Concentration camps and death camps are not words that can be used interchangeably. Death camps are usually concentration camps, but not all concentration camps are death camps. Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen were death camps, and they were also concentration camps. The Ugandan camp where Maltese detainees were held during the Second World War was a concentration camp but it was not a death camp.

A concentration camp is just what the name implies: a camp for the concentration (large numbers in a small space) of detainees, political prisoners and even prisoners of war, though the last should be protected by the Geneva Convention under which it is not permissible to keep POWs in concentration camps. Two of my grandfather’s siblings were in concentration camps – one Nazi and the other Japanese – as POWs during the Second World War. One was a captured British officer and the other the wife of a captured British officer. They were two among tens of thousands kept in those conditions.

Concentration camps were invented by the British, and not by the Nazis, as a way of coping with large numbers of detainees with relatively few personnel to guard and look after them. It was the Nazis and the Japanese who seized this organisational principle and turned it into a function for systematic cruelty and extermination.

I say this only to point out that the people who call the Safi compound a concentration camp – I was the first to do so, in a Sunday column headed “Malta’s concentration camps” – are perfectly correct. The Safi compound is in fact the perfect example of a dictionary-defined concentration camp. It is not a death camp, but it is certainly a concentration camp.

Largely due to ignorance of the correct meaning of the term, some newspaper correspondents, letter-writers and callers to radio phone-ins have objected most heartily to the use of this term as a description of the Safi camp and have called it ‘exaggerated’ and ‘ridiculous’, among other, less generous, adjectives.

We have not said that it is a death camp. We have said that it is a concentration camp, and I’m afraid to say that in this we are correct.

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I was fascinated to see published letters written by people calling for the Safi soldiers to be “court marshalled”. They brought to mind visions of the soldiers being set upon and thoroughly dressed down by little men in blue jackets and synthetic trousers, whose main job it is to stand outside the courtroom and shout: “Muscat John! Attard Paul! Muscat John! Attard Paul!” That’s what court marshals do.

A court martial, on the other hand, is somewhat different. It takes its name from Mars, the Roman god of war (as in martial law), and it is a military court where members of the armed forces are tried for wrong-doing – not by judges or magistrates, but by their military peers. Even the prosecutor is a high-ranking officer.

The process is called court-martialling, with a hyphen that forms the verb out of the noun, court martial. I hate to be a tedious pedant, or to come across as a hectoring teacher, but if people are going to bang on about something, they had better not confuse the issue by using the job description of the men who act as heralds in our crowded courts of law.

Since Malta became a republic, I don’t think that any soldier has been court-martialled, despite the excesses of several. Quite frankly, I don’t see that we have the set-up to handle it. Which high-ranking officer is qualified to prosecute? And which others would sit in judgement on the case?

Our army does not function like an army. Since the departure of the British, it appears to have devolved into just another government department, with roughly the same disciplinary procedures, if any at all, and very little discipline, which is supposed to be the very basis of soldiering. Whoever is surprised because those individuals spun out of control so quickly at Safi should reserve his surprise for the contents of his Easter egg.

Ordinarily – which means, elsewhere – a soldier found in possession of illegal drugs for sale to others would be court-martialled. In Malta, he is prosecuted by the police and his case heard in the public courts, as though he were not a soldier. The fact that he is a soldier will, if he is found guilty, expose him to punishment that is more than usually severe, but that’s about it.

The court martial is not used only for crimes specific to conduct while on duty. There was a time in the US – not so long ago, but in the 20th century – when adultery with the wife of a fellow officer would lead to the court-martialling of the guilty party. It was one of the rare cases of the man, rather than the woman, being punished for adultery.

This may seem an extraordinary state of affairs to those in Malta who see the army as a government department, but the fact is that an army is an organisation where discipline must be especially harsh and uncompromising, and anything that undermined the rigid discipline or brought the army into disrepute would be punished.

We saw, for example, that the US soldier responsible for much of what happened at Abu Ghraib was tried by just such a military court, jailed for 10 years, stripped of his rank and deprived of all pension entitlements. The same process is now happening in Britain, with a predicted outcome that will be equally severe.

In Malta, this mechanism simply does not exist, and even if the army were to try to put it into place, there would be howls of protest from the thousands of people who just wouldn’t understand that the army should not be just another government department.

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It is interesting to see that one or two correspondents have called for the soldiers in question to be “discharged from the army and court-marshalled”. Apart from the fact that it would create a rather unusual spectacle and that the court marshall, poor man, might object, these people clearly do not understand the function of the military court. It can only discipline members of the military.

If a soldier is discharged, then he is no longer in the army and so cannot be court-martialled or placed in a military prison (something we don’t have anyway). That’s why members of the forces are discharged after being court-martialled, and not before, and that is why, when they are found guilty and imprisoned, they are discharged only when their prison sentence is up.

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Jason Azzopardi, the Nationalist MP, was correct to criticise Church officials in Malta for not speaking out about the ugliness and threat to human dignity of an extreme right-wing political philosophy, the main tenets of which are class division and racial hatred. It is at times like this that people look to the Church for guidance, and they never find it.

The Church in Malta only speaks out when it is directly threatened: the Church schools crisis, for example, or the possibility that its stranglehold on marriage and its dissolution may come to an end.

The Church, unfortunately, has become all about power, control and the survival of the institution per se. It is not about living Christianity. There are individual priests who do their best to provide guidance and a shining light to those who need it (and who even affect the lives of those who don’t), but that’s about it. Fr Charles Caruana of the Jesuit Refugee Service, who was knocked down by a car and killed some days ago, was one such. As for the rest, they are like the executives of a multi-national corporation with an operational base in Malta.

How many priests have given a Sunday sermon about the Good Samaritan and there being no room at the inn for Joseph and Mary, as a way of illustrating what the true Christian attitude to refugees and “illegal immigrants” should be? How many priests took the trouble to explain that Christianity is very often in conflict with political expediency and the exigencies of survival, as they are perceived by those who live here and feel threatened – and that Christians often have to make a choice that might go against their personal interests? If any one of you heard such a sermon, please write in and let me know. All I have heard so far are complaints from those who were expecting one and didn’t hear it.

If the Church wants to become relevant – as opposed to playing the role of a controlling elderly relative who never dies – then it has to make itself relevant and speak to us about the issues of the day. We are no longer interested in what the Church thinks about sexual relations between individuals in whatever context, unless those individuals are priests and the boys in their care. Those are yesterday’s issues. We need to hear about today’s.

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It is tragic, and so revealing of their ignorance, that many of the very people whom Norman Lowell wishes to eliminate or subjugate in his Utopian Malta are the very ones who admire his thinking. Clearly, they do not know what he stands for. Perhaps if they visited his website they would be in a better position to do so. He wishes to eliminate all those who are racially different to the Maltese.

I hate to sound cocky, but would these be the blue-eyed blonds and the red-heads, tall people with straight hair or just those with African colouring? Would all those Maltese who don’t look like Norman Lowell be marked down for elimination?

Our man with the stick also plans to get rid of those with Jewish blood. How he thinks he will identify us, heaven only knows. A respected doctor wrote to The Sunday Times last week to point out that DNA testing shows many of us owe our origins to the Jewish populations of the Middle East. Perhaps he will force us into concentration camps on the fosos, for DNA-testing at gun-point and then incinerate us in a purpose-built compound at Hal Far. Oh, but I forget – he denies the Holocaust. Six million people were not incinerated and gassed by the Nazis; it’s all a giant lie perpetrated by the Jewish lobby in the US.

Ah, but here’s the crunch. Lowell thinks that those who are from the inferior classes – not Jews, Niggers or Gollywogs, you understand, but Maltese hamalli – will, in his system of government, be harnessed to provide menial work as glorified slaves and not be permitted any means of exit from the caste that he will impose upon them. Do many of those who rush to admire him know that this is how he sees them, and that these are his plans for their future? Truly, one could put a ring through the nose of some people, and lead them with it.