Scrabbling round for something good to say about Mintoff is unseemly. It is far better to say nothing at all. Those in a position where they cannot avoid saying anything, should weigh their words well before speaking them. Those who can avoid speaking altogether should do just that if they are incapable of rising to the occasion.

T he tragedy of Maltese culture is that it aspires to be European but cannot, because it is mired in southern Mediterranean values that are nothing to be proud of because they are completely unenlightened – literally so, given that the age of enlightenment passed this remote corner of the Mediterranean by completely.

It is these very values – I could be cynical and say that it is actually the lack of them - which lead so many Maltese people to think, even those who should know better but don’t, that rising to the occasion on the death of somebody like Dom Mintoff means ‘being nice’, rewriting history or distorting the truth and calling it maturity or being civilised.

The truly civilised approach is to say things as they really are, though couched in the proper language and without the expletives which come immediately to mind. Rising to the occasion means having the integrity, the intelligence and the eloquence to describe the man as he really was, and to do the same with the destruction he wrought.

The fact that Mintoff had and still has many thousands of supporters who might be upset is neither here nor there. It brings us back to square one. Those prominent and not-so-prominent speakers (and writers) who seek to avoid upsetting them have made a rational, though immoral choice: they prefer to upset the legions of Mintoff’s victims, who are not crazy, disruptive and violent, than upset the armies of his fans who are just that.

But they can rest assured that people out there are extremely annoyed at the way no politician, journalist or newspaper is prepared to tackle the truth as it is, the facts as they were and still are, because death changes nothing of what occurred. They are angry when they read about how lovely, kind and generous Mintoff was and how devoted he was to his wife and to the paupers of Malta. They cannot believe their eyes when they read that Mintoff should be judged as a parliamentarian and not for his behaviour outside parliament. Perhaps it is now fashionable to make oneself ridiculous.

Mintoff’s admirers flock to the internet to litter comments-boards with vulgarity, violent threats and insults as a way of showing how angry they are. But those who found Mintoff highly objectionable in life, and who are deeply offended by the hagiographies and eulogies, do not do the same to show how angry they are, how saddened by the rubbish being said and written. They do not do what Joe Grima did when a British priest wrote what he felt about Mintoff, for the Catholic Herald, and become violent and aggressive on Facebook.

The prime minister was quoted in the press as saying that Mintoff’s death was handled with “maturity”. Sadly, it so spectacularly was not. The spectacle put on by the Labour Party was excruciating and embarrassing – but just what you would expect.

The state funeral was a charade, but obligatory in this place where favours must be returned. And the speeches by politicians were absolutely dreadful and fell so far short of the required mark. They did not rise to the occasion, not at all. Though Mintoff had been dying for the past year and more, and at 96 his death could be expected anyway, nobody seems to have worked at a speech. It was all off the cuff and terribly ill-considered or perhaps not even considered at all.

Maturity obliges one to face the truth and the facts and deal with them – in as dignified a way as possible because politicians are not journalists and so are subject to greater constraints. Maturity is not the avoidance of unpleasant truths because they are inconvenient and might upset the more violent elements in society, or because we are reluctant to ‘look bad’. In seeking to avoid looking bad, our politicians have ended up looking worse.

The so-called maturity of reconciliation, 25 years ago, did not help Malta at all. It simply allowed a canker to grow unchecked, and worse than that, it permitted that disgusting swathe of society who think that violence and suppression of free speech are entirely normal ways to deal with criticism to carry on believing they are right.

The result is what we see today: 18-year-olds talking about hanging and assaulting anyone who criticises Mintoff in public, and their fathers and mothers writing (if you can call it that) openly on the internet about beating, shooting and tearing apart writers and interlocutors who say the truth about Mintoff because it is not their truth. The result is that we are back to square one, with people, even journalists, too afraid to tackle the subject in anything other than cooing tones. Or perhaps the problem never really went away. Control through fear: and we thought we were done with all that.

This is their way of silencing people who say the things that they don’t want to hear. They are now EU citizens, no thanks to their personal choices, but they still cannot grasp the basic concept that Europe takes for granted: free speech and open debate. How are these people any different from the Muslim fundamentalists who shock European society when they say they will blow up a newspaper office because of a Mohammed cartoon, or murder a writer for saying something they don’t like? They’re not, but they just don’t get it.

They don’t get it because no political or social leader is prepared to tackle them head on and to tell them that society is not prepared to tolerate this level of violent speech, to remind them that we are in Europe now and not in Mintoff’s Malta or in Gaddafi’s Libya, or Mao Tse Tung’s China. Leaders should lead, and one crucial aspect of leadership is having the guts to stand up for what is right, against what is so very wrong.

But the politicians themselves don’t understand these concepts and are reflections of the people who put them where they are. When some Maltese politicians and other leaders were interviewed about the Islamic fundamentalist reaction to the publication of a Mohammed cartoon by a Danish newspaper, I shook my head in disbelief. The most common reaction was not criticism of this assault on the fundamental European value of free speech, but “Why did they publish that cartoon? I wouldn’t have done it, knowing all the trouble it would cause.”

That is so typical. The assessment of who is in the wrong is completely perverse: the journalists for publishing the cartoon, and not the savages threatening to blow the journalists up. It is the very same reasoning which underpins the widespread reluctance of politicians and journalists to speak the facts about Dom Mintoff. It’s called self-censorship through fear, and it is very dangerous.

Both the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition fail Malta miserably in their reluctance to stand up to these disgraceful people whose values are still those of a North African dictatorship, and who are about as European as dog stew.