In the last few weeks, when the world is ablaze with the Coronavirus horror, too many incidents are happening which should jolt us into action or a show of public anger. But nothing happens, barring a few whimpers.
Take four incidents which litter our daily life. You see a pattern forming. A worrying, soul-destroying pattern where wrong is laced with acceptance, where the unsavoury becomes normal.
At first glance these four incidents are unrelated. But scratch the surface a bit and the narrative is all too clear. All are connected. And all is done with perfectly pitched design.
Charles Caruana Carabez, Mario Philip Azzopardi, Alfred Grixti and Karl Stagno Navarra have all said, and done, things which, in a normal country, would have made us all clamour for their dismissal from their posts, all state-funded or positions closely aligned to the state.
All four hold positions in different sectors of society, from education to culture, from social welfare to communications. All are paid for from our taxes, our money. One is – hold your breath because this is beyond belief - the education ombudsman. If this isn’t the peak of irony please tell me what is. We are not just living irony, we are the spoof of spoofs. Yet spoofs are usually funny. This is grotesque.
All four commented horrendously about certain people but none of them got fired. All four said things which are bigoted and reprehensible; racism, misogyny, attacks on freedom of speech, all couched in the worst metaphors were spewed away not in some private chit-chat but on social media. The dehumanisation is widespread.
There is a theory that people walking in the same direction end up moving in unison and uniformly, left foot and right foot forward at the same time. This is what government loves: that we all fall in step to the march of the people, the herd, the supporters at all costs. Government is made up of people who want us all to be desensitised and follow blindly.
The Labour Party in government, initially with Joseph Muscat, excelled at this. Now Muscat holds the leash on his successor and lapdog, Robert Abela.
The latter seems constantly out of his depth in all he does. He’s a smiling bully following his master’s rules to keep the people walking in unison.
By allowing these four incidents to slip by and not taking proper action, government and its proponents make these horrendous forays into dehumanisation appear acceptable and mainstream.
Robert Abela and a few other government spokespersons have dissociated themselves from the comments passed by some of the four unjust men. Yet they did not go much further. This seems to imply that it’s not fine to say those racist, sexist things, but, really, it’s no big deal. Saying you disagree but leaving them in their highly paid, state-affiliated, positions is just wrong.
Someone who is an unknown, or not in the public gaze, posting a terrible comment online is bad and they should be made to stop at all costs. Yet when people who should be leading by example give all the nation a terrible example in belligerence, hatred, spite, vindictiveness and misogyny, then these deserve more than a few words of caution and distancing.
They should be ostracised, flung out of their positions and made to suffer for all the harm they have caused.
To be perfectly honest, another top government man did go beyond just dissociating himself from the dastardly things spouted.
Michael Falzon, the minister responsible for the family, children’s rights and social solidarity, felt he needs to make sure he protects the country’s image of total dependence on truth and good values. Falzon went further in his condemnation of the racist words uttered by Alfred Grixti, CEO of the Social Welfare agency.
Please keep in mind that this is not part of a farce: Falzon said that there was no need to fire, suspend or even admonish Alfred Grixti. Thanks to the words uttered by Grixti, Falzon informed us, the media were able to fill several column inches. Case closed, no question of any action being taken.
At the end of the day, all Grixti had said was that a migrant rescue boat out at sea should be impounded and scuttled. And his comment was only passed while the same boat had poor men, women and children drifting out at sea.
The pattern in all this is not that one man or four uttered these horrible sentiments. It is that the more that is being said, the less that is happening to stop them. The pattern is they dehumanise, the authorities shy away from saying anything, and if anyone points out the horror they defend it as freedom of expression.
When the inhumane is made to appear acceptable society starts losing its sense of true values. This is what the Labour leaders love. They love to have the herd emulating their beloved leaders, so that when critics are dehumanised, brutalised, or murdered, the herd never sees anything wrong.
While critics are becoming a rare breed, attacking the few and seeing them off as traitors to the cause gets easier every day.
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