Living in Malta has made it a lot easier for me to understand how the arguments of National Socialism took root in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. I never ask myself or others, “But how on earth did people think like that?”
On a regular basis, I find myself in conversation with people – or inadvertently having to listen to the conversations of others – who do not even realise, because their education has been so deficient, that they espouse the principles of National Socialism. If the direction of their statements drives you to give in to the temptation to say so, then they look at you blankly. They think National Socialism is a reference to the Mintoff years in Malta. “Nazis,” you say, “Hitler. That’s National Socialism.” But unbelievably, they think that Hitler and the Nazis were a military group and not a political party with an ideology.
Malta’s dysfunctional education system, which teaches children more about how “the Maltese fought off the Muslims” than it does about National Socialism, Hitler and the war that ended just 70 years ago, has a lot to answer for. Education in the home doesn’t help, either, because partially educated parents are raising their children in their own image. Teaching people about National Socialism is crucial, because a lot of them seem to believe that their views are novel, that they are unique to the 21st century, that they are a reaction to the flood of refugees and the fear of ISIS. They are not. Their views are the result of deliberate social and educational conditioning against “Muslims and Arabs”, and those views are no different to the National Socialism’s view of Jews.
It has to be said that Malta took a break from hating and fearing Muslims so overtly while the British were here. For that century and a half, the more pressing fear was of ‘Protestantism’. The British were not about to forcibly convert the Maltese, but the big political and social fear was that some Maltese would be attracted, for various reasons of belief or opportunism, to the religion of those who ran the country. So Protestantism, and not Islam, was the Big Evil then. I actually remember the tail-end of that way of thinking. Maltese ‘Ketlicks’ were warned not to set foot in a ‘Protistint church’, not to take part in ‘Protistint cerimnies’ and told how ‘Protistints’ were heretics and vastly inferior to ‘Ketlicks’ who would be the only ones seeing the face of God. ‘Ketlicks’ were allowed to marry ‘Protistints’ in a Roman Catholic religious ceremony, in a Roman Catholic church, only if the Protestant/Anglican would-be spouse took instruction in Roman Catholicism and vowed to bring up any children they might have as Roman Catholics. I actually remember hearing people say, when I was a child, “But he’s a Protestant” in the same tones they would now say, “But he’s a Muslim.” Given that my school was a boarding-school at which there were rather more than a few ‘Protestant and Muslim’ girls, and one of my only two aunts was Anglican, I always thought it strange.
‘Protestants’ were for a long time viewed with suspicion and fear of the risk of conversion/imposition - but how quickly we forget, now that we haven’t been ruled by a ‘Protestant’ kingdom for the last 51 years. Our fears under ‘Protestant’ domination have since been supplanted by fear that we will be dominated by ‘Muslims’. There is no risk of that, but lots of people seem to enjoy feeling afraid and invent things to be fearful of because it lends a frisson to an otherwise tedious life. There is a singular difference, though – the Maltese were led to fear Protestantism under the direction of their religious and political leaders, but they didn’t despise Protestants. They admired them (“Kemm hu bjond. Qisu Ingliz.”). Today’s Maltese, however, literally despise the people who are Muslim. They say it is because of their religion, but it is not. They would despise them even if they were not Muslim. They despise them because they are ‘Arabs’ and they imagine that all Arabs are Muslim and that all Muslims are Arabs. Arabs are perceived as being inferior, and they are not “bjond qisu Ingliz”. The irony of a Maltese raised in the gutter, who can barely write or speak, who has no manners or education to speak of, and who knows nothing about anything, despising somebody who is far superior to him socially and educationally and in terms of achievement and behaviour, on the basis that he or she is ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ escapes many.
Unfortunately, the only ‘Muslims’ most Maltese encounter are hamalli bla flus or hamalli bil-flus and so they think there are no other sort. Imagine if all the Maltese were to be judged by the likes of a certain demographic, how terrible that would be for the rest of us. But then the funny thing is that the Maltese who despise Middle Eastern and North African hamalli tal-flus then admire the Maltese equivalent.
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