One of the most exhausting aspects of this sale of citizenship saga is the confusion, much of it deliberately engendered, about the facts. The government has every interest in people failing to distinguish between what it means to be a citizen and what it means to be a resident of a country, and so has not bothered to even try setting the ignorant straight. On the contrary, it feeds their chaotic thinking and lack of knowledge with ever more misinformation. And while doing that, it spins the risible myth that the Opposition is somehow in league with the entire world press to conspire against Malta’s national interest by cracking jokes and wielding insults, or even just reporting in disbelief, about Malta’s plans to sell its citizenship for cash.
You can see it on the comments-boards of news sites, and on social media. People’s arguments go to and fro between a mangling of schemes which involve citizenship and other schemes which involve nationality. It is chaos out there. When I could take it no longer and plunged in beneath one particular report on a newspaper site – not to argue with anybody, but just to set the facts straight as best I could in that sort of jungle of irrationality – I was actually accused by one man (a medical doctor, no less) of “splitting hairs” because I explained that there is a gulf of difference, legally, constitutionally and in every other way, between the resident of a country and citizen. Nationality is something else: it is not a legal concept so much as a set of emotions to do with birth and ethnicity and place of origin.
Some of the most shocking debates I have seen were in screen-shots people sent me from the Facebook timelines of supposedly educated people in their 50s, who I know to have had certain advantages, which means they have no excuse in not apprising themselves of the facts before they form an opinion. I read in complete astonishment the exchanges in which having an opinion on the sale of citizenship is treated much like having an opinion on the taste of various foodstuffs or on whether skirts are more flattering to women than shorts. In other words, these supposedly educated adults , at the age of 50-something, are unable to distinguish between what is strictly a matter of opinion (personal preference or taste, for example for colours, foods, clothing and so on) and a matter of opinion about facts, which by definition must be based on those facts.
When challenged by individuals better informed than they are, these ill-informed people (all of whom were, unsurprisingly, defending the government’s plans) responded with the trite and teenage, “But don’t I have a right to my opinion? Are you now questioning my right to an opinion?” The fallacious logic was quite phenomenal. Nobody was questioning their right to an opinion or even their right to express it. What was questioned was that opinion itself, and the individuals expressing it, for their failure to apprise themselves of the facts and then building their opinion on it.
Unfortunately for the country as a whole, Labour – whether in Opposition or in government – invariably fights its wars on ignorance while the other side is so often the loser because of its steadfast faith in the power of facts. Facts are not a strong enough weapon in a culture and society where rational thinking is not the norm, even among people with a fairly decent IQ and a bit of an education. Facts are a powerful communication tool only where they are met with strong analytical and information-gathering skills. There is a reason why the Labour Party’s third-world campaigning in the last general election was so very successful. And yes, it was a textbook, classic example of third-world campaigning, built around hysteria, crowd movements and primitive emotions masquerading as calls to the greater intelligence and insightfulness of those who chose Labour (when the opposite was true, as we have seen only too early).
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