From Mr D. Muscat
The Archbishop’s assertion, in his homily for Candlemas on 2 February, that “racism is not a quality that runs in Maltese blood” was perhaps one of the few intelligent comments made after the Safi incidents earlier this year. This is the prudent attitude that should be adopted in order to tackle paranoid nationalistic freaks who tried to exploit these incidents. Grandiose condemnations in reality only serve to increase self-fulfilling racist prophecies.
I think these extreme nationalistic outbursts are the symptoms of a deeper crisis afflicting our national self-identity. I suggest instead that we should focus on the root causes of such abhorrent nationalism so alien to the typical Maltese values of adaptability and generosity.
The first cause of such freak nationalism is that we are living in a schizophrenic society buttressed by the media. An example will suffice.
Lou Bondi pompously reminds us that he is the watchdog of our freedom. Then, this avatar of individual liberty demands the PN to condemn a young councillor in Safi because of the latter’s link to an extreme group. Very impressive Mr Bondi. Pity you had to provide the same weirdos with such a public soapbox on your talk show.
Didn’t association likewise taint you? Or are you trying to imply that journalism is an absolute value that is free from the responsibilities others incur by associating/giving voice to any and every group in society? The journalist is irredeemably compromised if he refuses to abide by the norms that govern the rest of society, and such a society is in grave danger if it gives heed uncritically to such irresponsible voices.
The second root of this deviant nationalism is a kind of sadistic pleasure in attacking the political establishment. For many years, we have been reminded by Alternattiva Demokratika that vilifying Maltese politics is a must. Adhering to Alternattiva’s views means you are emancipated from old-fashioned parochial partisan party politics.
The contemporary nationalistic freaks are light years away from the centre-left ideologies of the Greens. However these two converge in that both detest the political establishment and in their eerie New Age superiority complex. Both parties (the Greens and the freaky right) postulate that theirs is the high and lonely vision which alone can save the “sacred island” of Malta from the dictatorship of the MLPN.
The third root of our contemporary nationalistic idiocies is to be found in the unconscious reaction to the meddling with tradition and collective identity carried in the 1970s and 1980s. Indicative of this are the alterations of the National Day and the National Emblem just like the typical African post-colonial banana republic. At least we did not touch the National Anthem.
The Nationalists even wanted to remove the George Cross from the flag but had second thoughts, reinforced later by Mintoff’s attitude towards the British. The PN had mistakenly replaced the National Day celebrated on 8 September with Independence Day on 21 September. The Socialists replaced it with Republic Day and eventually Freedom Day on 31 March.
Nowadays we are in the awkward position of having five national days. Such things may seem banal. The real issue at stake is the subtle assault on the religio et patria ideal which has always given the Maltese their collective self-identity. Nobody today dares to propose 8 September again as our National Day because that appears too religious and moreover it might offend the Muslims. So ironically the new rightists are simply filling this vacuum caused by the loss of stability that the pre-1964 paradigm gave us.
Malta had been lucky in that before the 1970s there had never been a serious cultural clash between religio and patria. By providence or chance, the Maltese were never torn between loyalty to the faith of their fathers and patriotism.
In the 1970s there was an attempt to reread history in such a way as to change the nature of the social bond from a religious to a humanitarian one. Mixing left-wing class hatred with nationalism, the Socialists tried to persuade us that the Knights were not our national heroes but mere capitalist foreign parasites not dissimilar from British colonisers.
The Knights had, as it were, dragged the “neutral” Maltese people in a useless anti-Islamic crusade plotted by European superpowers just as Nato was doing in the 20th century! An attempt was made to show that Arabs are our genetic brothers (hutna fid-demm). State land was handed over to Libyans to build centres, schools and of course a mosque. The most typical of these moves was imposing Arabic in schools and the reinterpretation of medieval Malta – something which had already started in intellectual circles.
Radical left-winger scholars had understood perfectly that religion was the only common ground between the Maltese and the Knights. Indeed, the Turks at one point during the Great Siege attempted to estrange the Maltese from their alien European aristocratic overlords by pointing out the Semitic affinities in language and culture to their North Africans “brothers”. But the bonds of faith proved stronger that ethnic and racial factors. The Maltese decided to die side by side with the Knights in an epic defence of the island.
More than three centuries later Giuseppe Calì was able to paint this in the altarpiece of Mellieha by showing a young knight with the emblem of the Order on his breast and holding a coat of arms with the white and red flag of Malta. Ironically, the insertion of the Maltese national colours in such imagery would have been abhorrent to both Knight and Maltese nationalist a few decades before Calì’s lifetime.
When Mannarino – a born rebel and nationalistic-minded cleric – entered Fort Saint Elmo he tore down the Order’s flag and replaced it with the white and red flag of the Municipal Council of the Mdina – the università – which symbolized fledgling Maltese nationalism. The Maltese resented the Knights and through their native clergy, their foreign bishops and Inquisitors, constantly defied the Order’s arrogance.
Circumstances had changed and the Maltese wanted to contrast Mediterranean latinità with northern British barbarian imperialism. Thus the Maltese soon were able to purge any bad feelings towards the Knights from their memories.
But then the Maltese were largely loyal to the British during World War II, with another epic resistance. Religion had again made the difference and proved to be an efficient cultural unifier.
Will it do the same again in the first decades of the Third Millennium? I do hope so. May God liberate us from secular nationalism which serves only to instil in society a satanic fusion between racist evolutionary Darwinism and Nietzschean super-man madness!
David Muscat