The only monument to Dom Mintoff that this country needs is his gravestone

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 4 August 2013, 09:17 Last update: about 11 years ago

The Labour Party is to commission and erect a monument to Dom Mintoff. It was voted in for change and progress, but instead seems to have its finger firmly on the rewind button, with neither the intention nor the ability to lift it off. It’s as though that lot have been on ice for 26 years (minus Sant’s 22 months) and have now been defrosted like some kind of woolly mammoth, only to find that the world is really rather a different and confusing place.

Mintoff – who cares? As somebody commented on the Internet, the only Mintoff monument we could possibly need is his gravestone. Surely the Labour Party didn’t have to wait until it is in government to put up this thing. It could have done so any day on the doorstep of its headquarters.

But the distinction between party and government has, for Labour, always been nonexistent. And so there has been no talk of applying for permits for what will undoubtedly be some monstrosity, because it will have to be much larger than life unless it is to be mistaken for a monument to an escapee from Snow White’s cottage. Because he played such a dominant part in our lives we tend to forget that he was actually a physical as well as moral midget.

The committee to organise this monument is led by Toni ‘Sibt Pulizija Laburist’ Abela and includes Sandro ‘Facing Trial for GBH’ Chetcuti, a developer with his finger in many construction and real estate pies, who has long been in with Labour but who now sees his chance to really get it going with new development zones, land reclamation, and much of the same. It’s a shame that nobody at the press conference about the monument thought to ask about his presence there. Is he paying for it? I would think that likely, and the next question then is what he expects in return.

It is astonishing to see that democratic debate in Japan might actually be stronger than it is in Malta. The finance minister there said that his country should follow the Nazi example in pre-war Germany and change its Constitution stealthily before people realised what was happening. In Malta, a remark like that might spark a few hundred comments on the Internet, be followed by media stonewalling, and then be forgotten. In Japan, it has sparked a level of outrage that has made the international news.

The outrage has spread to neighbouring countries and been picked up by human rights activists, but though Taro Aso has taken back what he said, he has not resigned despite pressure to do so.

Taro Aso said of planned changes to Japan’s Constitution – we are facing changes too, in Malta, but they are in Franco Debono’s hands and nobody seems to be talking about them – that he doesn’t want to see the changes happen “in the midst of an uproar”. His advice for change was that because revisions of the Constitution may give rise to protests, it should be done “quietly, just as in one day the Weimar constitution changed to the Nazi constitution, without anyone realising it – why don’t we learn from that sort of tactic?”

I rather suspect that our own government has more than learned from that tactic. The German constitution was not so much revised as abused. The Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s because of widespread public unrest caused not by economic well-being and sheer boredom but by the Great Depression and rampant unemployment. Emergency decrees circumvented the Weimar constitution and Hitler was able to take absolute power when he was made chancellor in 1933. In other words, that Weimar constitution was not “revised” but abusively suspended.

Japan’s Opposition is not too thrilled at the remarks, saying that they show Aso’s failure to understand the historical reality, that they sound like praise for Nazi actions, and that they are totally incomprehensible. “Minister Aso’s ignorance about historical facts is so obvious,” one said. “I also want to remind him that praising the Nazis is considered a crime in EU nations.” Well, not a crime – but it’s certainly not appreciated, except perhaps in Malta, where Norman Lowell has rather a strong following for such a tiny population.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which keeps alive the memory of the Holocaust, made perhaps the most pertinent comment: that the Nazis’ fundamental technique was the systematic crippling of democracy, in a way that people barely understood what was happening until it was too late. “What techniques from the Nazis’ governance are worth learning? How to stealthily cripple democracy?” the associate dean of the centre said.

It is quite appropriate that we should think about these things. The normalisation of abnormality has been systematic over the last five months – to the point where some people don’t even seem to recognise the palpable signs that things are going badly wrong. It’s like watching people cart out your neighbour’s goods in broad daylight. Surely they can’t be stealing them? It’s broad daylight. But they are.