Radical people in Malta are just so not radical. People will only stick their head above the parapet if they have been reassured first that there is a ceasefire and their facial features are safe. So you have people acting outrageous and playing at pushing the boundaries while all the time they are betrayed by their ‘sit and obey’ Maltese upbringing, which reveals them for the pussies they are and which makes them, as the vernacular has it, afraid of their own shadow.

So the campus newspaper Realta is banned by the university authorities because of a rude story, and what do the publishers do? They obey the ban, which I find unbelievable. It wouldn’t have been me doing that, I can tell you. I would have carried on publishing it and let them try to stop me – because here’s the thing. The university does not have the legal power to ban the publication of anything. Not even our law courts can do that, except in very restricted cases to do with privacy and libel.

The university might be within its rights to ban distribution of the paper within the delineated confines of its property, but that’s about it and even that is open to challenge. The university is not private. It is a state university.

Let’s be practical here. What does the university plan to do if attempts are made to distribute a paper, the publication of which is permitted fully under the laws of Malta? Perhaps it will train up an army of those people who sit around in blue shirts staring into space in glass cubicles and pretending to be messengers, and get them to make themselves useful by fighting the good war against a student newspaper. Other than that – what can it do? Is it going to expel the culprits? I’d like to see it try.

The university would be ill advised to pursue fresh action against Realta on campus. The parallels with Beijing would be too uncomfortable. They are too uncomfortable already. The university understands that it has embarrassed itself and given the offending article a much wider readership than it would have had otherwise. But it is not going to take the initiative of backing down. So it has to be forced to back down. This does not happen with protests, articles in the newspapers and complaints. It happens by the simple expedient of publishing the newspaper, distributing it on campus and forcing the university into a position where it must choose between turning a blind eye (bad for male egos in the short term) and waging a full-scale war against a student news-sheet (a long-term ruckus with dangerous implications). Universities are there to encourage reading, and not to burn and destroy publications which use naughty words. The university knows this, which is why its library is replete with all forms of obscenity between the covers of literature.

But instead of ignoring the university authorities altogether, which is what I would have done – and that’s not insubordination but standing up for your rights at law and pointing out that the university does not have the remit to ban publications – what are the publishers of Realta doing? They have set up a ‘front against censorship’ and are lobbying against ‘outdated laws’. That should put a rocket under the university, I must say.

How exasperating. Somebody please tell them that they are the ones who are censoring themselves, by being so dreadfully obedient. The university tells them not to publish their newspaper and they say ‘OK’, then go off and protest against the injustice of it all. You see, that’s what the education of Maltese children does: it trains them from birth never to question authority and always to obey orders unless you can do something underhand to get away with it.

These university radicals are so keen to follow the rules that they have even written to the university’s ombudsman asking him to condemn the ban on the grounds that it breaches the students’ charter. You know, I’m beginning to find all this really exhausting. My baby-pink Ed Hardy shoes with the skulls and roses on are more radical than this radical group.

There’s only one thing these people should do, and it’s not radical but commonsense strategy. Face down the university. Ignore the ban and proceed as usual. Produce the newspaper, print it, and distribute it on campus. There can be no adverse consequences for doing that, and believe me, good boys and girls, the sky won’t fall on your head if you don’t obey. But there will be highly adverse consequences for the university if it sends in its troops.

There’s something else the publishers should do to frame the absurdity of the university’s ban: put Realta on the Internet, and expose just how the university’s thinking on the meaning and implications of publication has not entered the internet age yet, even at this late stage in the game. They can send out the messengers to moan and groan and gather up hard copies of Realta, but the internet is more convenient and widely accessible and the university can do nothing about that.

Putting Realta on the Internet will also put the focus on a question that no one has yet thought to ask: did the university ban the newspaper to prevent students reading it (which is where the Internet comes in), or did it ban it in that parental ‘not in my house’ sort of way (“I won’t have any dirty magazines under my roof!”)? Unless the university has not yet hitched its wagon to the Internet, the reason for the ban must be the latter, and in that case it hasn’t got a moral or legal leg to stand on either.



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