Those who have most to embarrass them in their relationship with the Libyan tyrant are keen to move on and gloss over the last 40 years as though they never happened, or failing that, to rewrite recent history instead.

They put on an air of impatience with ‘childish’ individuals who, they say, are keen to trade insults over who made the greatest emotional investment in Muammar Gaddafi. But it is not because they are too grown-up and sophisticated that they don’t wish to discuss the subject. It’s because they are crucified by difficulties. I will not say ‘shame’ because, from where I am standing, none appears to be in evidence.

The internet is littered with generally ill-spelt and badly constructed appeals to the denizens of Maltese politicians’ Facebook walls to ‘move on’ and ‘put this behind us’, and once we have done that, to gang up together against the Transitional National Council and bludgeon it for crude oil.

But hold on a minute. There can be no moving on until the past is scrutinised, laid bare for examination and discussed. You don’t move on with an open wound, pretending that it does not exist and convincing yourself that it is healing when what it is doing instead is festering dangerously.

Soul-searching and introspection are not the hallmarks of backwardness, as the frighteningly uniformed people who congregate around inept politicians and dismal failures on Facebook would have us believe.

The examined life is as important to society as it is to individuals. Socrates’ guiding rule was ‘know thyself’, and this applies in the collective as it does in the personal. Much of our confusion as a nation, many of the mistakes we make repeatedly, the damaging behavioural patterns which hold us back, are because, in terms of society, we live an unexamined life. We do not know ourselves and worse still, we do not want to know and we fight off any attempts that are made to force our faces into such self-knowledge and make us see.

In the matter of Libya, the population is split between those who want to know, who have hit the internet and are using Google’s advanced search facility to call up international news articles from the 1970s and 1980s, sharing them with others and exchanging information, those who don’t give a damn either way because they have the maturity of a 10-year-old, and those who want to ‘move on’ without giving the last four decades a second glance.

But those are the decades which shaped our destiny and certainly the fate of the Labour Party. This examination of the past has resulted in a great deal of point-scoring, yes, but it is essential if we are truly to know ourselves. The freedom to move on comes not from forgetting or from denial, but from coming to terms with the truth, or the closest we can get to it.

The Labour Party’s immediate decision to pretend nothing had happened, after six months of silence and a total refusal to comment because of ‘prudence’, invites catastrophe. It has been there before on so many other issues, and if it is true that the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, it really is time for Labour to do the adult thing, sit down and take stock. The people with the most disastrous lives are those who hurtle from one mess to another without even realising that they are messes, or that every fresh mess compounds the others, because their state of denial is complete.

Just two years ago, Joseph Muscat’s party held a big conference at its Mile End headquarters to celebrate 40 years of its relationship with Libya, a euphemism for Gaddafi because Libya is a lot older than four decades. Now here that same party is, pretending that the past six months of terror did not happen, that the revelations of 42 years of torture, murder, disappearances and gross human rights violations are just whispers in the wind, and that Gaddafi merely walked away as though he never existed, leaving all the shiny happy people to cheer their way to democracy with a little feast at Labour HQ.

It was beyond belief that when Joseph Muscat took to the podium to harangue his guests at the first-ever reception organised for Muslims at Labour HQ, he spoke only about the Labour Party and did not once refer to the Arab Spring, still less Gaddafi.

It is one of the worst cases of denial I have observed. If the Labour Party were a human being, instead of an organisation, we could safely say that it is in shock and needs the appropriate psychiatric care. Either that or it is still in the early denial stage of the bereavement process.

Middle-aged politicians and their hangers-on seem to favour decorating their Facebook walls with quotations in much the same way that teenagers in the 1980s decorated their bedroom walls with Hallmark posters and cute quotes on pictures of kittens and flowers and fields (“Today is the first day of the rest of your life”), so if I might just suggest one, here it is:

“This above all: To thine own self be true, for it must follow as dost the night the day, that canst not then be false to any man.”