From Mr P. Sant Cassia

I hold no brief for Joseph Muscat but to label a ‘manifestation’ as “a national disgrace” just because it was held on Remembrance Sunday is a bit excessive.

Daphne seems to have become as much a devoted enemy of Joseph Muscat as she was of Alfred Sant before him. The memorial services were held in the morning; the ‘manifestation’ was in the afternoon. It is the remembrance and the ceremony that are important, not the halting all activities. In any case, permit some of us to have some scepticism about the use of ritual for statist purposes.

Interestingly, State investment in Remembrance Sunday (certainly in the UK) tends to be given much more prominence when there is an unpopular war, such as the current one in Iraq. Not all wars are popular and just (Iraq, Vietnam, to name a few) but they are commemorated just the same. This is not to belittle the sacrifice of life. It is rather to lament that, “so much suffering, so much life, went into the abyss. All for an empty tunic, all for a Helen” (Seferis).

There is an equal, if not more powerful, tradition of anti-war poetry like those by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and I, for one, find their poems much more enlightening than the famous contemporaneous poem of McCrae appropriated for such commemorations, and quoted so gushingly by Daphne.

Whether the ‘manifestation’ is a good idea or not is a different matter, but we need more substantive comment than the affectation of imputed breaches of etiquette. Once Daphne starts writing in this vein there seems no reason why she should ever stop, short of exhaustion.

Paul Sant Cassia

Durham, UK