Imagine being stripped of the right to lead an independent life,” goes the tag line in the latest marketing campaign for SOS Eden, which raises funds for the Eden Foundation that Josie Muscat set up. It struck me that it might serve just as well as a tag line for the political party he launched yesterday, in the ballroom of the Hotel Phoenicia.
Yes, imagine being stripped of the right to lead an independent life, because if Josie and his boys are going to have their way, we are all going to be press-ganged into living by their values. This doesn’t mean that we are going to be selling plastic surgery as though it’s a harmless trip to the sweet-shop, or having the fat sucked out of a chubby singer’s body in front of the television cameras to market liposuction to the obese Maltese. Nor does it mean that we will all be harried into laboratories to work at what is euphemistically called “assisted fertilisation”, in a completely unregulated environment. And in the case of Dr Muscat’s political partner, the developer Anglu Xuereb, those of his values that we will be obliged to live by have nothing to do with construction or the environment. As for Philip Beattie, the third man among them, those of his values which he wishes to force on us have nothing to do with being a life-long bachelor whose obituary, when it is eventually written, will include the line “he never married”. No. Instead, he wishes to dictate to us about marriage and the appropriate context in which to have children. In the ballroom yesterday, he said: “I strongly believe in birth, the family and marriage between man and woman.” What’s not to believe? If he bangs on about it any more, I’m going to begin to suspect that this is a case of protesting too much.
As the Maltese exclamation goes: “Ahjar ma nghid xejn!” But I write a newspaper column, so making the sign of the cross in disbelief and getting on with the next thing is not an option. I have to tell you what I think about the party, which is called National Action – though not in the evil language of the coloniser, of course. We know what the word ‘National’ in the name of a political party stands for, and once stood for in the Nationalist Party, but let’s not go on about it or they’ll rush out to insist they’re not fascists.
The party claims it has no ideology, and yet it is against homosexuals and migrants, in favour of hunting and racial purity, and brushes off women while glorifying strong men and uniforms who bring order to a disordered world. That is an ideology. I won’t put a name to it, but I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to work it out for yourself.
Back in that ballroom, Josie Muscat told his audience, which was made up almost solely of men, that National Action will “help boys become men and not people who have to ask their wives for directions.” Our reporter, Juan Ameen, took note of the fact that apart from this disparaging remark, loaded with meaning about the inferiority of women and the “don’t nag, woman” status of wives, there was no reference to women at all. That in itself tells us all we need to know, and fits in with the profile of this kind of far-right thinking: woman’s place is beneath a man, literally as well as figuratively.
The trouble with democracy is that it throws up all kinds of flotsam and jetsam, and parties like this one that play up to the worst elements of human nature. They try to use democracy to get elected, so that once they have some power, they can create a less democratic environment than the one they found. This would be an environment in which they tell us how to live our lives and what sorts of people are “allowed” or not.
National Action, from what I have seen of it so far, is what I call a vanity vehicle. It’s a great big ego-trip for two men who have built up good businesses and another one who, in his relentless focus on other people’s marital and reproductive patterns, while showing no similar inclinations himself, seems to have a whole lot of hang-ups underneath his tweed jacket. He has resigned from Martin De Giorgio’s National Republican Alliance only to mouth more of the same offensive rubbish on a different platform. If I were to call him a fascist, he would rush straight to his lawyer. So instead I’ll say that he sounds like a fascist and that it would have been nice to know that we left all of that behind when the Axis powers were defeated and General Franco dropped dead. But sadly, that’s not the case. The people who need this kind of pseudo-certainty will, like the poor, be with us always.
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People like Josie Muscat lack the insight and self-awareness to see that they are caricatures. Anyone who is against gays and migrants, who wants to keep the nation ‘pure’, almost by definition is in favour of hunting, champions the military and the police force, and holds a dim view of the status of women. This isn’t so much politics as a psychological profile, one so clichéd that it would be risible were it not so sad. When a colleague called to say that Josie Muscat is against gays and immigrants (I had worked that one out already), I said: “Let me guess. He doesn’t like women much, either; he champions hunters, policemen and soldiers, and he wants a return to the velyoos of the 1950s.”
It’s a package, you see; these qualities – if you can call them such – all go together. And they behave the same way, too – which is why the racists went around burning homes and cars last year, and the hunters had a high old time pouring used machine oil into nature reserves and topping three thousand trees. I’m not saying that Josie Muscat and Philip Beattie do this kind of thing. Heaven forefend that should be so. I’m just saying that these are the kind of freaks they’re going to attract, and quite frankly, when you begin to attract freaks, then you become a freak-show.
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I was talking about this during a clinic appointment earlier today – not at the Capua Palace Hospital, which I now feel in duty bound to boycott because of its owner’s much-touted racist and homophobic views. I will not give a single cent of my earnings to somebody who speaks so badly of gay people, black people, “foreigners”, single mothers, and anyone else who does not fit in with his religiously (and unchristian) millennial view of life. Above all, I won’t give even a cent towards the profits of a business owned by somebody who runs down my gender and whose view for Malta’s future is one in which men run the show instead of “taking directions from their wives” – a giant Rambo-esque fantasy in which public life is dominated by strutting men in uniform and other men with guns, while women sweep up after them and secretly feed the gays in the closet. I won’t even bother going into the psycho-sexuality of what this means for the many men who think like this, and who will rush to support National Action. I’ll just remind myself that the same democracy that is giving us these anti-freedom fighters also gives us the ability to vote them into the dustbin.
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I can’t imagine why Anglu Xuereb got himself mixed up with this ragbag of prejudices. He never struck me as a racist homophobic misogynist, and I don’t think he is one even now. It’s a shame he’s shunted his wagon alongside the gay-hating, women-despising, gun-and-uniform-loving, “let’s keep the niggers out” bunch. It’s a shame for him personally, but above all, it’s a shame because what he said at the ballroom meeting made sense. Yet it was eclipsed by the myriad prejudices of his colleagues, which are fearsome.
I cannot take exception to Mr Xuereb’s statement that the narrow division between the two dominant parties means that important changes can never be made. But I have to remind him that one such important change that will never happen, because of that division, is the curtailment of the hunting that his party now champions. I also have to remind him that another such change that has been rendered impossible because of the fear of losing votes is a divorce law. But that is a situation which will be shored up by National Action. Ultra-right parties are against divorce, and not in favour of it.
National Action has about it the whiff of the pre-war Nationalist Party, the one that drove more open-minded people running hard to vote against its oppression and ultra-conservatism, for Labour and the Constitutionalists. By moving towards the centre and attracting people like me, who would never have voted for the old Nationalist Party (in fact no one on either side of my family did so in those days), it has created a gap which is now being filled by the rabid right. These are people whose defining characteristic is the need to control the way others live. They want us to live by their values.
Well, I don’t want to live by Josie Muscat’s values because I don’t share them. I don’t want to live in a society where the people he doesn’t like or approve of are ghettoised, figuratively speaking, and where people – for which read women – are not allowed to marry foreigners because he thinks it’s a bad thing for the purity of the race.
Purity of the race? Who is
he kidding? The Maltese are
the mongrels of the Mediterranean. Any gene going in the world, we’ve got it. Malta was a port, and nothing but a port, for centuries. We had a huge slave population, many of whom stayed behind and settled here after manumission. Slavery ended just 200 years ago, and most of our slaves were Jews and Moslems, not sub-Saharan Africans, so we can’t tell the descendants of slaves just by looking at them, as you can in America. There are Maltese people with clearly Chinese or Japanese features that have emerged maybe a couple of centuries after a passing merchant dropped his seed. There are tens of thousands of Maltese with Berber hair, Semitic features, and Middle Eastern faces that are no different to the ones you see on news reports coming at us from Iraq or Palestine. Then there is red hair, blue eyes, skin that burns in the sun, freckles, poker-straight hair – we’re all sorts, and you’ll often get that hodge-podge mix in the same family. It’s such a farce to speak about ethnic purity. There’s about as much ethnic purity here as there is at the SPCA’s dog shelter.
And yet our Josie is obsessed by the notion of foreigners coming here to breed. To which I say, what’s new? If his hospital, which is forever turning to new ways of bringing in the money through innovative services, doesn’t already have DNA-testing, he should introduce it. Then he should test a few of his followers and tell them where their ancestors came from. The ancestors of anybody who is Maltese were, ultimately, foreigners who came off boats. The population of Malta grew after the 16th century, when it became safer to live here. The new arrivals bred, as Dr Muscat might put it, with the core population of Siculo-Arabic origin. And so it went on, right up to the 20th century. You only have to look at the surnames on the electoral roll.
Ah, but he’s having none of that. “Malta is being invaded by people arriving in boats and people who are landing with a visa,” he told the ballroom packed with men, who were presumably displeased at this threat of competition for scarce female resources to boss around while wearing a Carabinieri get-up. “These will overtake the country in the next 20 to 30 years unless we do something. One-third of Maltese are married to foreigners.” I hope he performs his medical procedures with more accuracy than he makes up figures. One-third of Maltese indeed – but even if it were so, he must understand that who people choose to marry is none of his business. Nobody interfered in his choice of a wife, and nobody interfered in his son’s choice of wife, and that wife is, as he would put it, a “foreigner”.
This remark is not an invasion of her privacy: she has given interviews to magazines about her marriage and how she met Muscat Junior. So it is OK for Josie’s son to marry a foreigner, but not OK for anyone else to do so. Do as I say, but not as I do.
It seems to be Africans that particularly upset him. “Maltese are having fewer children,” he told a newspaper, implying that this is dangerous because Africans breed like bunnies. So did the Maltese, as he knows only too well, and when we stopped breeding like bunnies he saw the gap in the market and started his artificial insemination business. The bunny-breeding Africans “pose a problem for us,” he said, “and we mustn’t forget that once they’re here they can bring their families, which will make the problem 10 times worse.”
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When Josie Muscat’s last child was born with Down’s Syndrome, he did an admirable thing in working for the integration of children with the syndrome into general society and education. The Eden Foundation’s remit has since been extended to encompass others with some form of disability. This sits awkwardly with his barely-concealed disgust for anyone who does not have a disability, but who is different to what he sees as the mainstream: gay people, black people, people from different countries and ‘cultures’. Why does he believe it is desirable to have Down’s Syndrome people fully integrated into the mainstream, but not a black woman or a gay man? The political cliché to which he subscribes is generally anti the disabled, seeing theirs as faulty genes which must be suppressed, hidden or destroyed to ensure the purity of the race.
Dr Muscat does not subscribe to this part of the extreme right philosophy because he is able to empathise. He knows that a severe disability does not make a person less of a human being, with fewer rights, and he knows this because of his daughter. And so I must ask: if he had a gay son, would he still think that gays should be marginalized or “not encouraged,” as he puts it? If he had a gay son, or daughter, I don’t think he would say what he said last Friday: “What worries me is whether it (homosexuality) is on the increase. Is it because it was hidden and is now no longer a cause for shame?... We shouldn’t glorify it.” He mixes up people who are gay with those who are transgender, and was quoted as saying that he would never “consent to people changing their gender with funds from the State”. Ah, but here’s the next big question: would he consent to transgender surgery being performed against private payment at his hospitals, and would he consent to breast surgery in the same hospitals on a transgender man who wants bigger boobs?
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I want to live in a country where people of all sorts feel safe and not marginalized by law or prejudice. If Josie Muscat is uncomfortable with equality, then he should go and live in Saudi Arabia – if they will accept him as an immigrant. Josie Muscat and I may both be Maltese, but we have nothing else in common with each other, and despite what he thinks, we share no values. Mine is the value of common sense and the dignity of each and every human being, not just of the ones I happen to like or feel comfortable with. If that were the case, then I would be forming a political party to ghettoise people like Dr Muscat and Mr Beattie. I can do without them, that’s for sure.
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Do you want to live in a country that marginalizes blacks and gays and champions people with guns? Tell me what you think: [email protected]