A few days ago Henry Frendo, history professor at the University of Malta, wrote a letter to another newspaper complaining about punditry and the frequent peddling of factoids. I wrote an online comment to his letter.

Prof. Frendo was reacting to an article which had argued that, in 1919, the Maltese masses were manipulated by Fascist-leaning Maltese politicians who wanted Malta to join the Kingdom of Italy. He wondered whether writing history books is really worth the hassle.

My online comment was that the Fascists had published their manifesto on the eve of the Maltese riot, and therefore the two were linked. Even Balbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon would confirm this. I should have added that we have always called it Sette Giugno, a dead giveaway that they were Fascists.

Needless to say, my ironic comment was loosely based on Umberto Eco’s analysis of the fantastic links one can “see” between disparate facts. The three chaps I referred to are the three protagonists of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, a novel built on anachronisms and bizarre associations between unrelated facts.

(The article which rightly irritated Prof Frendo seemed unaware of the fact that Italian Irredentism – that is, claiming ‘Italian’ territories for the Kingdom of Italy – predated Fascism, among other salient facts.)

My point, however, is that pundits peddling factoids distort our understanding of our past, present and future.

 

The migrants saga

We are relentlessly bombarded with facts and factoids in the migrants saga, making it difficult to distinguish the former from the latter.

We are told about the black African invasion. It is certainly true that there are many blacks in Europe. It is also true that it can be difficult for them to integrate. And it is also true that they are more visible than white immigrants – mostly because their skin is black.

Is this an invasion? Numerically speaking, I think the facts show that it is not an invasion. The numbers are relatively small. (And I think they should remain small.) Culturally speaking, I think the facts show that it is an invasion.

Who is to blame? To my mind, the promoters of multiculturalism and similar airy-fairy utopias. We have absolutely nothing to learn from black African culture, I am sorry to say. I visited Senegal last year, and the only thing I can say is that it’s the ideal place for an anthropologist or some other scholar interested in pre-State societies and how they were devastated by Western colonialism. Otherwise, there is nothing to learn. I was shocked by the chaos I saw; it’s beyond description.

There was a hit in 1947 called Civilization, which stayed in the charts for a number of weeks. It narrated the story of a black African laughing at the ‘educated savages’ who want to ‘civilise’ him – he tells them he prefers the Congo to civilisation. And I can understand him. The intelligent black African prefers being somebody in Africa than a slave in Europe. Ultimately, Europe is no El Dorado. And despite the lip service, Europe will never really accept the black Africans.

Needless to say, there are those who run away from war and other conflicts. For these I have the greatest sympathy; for the economic migrants, much less.

But let’s go back to factoids and facts. Europe is being swamped with black Africans (not true). European civilisation and African culture can co-exist (also not true).

The facts are that Europe has developed the State; the Africans have not. This basic difference accounts for the inadequacy of multiculturalism.

Unlike the racist notions hopefully of yesteryear, the French theory of nationalism is that, irrespective of your skin colour, if you accept French civilisation you become French. It is absolutely not multicultural, and I think they are right. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

 

Roma locuta, sed causa non est finita

The government of Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio has decided to flare up anti-immigrant sentiments, bullying Malta in the process.

Both stances are unacceptable. Racism is rubbish and bullying is despicable. But, again, we have to ask a number of questions. For instance, what is Malta doing to avoid the root causes of this situation? As far as I can tell – but I stand to be corrected – absolutely nothing.

Has Malta put any pressure on France to stop meddling once and for all with internal politics in Africa? Has Malta put any pressure on her European partners to help Africans develop their domestic economies?

Taking in refugees is a cure for the symptoms. Instead, the root causes have to be cured. Like Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, I believe in no more European neo-imperialist meddling in African politics; no more neo-liberal exploitation of African economies for European gain. We need an Africa for Africans. We need African nationalism, African State-building, African acclimatisation of other elements of Western civilisation. And this because the Africans have understood that the Western ideas about the State form are the only viable shell within which to develop into modernity.

What has Malta done in this respect? Does the newly-opened mission in Ghana, for instance, help towards the attainment of this goal?

Closing Malta’s ports is a stop-gap, myopic solution. We need a radical solution. We need to stop Africans dreaming that they are some latter-day Dick Whittington who left his native Lancashire to seek his fortune in London, having heard that the streets there were paved with gold, only to find himself cold and hungry... and was saved when taken in by a wealthy merchant... Well, you know the story.

Europe’s streets are not paved with gold. Italy and Greece are facing real crises. Malta has registered a €78 million deficit in the first five months of this year. Where are the gold-paved streets?

(I am obviously ignoring the Fourth Floor Federation.)

(Perhaps Mr Salvini wants Malta to take in the migrants because it’s l-aqwa żmien; you never know.)

Apart from alleged secret agreements with Matteo Renzi, Malta has done nothing to help resolve the root causes of mass migration. Instead, Malta is embracing neo-liberal policies stemming from Malthusian prejudices which account for Europe’s demographic decline and which nutty liberals want to counterbalance by importing boat-loads of illegal immigrants.

Has skin colour got anything to do with my ire? Absolutely not. What irks me is that the supposed right of a woman to kill her child in her womb ends up – via a series of labyrinthine links – fuelling the boats carrying illegal immigrants.

If Europe were not experiencing demographic decline, there would be no justification for NGOs to sail close to the Libyan shore to load illegal immigrants and ship them to Europe.

 

Human rights

The human-rights aspects of this trade (a veritable modern-day slave trade, which keeps reminding me of the slave trade conducted from Senegal and other West African outposts 200 years ago) are complicatedly intricate. The immigration crisis has been unfolding not only in the Mediterranean region but also on the North American continent. Does the solution lie in a fairer distribution of wealth among nations? What is Malta doing toward this end?

The United States left the United Nations Human Rights Council a few days ago because of what it has called a “cesspool of bias”. Is this a signal that the world is turning its back on human rights?

I doubt it. Traditionally, the US was inward-looking. It is not the first time the US has withdrawn from an international engagement because of human rights. In April 2005, it withdrew from the Optional Protocol of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations because the Protocol placed the US under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the US had just lost three cases in a row which dealt with consular law but had a strong human rights dimension.

(I had taken a personal interest in the third case – Mexico v. US – even attending the oral pleadings at the ICJ in The Hague. Ah, the follies of youth!)

What was remarkable was not that the US withdrew, but that it signed up to the international court jurisdiction in the first place.

So the recent withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council seems to fit in this inward-looking pattern of the US.

But is Europe inward-looking too? Despite the claims (of important polemicists such as Tariq Ali, author of The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad, among others) that the US follows an imperialist policy, I think present-day American imperialism is different from the European imperialism of former times. I cannot say that Europe looks inward.

And yet, despite her obvious historical debt toward Africa, Europe seems uncertain as to how much she wants to adhere to human rights which are not related to sexual freedom. In the sense that when sexual freedom is at stake, human rights generosity abounds; but when it’s human rights for black Africans, Europe becomes stingy.

In this case, by human rights I do not mean the right of the economic migrant to play Dick Whittington. I mean the right of every African to pursue happiness and achieve his or her full potential in a prosperous Africa.

 

My Personal Library (10)

Martti Koskenniemi’s The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001) is a unique analysis of imperialism and colonialism from an international law perspective. But it’s not strictly a history of international law; it is a history of the ideas that shaped international law. It speaks of civilisation, of sovereignty, of universalism and particularism, of “Europeanness” and “Otherness”.

One of the central themes is the “myth of civilisation: a logic of exclusion-inclusion”: “exclusion in terms of a cultural argument about the otherness of the non-European that made it impossible to extend European rights to the native, inclusion in terms of the native’s similarity with the European, the native’s otherness having been erased by a universal humanitarianism under which international lawyers sought to replace native institutions by European sovereignty” (p. 130).

This is self-evidently relevant to today’s human rights discourse. Are the Others – the migrants – who are manifestly breaking the law to seek their fortune, still eligible for their human right to life? Is the cultural threat they pose enough to deny them their human right to life?

And then, to kick it up a notch, are the illegal migrant and the embryo so different from us that they do not deserve to enjoy their human rights?

I have to mention Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999) at this juncture. He claims that the Europeans have managed to dominate other peoples not because the Europeans are genetically superior but because they had guns, they had immunity to the germs they got from domesticated animals and which they carried on them wherever they went, and they had the steel to build railways to transport armies and goods quickly and efficiently.

Diamond’s book is fantastic: it gave me goose-bumps when I first read it 19 years ago. But the documentary based on it was even more poignant. Professor Diamond argues that the imposition of the European lifestyle erased African millennial traditions. For instance, the Africans used to live in small villages on hilltops, away from water sources. The Europeans made them move and settle in new cities built in riparian areas, so that they could load cargo on steamships navigating the rivers. By so doing, the Europeans wiped out the strategy the Africans had used since time immemorial to avoid malaria. During a visit to a hospital in Black Africa where children are dying after having been bitten by the deadly malaria-bearing mosquito, tears roll down Diamond’s cheeks while he describes the human disaster provoked by the White Colonial Master.

I too cried.

And just like John Paul II, when he visited the Senegalese island of Gorée from where slaves were shipped to America for two centuries, prayed for forgiveness for the way the blacks were treated, so too I pray.