Some people are quick to accuse others of being elitist when those others point out how their predictable response to stimuli plays out just as expected. While recriminations and lamentations over the election results pile up, coming from people apparently unembarrassed to admit their surprise at the results, the notion that, of all people, the election result can be blamed on me is gaining some ground.
It’s really quite silly really. I haven’t been anywhere near anything like the decision-making process (or any other process) in the PN for 9 years.
Since Bernard Grech became party leader I only remember having anything like a conversation with him that lasted more than 20 seconds just once and that was nearer the beginning of his term than the election.
If I can be fairly accused of anything it would be that I’ve been critical of the PN. And yet Dominic Fenech describes me as a millstone around the PN’s neck and Saviour Balzan speaks as if the PN bases anything it says or does on what I think. That’s a flattering idea, Saviour, but entirely fanciful.
In response to these comments, trolls say I should ‘get out’. Fine. But out of what? How do I get out of something I left 9 years ago?
Some other commenters said that my analysis or opinions on political affairs are irrelevant because, you know, they come from me. Which is fine, except that I have to wonder why they’re even aware I write or have an opinion. Why do they care?
And what are their complaints aimed at achieving? Am I going to have my tongue cut out and fed to pigs? Am I going to be poked with a sword in the back until I jump off a plank to swim with sharks?
These people are responding predictably to the stimulus of Labour’s campaigning. For years One TV fabricated stories about me intended to make me an object of hate and ridicule. They wrote about how I led a mob to assault and insult children with disabilities, how I piled dog shit in the street, how I coordinated an international press campaign to make Malta look bad, how like Warwick I crowned Bernard Grech and then retained him as my puppet. The list of spectacular absurdities with no relationship with truth is endless.
All these vaguely remembered details where then refreshed on that campaign video and billboard that identified me alongside PN candidates Labour did not want elected. I didn’t run so they weren’t trying to prevent me from being elected.
But they still want me ‘out’. And the only thing I can be out of is the only thing I’m in: here, exercising my profession, exercising my fundamental right as a citizen to think for myself rather than think what one party or the other would like me to, living up to my responsibility to share what I learn rather than shut up and let others face alone all the risk, and honouring your fundamental right to hear what I have to say if that’s what you want to do.
They want me to stop doing that so you stop having access to what I do.
They want me to stop speaking because it was better when they only had Daphne to deal with instead of the multiple voices speaking up now. It is of course woefully true that my voice and all those other voices are all inferior to the ground-breaking power of Daphne’s. But as a collective we are the last remnant of a pluralist society containing views that are not coordinated by some invisible hand paying the bills, and for that the voices are transparently sincere.
It is also true that our voices are not enough to make Labour win or lose elections. But that’s not really a weakness. To borrow a phrase, right or wrong are not a popularity contest. And yes, we lose popularity contests hands down.
It is, after all, the people who decide who gets to win or lose elections, not me or other people who do this sort of work. Our job is to inform the public the best way we can and the public is entirely free to ignore us. Most of the public has done so again in this election. It happens. The public voted Labour in 2017 in spite of what Daphne told them about the Panama Papers. The public voted Labour in 2022 in spite of what we told them about what Daphne told them. Just because we can’t change those basic realities with our words does not mean we must stop using words.
None of this is a reason to stop. But it’s a reason for Labour wanting us to. Because even as all powerful as they must feel today, they still fear that one day their secret will be out and the public will see them for what they truly are and punish them for hiding it from them for so long. For the public to see the truth when their eyes open, they’ll need us to stick around now documenting the evidence. They don’t know it yet, but we’re doing them a service.
Labour wants us to shut up so that the day of reckoning never comes. Labour is happy to be thus, but they want to be safely thus. That’s why they want us, people who just won’t be intimidated by shows of force, by Mary Spiteri uber concerts, by drunken orgies bearing mock coffins in the street, and by trolls, even deluded Nationalists, telling us to ‘get out’, to shut the hell up.
Let it be clear then that I’m by no means the only target of this. But the list of enemies of the Labour Party is short and shrinks further. Though their majority is ever greater, their popularity more consolidated than ever, Labour’s insecurity is transparent. And trolls, who have persuaded themselves to believe they are speaking for the PN, help Labour like lab mice responding to an electric jolt.
Like the youth of China’s cultural revolution, they shout slogans condemning the “elite”, the “establishment”, the “enemies within”, the “bourgeois”, and the “intellectuals”, and marching out the enemies of the revolution.
I’m not pitying myself. I’m merely pointing out, if you’ve been wondering, the real reason why Labour would put a journalist on its campaign videos and billboards. This is when it starts working.