There come certain times when the national community focuses on issues that lie beyond or cut across party lines which divides the country into two camps that are not coterminous with the party divide and about which the parties either do not have an opinion (quite a rare thing, this) or are scared of having an opinion because it could split party membership.
One such issue that cropped up recently, was the public reaction to the forthcoming Da Vinci Code film, which, apart from its content, also happened to be partly shot in Malta.
The issue was: Should this film be banned in Malta or shown? Opinions were divided, with prohibitionists from the fundamentalist camp not only within the Catholic Church in Malta, but also from other Christian traditions or sects; and those who were against prohibition argued mainly from the position of freedom of expression and religious belief and some also from a virulent anti-Catholic point of view.
Then, as we all know, an individual was about to organise a pilgrimage, found priests and religious to back him up and promised to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister, but the church, which had never promised to support him, at least officially, pulled out, thus provoking further dismay among those who feel the film is a dishonour for this country, not just by screening it but also because certain key scenes were allowed to be shot here.
On a far deeper level, there is the ongoing discussion regarding the illegal immigrants crisis and the rabid, sometimes violent reaction to them, which many times verges on the racist and which led to a number of arson attacks over the past weeks.
This newspaper expresses its support and solidarity with former colleague and fellow editor Saviour Balzan, assuming that the arson attempt on his house last week is the result of his frequent criticism of the widespread racist overtones regarding the illegal immigrants crisis. It is time to stand up and be counted and there are still many, many doors that calmly wait to be torched over and over again by these hidden hands of the night. But these arson attacks will not make their victims change their minds nor succumb to the racist threat.
Beyond this, however, the issue posed by the illegal immigrants in Malta is still there and no amount of platitudes expressed in Valletta, Strasbourg or Brussels has changed anything. This, in turn, is feeding on the fears felt by many Maltese that their identity risks being swamped, their civilisation diluted and the new Malta becoming an increasingly hostile country.
There is also, to be sure, a resurgence of anti-clerical feeling reminiscent of the Labour Party in the seventies, which has now been almost completely shed by that party and widened to include fellow anti-clericals from the Nationalist side, which previously had no platform for their feelings.
On the other side, one finds the people with a humanitarian spirit who see in the person of the illegal immigrants a human being, whatever his colour, and a person suffering from the violence of today’s globalised world rather than an intruder into our cosy world.
Far more than the Da Vinci Code dispute, this has developed into a conflict of ideas on which no possible mediation can be possible. Today’s main parties, for all the colour of their flags and mass meetings, have come to so resemble each other as to be almost indistinguishable, but the split as regards the illegal immigration issue is a real one, a very real one.
Faced with this split, the parties have shrunk back from being leaders and taking a stand, and the Church, or the official part of it, has retreated into the background when it should have been far more prophetic. The people have been left to their instincts and the Maltese discovered that their basic instinct is not so different from that which was prevalent 300 years ago when Malta had a huge community of mainly coloured slaves.
So, while on the surface, this is still the same old Malta of the past decades, with the two huge parties battling it out not just at election time but practically all the time. The parties now have given themselves further media weapons in a bid to further dominate public opinion. But issues are cropping up. The illegal immigrants issue is just one such issue, where the parties themselves do not have an answer, or are afraid of having one, and the people have split up according to what they feel is right, regardless of whether they are Nationalists or Labour.
Other countries had, or have this problem and not all have found a way of solving it satisfactorily. Our situation is very much a special case, which can also mean that we have even greater difficulty in solving this split than other countries have. Sooner or later, what used to be described, or derided, as a very minor group of hot heads may well turn out to have a rather wider support and this can in turn upset the finely-tuned equilibrium between the parties.
Ultimately, although Mr Balzan and the other victims may not relish this as they contemplate their torched front doors, it could very well be that these arson attacks and similar violence is what stands between the rabid anti-illegal immigrants remaining as a minority group and their achieving wider and greater support. If this were to happen, this transversal issue may well prove to be the fulcrum which could change the whole pattern of national politics.