When a ship loaded with 30 tons of cannabis caught fire while sailing some 30 miles off Malta a couple of weeks ago, some joked that the prevailing wind brought the ‘smoke’ to our islands and it might have affected some people.
When you see the folly in what some people say or do, you start wondering whether there was some truth in the “weed” effect. I’m saying this because for anyone to come up with the proposal to replace/remove the George Cross on our national flag, one is either smoking something very particular, or else has a very warped concept of what makes a country a ‘nation’.
A flag is not just a piece of fabric hanging from a pole. It signifies something bigger and stronger. It identifies a nation and its people. Together with other important aspects, such as language, history and culture, a national flag is a symbol of who we are.
In my book, any tampering with the flag of a nation requires something more far-reaching and substantial than some delusional ranting of an overly zealous “patriot”. When a national flag is changed (either completely or partially) the motivation is usually because the element being removed is something that brings shame to that nation. Two clear examples come to mind.
In a referendum after the Second World War, the Italians decided to go for a Republican constitution, and, soon after, opted to remove the Savoia coat of arms from their flag. They did not do this on a whim, but because the post-war political leaders wanted to denounce King Vittorio Emanuele III for abetting Benito Mussolini and his Fascist regime (especially for signing the racial laws in 1938). Indeed, the 1946 Constitution banished all male members of the Savoia family from entering Italy – a banishment which was only repealed in 2002.
The second example is much more recent. Take the change of the Libyan flag following the fall of the Ghaddafi regime. The new flag chosen for a new and free Libya was the old flag of the Kingdom of Libya which was first used back in the 1950s. By removing the green flag, the then Libyan Transitional Council wanted to declare to the world that it was denouncing all that Ghaddafi’s Green Book political philosophy, and his regime, stood for.
That is why countries change their flags.
The nationalistic undertones of the suggestion that the George Cross is no longer a valid depiction for our flag, is a feeble and ridiculous attempt at re-writing history. Blinded by what they call “national pride”, those behind this suggestion are insulting their forefathers who earned the George Cross by laying down their lives, suffering hunger and enduring the adversities of life on an island under siege, in their fight against the Nazi Fascist onslaught of Europe during the Second World War.
I am no anglophile, but claiming that the George Cross is just a medal is reductionist in nature and insulting in substance. Assertions that the medal has no value as it was awarded by a foreign power (whatever that may mean) are complete hogwash. No amount of fact twisting and distorting the historical context can deny the significance of this honour; the fact that, for the first time, it was not given to a person but to an entire population; how it continues to highlight the values of human bravery and – in the case of its award to the people of Malta – the heroism shown in the fight for freedom and democracy. So no, it is not ‘just’ a medal. It is a symbol of everything that Malta and its people went through during the Second World War.
I’m afraid that this recent initiative to lobby for the elimination of the George Cross from our national flag is yet another idea from that magnificent repository of political indoctrination inherited from the Mintoffian era. Unfortunately, the “Mitna ghal xejn, mitna ghal barrani” (We died for nothing, we died for the foreigner) philosophy – with which those of my generation or slightly older had the unpleasantness to be force-fed in our formative years – is still prevalent within some sections of the population. Is it that hard to understand that the war would have reached our shores irrespective of whether we were an independent state or not? How is it that there are still those who believe that our ancestors died in vain, and died for a cause which was not theirs?
Those arguing in favour of the removal of what they deem as the sign of British oppression are misguidedly mistaking nationalism for patriotism. Their uninformed way of thinking is in itself a denouncing of how small-minded their outlook is. The way they decry “the foreigner’s usurping of Malta” is a tell-tale sign of the causal inferiority complex that is the source of all this flurry of nationalistic activity. When someone deems himself inferior and subservient, it is natural that he feels justified to point the finger at those to whom he feels inferior. Belittling the George Cross on our flag does not belittle those who ruled Malta in the past but those who, almost 50 years since Independence, still think of the British as “the foreign power”.
The world has undergone many great changes over the centuries and will continue to do so. But we cannot justify the elimination of a symbol of Maltese heroism just to quench the thirst of a group of jingoistic anti-foreign fanatics. Rewriting history to justify a pseudo political agenda has never led to any positive results.
As already described, flags are changed or amended to denounce a shameful past and to signify a clear break from that very same past. So I ask: is the George Cross something of which we should be ashamed? Because that is the message we would be sending out to the world if we decide to remove it from our flag.
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