Warning: This article is meant for intelligent people only.
At times, one has to flit from one point to another, like a bird dancing around a tree’s dense branches. The other option is to focus on just one point. Today I’ll choose the former.
Many years ago, Alfred Sant had a weekly newspaper column called “Prosy Points”. He probably indulged in self-irony: the points he tackled were other than dull or commonplace. Or, maybe, they were. So many years have passed – I can’t quite remember.
Politics doesn’t really tolerate irony’s ambiguity. Politics wants direct (if incomplete) statements, that can be understood by most if not all of the population. The game in politics lies not in ambiguity but incompleteness. Power is based on information. You might have watched the intellectually-stimulating British series of 1967-68, The Prisoner, a critique of modern politics (it’s probably still available on YouTube): most episodes begin with, “We want information! Information!” Indeed, the more powerful have more information than the less powerful, and power’s bestowed by the possession of that information.
In art, ambiguity is the name of the game, the wilful or unconscious play on meaning. Literary criticism, and, as matter of fact, all criticism of all art forms, is a quest for meaning: What did the author really want to say? That’s the basic question in art. In politics, the questions are: has the politician been telling us all we need to know? What should we do with what he told us? What does “need to know” mean?
Bobby Abela and the Star Witness
As we watch the courtroom drama unfold in the Caruana Galizia assassination case, we keep asking ourselves: how much did Labour politicians know about the assassination, its commissioning and execution, the people involved?
As the mass of threads unravels before us, we start acquiring specks of insight into certain decisions taken a few months ago. If it turns out that Prime Minister Bobby knew more than he told us then, what will the implications be?
There’s so much we don’t know
For instance, according to one study, the common influenza virus changes human behaviour: it makes infected people more sociable by activating the molecule of sociability (interferon gamma)! However, scientists don’t really know how this works. It also seems we don’t know if the new coronavirus has the same effect on sociability.
Another example: scientists don’t seem to know how the “horsehair worm” manipulates the little brains of certain insects to make them carry its larvae to the closest body of water.
And so on. There are so many things we don’t know.
And yet, people like the two elderly gentlemen Mister Oosterman and Martin Scicluna repeatedly tell everybody they know when a “clump of cells” miraculously becomes a human being worthy of legal protection.
Yes, science doesn’t know how parasites manipulate their hosts’ minds, but these two elderly gentlemen know when a human foetus becomes a human person.
Why don’t they put their great minds at the service of science?
Jean-Claude Micallef
Everybody and his brother know I’m staunchly anti-abortion. But I have to disagree with Labour MP Jean-Claude Micallef’s recent anti-abortion rant (while he has my full sympathy for the way the Liberal Fascists savaged him).
Though Mr Micallef’s intentions are good, his approach is messy.
One, he contested the elections with a party led at the time by a man who had been, at the very least, flirting with the pro-abortion lobbies. I said as much on numerous occasions. Did Mr Micallef think I was bluffing? Does he think I left the Labour Party on a whim, or for personal reasons? In an interview with il-mument in 2016, I said I had left the Labour Party because of the Panama Papers scandal and because I knew that Joseph Doctor Faustus Muscat had probably sold his political soul to the abortion-lobbies Lucifer. Why did Mr Micallef join the “Most Feminist Government”? Didn’t he understand the message hidden in that slogan? Isn’t he aware that in today’s world, “Feminism” is a by-word for “abortion rights”?
Two, he’s adopting what I’d call the “Ceaușescu Approach”. Nicolae Ceaușescu was Romania’s dictator from 1974 until his overthrow and execution in 1989. Like Muscat, Ceaușescu wanted to increase his country’s population: Muscat imported thousands of foreigners (somehow reminds you of the slave trade), Ceaușescu forbade contraception and abortion. Romanian Police would routinely inspect pregnant women. The repressive regime meant that, upon Ceaușescu’s toppling, one million Romanian women aborted.
Repression never works; education does. By education I don’t mean the supposed benefits of abortion (as people like the three elderly amigos, Kenneth Wain, Martin Scicluna, and Mister Oosterman, seem to propose) but other values, inspired not by Richard Rorty, Peter Singer, and a misreading of Immanuel Kant, but by Mary Midgley, Jordan Peterson, Karol Wojtyla.
The fact remains that, as Maltese law stands, if a Maltese woman flies to Britain to abort, there’s no crime to prosecute. It’s like if you’re a Maltese man and, after you’ve taken leave of your senses by working out that one mother-in-law isn’t enough, you leave for some African country where polygyny is recognised, with the intent of marrying two or three women: you cannot be prosecuted in Malta even though bigamy is a crime in Malta. If Mr Micallef wants to achieve something, he should present a Private Member’s Bill to amend Article 5 of the Criminal Code. Then again, despite my anti-abortion stance, I’m not for such a course of action. It would be counter-productive.
Anti-racism iconoclasm
The rage we’ve seen in the past weeks, expressed in the destruction of statues of racists and slave traders, might be nothing but a self-centred attempt to cleanse the collective conscience and wipe out the collective memory. To my mind, those statues should stay where they are. Not because I support the ideology the statues represent. Only the contrary: it’s because I despise it! Those statues should stay there to remind us what those men did. It’s not that Europeans can now claim to have redeemed themselves of their past. Europe’s wealth is partly based on the exploitation of Africa – some countries are still doing it nowadays. Those statues should stay there, as a reminder of atrocities past, and atrocities present. If present-day Europeans are really sorry, they should stop the present exploitation of Africa.
Multiculturalism and the importation of Africans isn’t the way to cleanse Europe’s collective conscience. And neither is the weird idea peddled by liberal multiculturalism that Europeans should learn from the imported people.
“Imported people”. Not “irregular immigrants” or other euphemisms. To my mind, many of the Africans brought over to Europe are in a situation only a tad better than their ancestors who were transported, also over the seas, to the Americas. They’re not brought to El Dorado but to a society in which they’ll most probably be marginalised and unhappy, as the story from Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity I cited a few weeks back (about the Senegalese lady in France) amply shows.
When I visited Senegal some years ago, I understood many aspects of the migration chimera.
I realised first-hand what an intelligent people the Senegalese are. I was travelling with a Lithuanian friend, and a number of street vendors, mistaking him for Russian, spoke to him in Russian, and to me in Italian – all of them could speak both languages (in addition to French and their native Wolof). When later I asked my friend if their Russian was good, he said it was perfect. I replied that their Italian wasn’t bad either. These men had migrated to Europe for ten, twenty years and graduated at the University of the Street.
I realised that Senegalese women actually look forward to becoming the second or third wife of a certain type of man. Will our local liberals want to ape this mentality, like they want to ape the abortion mentality? Or is abortion fine because it’s a White import, but polygamy isn’t because it’s Black?
I realised that the Senegalese have been utterly broken by colonialism. My friend and I visited two cities, Dakar and St Louis. The utter confusion that reigns in both is beyond belief. A Senegalese teacher with whom we shared a restaurant table told us it’s because of the sweltering heat. I begged to differ. Particularly after visiting the island of Goré, from where slaves used to be shipped to the Americas. I broke down and wept when I saw how the slaves were treated. There was a photo of Pope John Paul II kissing the ground when he visited that haunted place. In 2004, Karol Wojtyla exhorted humanity to be “seriously committed to safeguarding first of all the right not to emigrate, that is, the right to live in peace and dignity in one’s own country”.
The memory of the slave trade is a bad memory. But before the slave trade was abolished (the exploitation of African human resources was replaced by the exploitation of African mineral resources some two hundred years ago), the abominations of the slave trade were accepted as part of the Zeitgeist, the spirit or mood of the time. Just like today the abominations of abortion are accepted as part of the West’s mood of the time.
In reality, our values shouldn’t depend on the mood of the time, but on the law of love that’s written in the hearts of some men.
My Personal Library (96)
This feature is soon approaching its 100th edition. I’m seriously thinking of discontinuing and to start a new series instead, “Movies I’ve watched”. I’m still unsure about this idea, but if I decide to carry on with it, it will be one hundred movies.
Alfred Sant’s Kwart ta’ Mija is a collection of short stories published 25 years ago that the author wrote over the preceding twenty-five years (hence the name). I read it as soon as it was published and I don’t remember what all the stories dealt with. One of them, however, did impress me. The author managed to evoke a powerful image, which I can still see in my mind’s eye after all these years. In this story, a young girl returns from abroad. She’s with her family, her face is pale and she looks as though she’s been through a lot. The author makes us understand that she’s been abroad to abort. He also conveys that the girl’s family is a “good family”. His tone is critical but he’s ambiguous. Is he criticising the hypocrisy of “good families” who force their young daughters to abort or Maltese society that forces “good families” to seek abortions abroad rather than at local clinics?
Then again, with hindsight: did he use literary discourse as an appendix to political discourse?