A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I would be desperately saddened but not in the least surprised if the positive predictions for the right-wing candidates in the EP elections materialised.
I really wanted to be wrong on that one, but sadly I wasn’t. The predictions did materialise and not only in Malta but all over Europe. From France’s National Front, to Germany’s National Democratic Party to Greece’s Golden Dawn, an overwhelming and very worrying number of voters went out and voted for extreme right parties, as they did for our very own Imperium Europa.
Support for Norman Lowell and his so-called party has been on the increase ever since he first ran for the EP elections in 2004. Back then he received 1,603 votes. Four years later, in 2009, the figure was 3,559 and now, in last week’s elections, he has won a scary 7,335 votes.
About 4,000 of his votes were transferrable, which means that just under half of his total voters voted for him and him alone. The rest voted across parties with almost 1,000 of those who voted for this racist lunatic also voted for his antithesis: Arnold Cassola. Another 1,000 went to the Nationalist Party and 2,000 – the highest percentage of his transferable votes – went to the Labour Party.
It is totally mind-boggling and almost impossible for me to understand how the likes of Norman Lowell can garner even one single vote; how people cannot see that the man has severe psychological problems and how twisted he is. But here’s what jumps out at me when I look at these voting statistics:
1. People who voted for Lowell and also for Cassola must be on some heavy narcotics or living in their own bubble. Perhaps it’s not antibiotics that the Maltese have been popping all these years, but those little yellow happy pills.
2. People who voted for Lowell and also for one of the other main parties might have used their vote as a protest. Let it be known that using your vote to protest against anything is the most useless thing you can do with it – probably even more useless than not voting at all.
3. The most plausible explanation behind all these votes for Lowell, or rather the explanation I’d rather believe so as not to lose too much sleep, is that most of those who voted for Imperium Europa do not really know what the party actually stands for. I think it is safe to assume that apart from his “pushback” policy, very few of those who voted for Lowell actually know what he believes in. I bet that hardly anyone of them has read his books, so here’s a little sample for everyone’s delight:
• Mr Lowell believes that different races should never mix. He believes that every race should have its own space and that there should not be contamination of one race living close to another.
• As a result, he believes that those coming into our “white territory” should not be fed, helped or kept.
• And when it comes to immigrants reaching our shores, he would very simply push back all of them without regard to human rights and without filtering out genuine asylum-seekers.
• According to Lowell, behaving in any different way would kill our race, conveniently forgetting that we’ve been mixing races for ever and a day, actually making the human race stronger.
• Lowell is also of the opinion that babies born with disabilities should be humanely euthanised within an hour of their birth. Now that this man has garnered more than 7000 votes, I’ve never been happier to be working with Inspire, an organisation that works to bring out every individual’s best potential, no matter their disability.
• When asked for his opinion about the Citizenship scheme, Lowell said that he opposed the sale of Maltese passports not because he was against it in principle but because of something to do with an invasion of Jewish oligarchs.
• His selective criteria for “the perfect race” are based on genes, high culture and high politics enforced by what he calls “the elite”. This is essentially what is known as eugenics – the belief that the human race can and should be improved by discouraging people who have genetic defects, or undesired qualities (like the wrong colour eyes) from procreating, while encouraging those that are considered to have desirable traits (like white skin) to procreate more.
• This was essentially behind Hitler’s obsession and what led to the Holocaust.
• Although Lowell refuses to call himself a Nazi, he has publically called Adolf Hitler his hero and referred to the Holocaust as “a holy hoax”.
Some might be tempted to argue that the only way to fight this rise in far right support is by censoring these extremist views and not by highlighting them. But in previous years, Lowell hasn’t been given much media attention and in the last EP campaign almost every interviewer treated him as the loony that he is, and yet his popularity continued to rise.
I don’t believe in censorship. On the contrary, I believe that we need to allow people like Lowell to show their true colours. By giving them enough rope to hang themselves, people will see them for what they really are. Lowell knows this all too well and that’s why he keeps refusing invitations to be interviewed on Xarabank, but if we don’t get the man to expose himself and all his disgusting beliefs, what has happened in previous elections could very well happen again. By not exposing his ‘craziness’, we will have too many people thinking that he’s a rational human being who would simply take a strong stand against immigration.
When you promise people that you will deliver what they want – in this case a tough approach to irregular immigration – they don’t tend to ask how. It is therefore the responsibility of the media to bring Lowell’s ‘how’ to the surface, so that people can see for themselves.
And, in the meantime let’s also focus on teaching recent history. Let’s show what happened in the past when class-based inequality was rife, when elitism was the rule of the day and, above all, let’s not bury our heads in the sand and keep thinking that 7,000 votes are nothing to worry about, because when ideas are so extreme, they bloody well are.