trained, overly ambitious, negligent plant managers caused it. But it also happened because the government chose a cheaper technology to roll things out faster and suppressed information that could have prevent the accident from happening because it would have caused political embarrassment to reveal.
It’s not unlike the way the government here has opened the tap on unregulated over-development and short-circuited geological reports that used to be necessary in these cases and would have prevented these disasters.
Chernobyl was the beginning of the end of the Soviet regime. People would no longer sit idly by as they are told not to ask questions. They asked questions. They set up protest environmental campaigning organisations that were illegal at the time but happened anyway to the point where they had to be made legal and became the first political parties in Russia since 1917 that were not the Communist Party.
There were many Ian Borges in the Soviet Union of 1986. Arrogant bastards who thought no one could touch them and they could scare an entire population into silence by threatening them the nasty Americans would be coming. They were all out of a job within 3 to 5 years.
Ian Borg would do well to read the 1,000+ comments he got so far. His destiny is carved between those lines. The roof over his head at his Ministry is pretty solid. But political roofs crumble just as suddenly as the roof did yesterday over poor Mrs Pace.
