It is fascinating, the way the Labour Party always resorts to the same brainwashing technique that it has used over the years, expecting it to succeed just because it did so once, in 1996.
This tactic is the seizing on and deployment of a single word as a cipher for some great and obscure evil which then becomes associated in the public mind with the Nationalist Party in government. Alfred Sant was the first to do it in the early 1990s, when he used words like barunijiet and hofra in a relentless campaign designed to tap in to people’s ignorance and baser emotions, while leaving their brains untouched.
It worked then because the use of the word barunijiet stirred up powerful feelings of bitterness, envy and resentment among very many of my own socio-economic group, who then rushed out in droves to vote Labour so that Marin Hili and Joe Gasan would have less money (they thought). Hekk, hekk, hekk, ha nwahhalulhom.
The promise to remove valued added tax was just a part of it. Hdura and lanzit, two very serviceable Maltese words to describe some very Sicilian emotions which are as yet undiscovered by English, was what really did it. And this along with the desire to supplant and replace (with themselves, quite possibly) those they perceived as friends of the government, who got more than their fair share of the cake. So off they went in 1996, the word barunijiet ringing in their ears, to vote Labour quietly and then boast about it only afterwards, when Labour had won and they felt they stood to gain by claiming their share of the victory.
from that, the one-word tactic hasn’t achieved its aims of eroding support for the Nationalist Party among those electors who make a difference to the party’s fortunes. Support has been severely eroded, yes, but not by the use of single words as a cipher for evil and corruption. That tactic is designed to appeal to the lowest common intellectual denominator, and that is Labour’s natural market anyway. So it ends up merely an exercise in reinforcing morale among the troops, rather than proselytising among the enemy.
I rush to add that by the lowest intellectual denominator I don’t mean the working-class. Some of the poorest intellects I encounter in daily life are very proudly possessed and displayed by women who would be slotted by a market researcher into the same socio-economic category as I would be. You only have to check out some Facebook ‘walls’ to see what I mean. They are the ones who think that in order to be thought smart and clever and different, they must criticise the government. It is a crying shame that they have neither the arguments nor the words to do this, their intellectual development having been arrested largely at the age of 15 or 16, when they left school.
The Labour Party’s current deployment of this hackneyed tactic centres on the use of the acronym BWSC, the corporation which won the power station tender. It-Torca, l-orizzont and KullHadd, the newspapers owned by Tony Zarb’s union and the Labour Party, use the letters BWSC in their front-page headlines. Super One newscasters and talk-show hosts rabbit on about it all the time.
Joseph Muscat talks about ‘bee double you ess see’ whenever he can, too – on street corners, at press conferences and on radio and television. He doesn’t do so because he thinks his audience actually understands what he means or takes a deep and passionate interest in the tender adjudication process and its myriad complications and technicalities. He does so for the same reason Sant talked about mysterious and unnamed barunijiet, leaving the rancid imagination of bitter electors to fill in the blanks with rancorous Chinese whispers and defamatory untruths.
In the intellectually impoverished thoughts of Muscat’s supporters, ‘il-bee double you ess see’ is now a byword for unquantifiable evil, which in these unsophisticated minds takes the sole shape and form of ‘mhux fier’ – other people taking money when they’re not getting any themselves.
It’s a safe bet that most of the people kvetching about the evils of ‘il-bee double you ess see’ haven’t a clue what the broad points of the issue are, still less the finer points and details in which the devil famously resides. ‘Il-bee double you ess see’ has become just become just another barunijiet, but with the key difference that the circles in which I used to move but have time for no longer are not eaten up by jealousy because the corporation is not Maltese and they don’t know who to be jealous of. This even if they felt jealousy for foreigners at all, which they don’t - this soul-destroying emotion, as with all backward village societies in the Mediterranean, being reserved solely for fellow villagers who think they’re someone and who are thought to be getting special privileges.
Yesterday, when persons unknown sprayed the letters ‘BWSC’ on the prime minister’s father’s grave, we had the perfect illustration of how this Labour tactic works – or rather, doesn’t. Of course, they might have taken a cutting from It-Torca with them to make sure they got the right letters in the correct order, but I doubt it. Constant repetition on the Labour-leaning and Labour-owned media has drilled ‘bee double you ess see’ into their minds. The clue that the print media played a large part in brainwashing them is the fact that, had they listened only to Super One, they would have got it down as BWSE, because that is exactly how Super One newscasters and show-hosts pronounce it lazily: bee double you ess eee.
The sort of person who wakes up one morning and thinks ‘I know what I’ll do today: I’ll take a can of spray-paint, drive to the cemetery and spray ‘BWSC’ over gONzIPN’s father’s grave’ might well be the type to take more than a passing interest in the adjudication process of public tenders and in power station technology. But it’s unlikely.
Of one thing only can we be certain: when Labour begins to deploy its one-word-wonder tactic, the morons are out in force. If they’re not on some Facebook ‘wall’, then they’re at the cemetery, armed with a spray-can and a set of letters whose meaning is obscure to them.
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