Those who do not learn from others’ mistakes are bound to experience the same falls. What is unfortunate is that with them, many, even those who had sounded warnings, are compelled to undergo the same travails. As the popular saying runs ‘bl-art u b’Alla ma’ jidhak hadd’.

Greece spent its treasures on Olympic facilities which generated meagre returns on outlays shoving it to totter on the edge of virtual default. Earlier, Britain’s magic eye, another infrastructure project undertaken by the state, was not so bewitching as, with all the account manipulations by Britain’s new labour, the sterling, from a benchmark, even in literary parlance, “progressively” fell down in the doldrums. More recently undoubtedly, despite the Orange revolution, Ukraine has been condemned to another spell of “subservience” to Moscow through the recent political shift, exacerbated by the plaid haired former PM overspending on never finished stadiums supposedly intended to host prestigious upcoming football championship matches – a fate sealed by a helpful push from European top brass more keen on having their gas supply passing through Ukraine guaranteed by a Russian leaning, already once fraud convicted politico, rather than standing shoulder to shoulder with the upright pro-freedom Ukrainians still on a steep democratic learning curve, millions of whom where first wiped out by Stalin’s artificial famine in the 1930s, than by Hitler’s ethnic cleansing, followed more recently by the Soviet Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

J. Bonett

Balzan