The panic about bird flu has subsided. But bombs, terrorists and CHOGM have filled the vacuum. Among parents of school-age children, the buzz has been whether they should send the kids to school this week, or keep them at home in case terrorists strike with a bomb or four. The more sensible parents, faced with those wide-eyed panic-mongers who appear to have nothing to do but brew up imaginary things about which to get palpitations, were taken aback.
One mother told me how she was beset on all sides at parents’ day last Monday by other mothers who were virtually shivering with the perverse thrill of having something to panic about: “What do you mean, you’re sending your daughter to school this week? I’m keeping mine at home!” “Home?” my working-mother friend asked. “Why on earth? That’s all we need – two days of teacher-training, closely followed by parents’ day, and then another three days off school – why?”
Detailed explanations followed – most of them fantastically-twisted interpretations of bits and pieces gleaned from the news, about a possible attempt on the life of Queen Elizabeth II when she is in Malta. In the minds of these “love-a-panic” women, the risk stretched to a bomb- attack on a school in an out-of-the-way part of Malta. I imagine that they will feel terribly cheated if Al Qaeda does not target “Saint Wotsit’s” school in Malta, after all these nights they have spent having nightmares about covens of Muslim terrorists plotting in mosques the mass-murder of Maltese schoolchildren, as a means of disrupting the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. And they said that common sense was a woman’s strong point.
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What damage some priests do to the name and reputation of the Catholic Church they represent! They make the world headlines and undermine the good work and even the heroism of so many other priests who strive for positive goals.
Why do they do it? Are they genuinely misguided in really believing that they are working to fulfil God’s will – like all those who, in earlier centuries, tortured, maimed and killed in the name of Catholicism? Or do they just use their priestly authority to gain advantage for their vicious perversions?
The latest upsetting news is that of a 60-year-old Belgian priest who is to be tried in Belgium for his role in the 1994 massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda. Fr Guy Theunis stands accused of masterminding killings at a church – one hopes that this is not true, but if it is, that he is imprisoned for life – and for reprinting and distributing articles from an extremist publication, inciting Hutus to kill Tutsis.
Thousands of ethnic Tutsis were slaughtered after seeking sanctuary in churches, in a horrific ethnic purge that the recent film Rwanda tried to record, but failed to do so – because an accurate portrayal of the genocide would have cast any film into the genre of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
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I see that Spain has its own problems with neo-Nazis and fascists. You would think that 40 years of General Franco would have put them off, but no – some hard-liners are still marching around and giving speeches to commemorate the anniversary of his death, when the only sane response is a cheery “good riddance”. What odd heroes some people choose to have – not just feet of clay, but clay from the scalp right through to the toes.
Like our home-grown fascists, the Spanish lot blame all the country’s troubles on homosexuals, working women, and “liberalism”. They would burn us all in hell if they could, or pen us up behind high fences and run the country as a dictatorship in which women are only allowed out of the house-wrapped in a faldetta (and then only after having proved themselves worthy by breeding at least 12 children), where homosexuals are whipped in squares or imprisoned for sodomy, in which the state makes sure we all go to church on Sundays and say the rosary everyday, whether we believe in it or not, and where freedom of expression translates into writers being jailed for criticising the dictator or inciting the populace to immorality.
The more I read and hear about the fascists in different parts of Europe, the more I am struck by the irony of the situation. They are completely different in their thinking to the rest of their compatriots, and yet they insist that the culture of their country should be kept homogenous – when their very existence proves that it is not homogenous at all. (What do I have in common with Maltese fascists? Nothing at all. They are as repulsive to me as I am repulsive to them. They might as well be from another planet. They are certainly from a different culture, one which we don’t share.)
Maltese, Italian, Spanish, German, and French fascists have nothing in common with other Maltese, Italians, Spaniards, Germans or French, and yet they all have everything in common with each other, except citizenship. The solution presents itself immediately – the formation of a fascist state, preferably on some inhospitable tundra that no one else wants, to which all these European fascists will be encouraged to emigrate, there to live among others who share their sympathies and to create the fascist Utopia to which they aspire.
In this fascist paradise, there will be no gays, no women with ideas or aspirations, and absolutely no liberals. Because of its breeding policies and its belief that women belong in the kitchen, the bedroom and the nursery, fascist utopia will rapidly end up as the only state in the developed world with no pension problem or ageing population. The one problem it will have is the problem that Communism knew – how to keep the children it breeds within its borders, without putting up an electric fence to stop them escaping to normality.
The rest of us out here will be all agog to see how long the fascist utopia lasts, given how easy it is to predict that out of every 100 new residents, 99 will want to be the dictator. There will be a coup d’etat every five minutes. Yes, these fascists should be given every encouragement to be with each other and leave the rest of us alone.
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Walking towards the HMS Illustrious with one of her officers, we saw a taxi driver, who was accompanied by two elderly British tourists, press up against the security fence and call out: “Sir! Sir!” The officer was a woman, and so am I, so we kept on walking, thinking that he must have been trying to attract the attention of somebody else. Then we realised that he was gesticulating in our direction – more particularly, in the direction of the lieutenant with the neatly-tied long blonde hair: “Sir! Sir!”
He was only trying to be helpful to the passengers in his taxi – their grandson is with the aircraft carrier’s company and they had flown to Malta to see him. He called the officer “sir” even when she went up to speak to him and he could see perfectly clearly that not only was she a woman, but a very attractive one at that. It was not a case of gender confusion, but of perplexity in an old-timer to whom all ship’s officers are men who should be addressed as “sir”. The “sir” becomes linked with the officer’s rank rather than gender, and hence, women officers get called “sir”, too. Well, it made a funny start to the visit.
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The fascists will solve this problem by banning women officers. Then we will have no confusion as to whether they should be called sir or “ma’am”. But under the fascists, we will not have officers on aircraft carriers, because the aircraft carriers will be used as isolation posts for gays, liberals and women who refuse to stay at home and have 10 children, living on hand-outs from their husbands.
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They say Filfla is home to a protected species of rare lizard. What a pity. It would make a fantastic place for our fascists to set up camp permanently and play Francos and Benitos.