Clint Camilleri’s speech last Sunday is especially important to our understanding of Labour’s electoral strategy. This strategy is to my mind based on a two-pronged approach, which are, essentially, manifestations of the same ideology. Minister Camilleri’s diatribe against the “élite” is one of the two aspects. The other aspect was implied in Owen Bonnici’s opinion piece published in The Times of Malta last Monday, parading as comment when in reality it was just usual propaganda. But let’s put that aside.

In his piece, entitled “The Land of Equality”, Minister Bonnici spilled the beans, spelling out the ideology underlying Labour’s electoral roadmap. Some people may credit Joseph Muscat with having birthed this brainchild, but I very much doubt it. It takes someone more brainy to come up with a narrative so intelligent. Not that Muscat isn’t smart, crafty, clever and fast. But he’s not intelligent, not in the intellectual sense of the word. What Labour is doing is intellectual. Then again, mind you, I might be wrong.

Labour’s campaign is unfolding under the banner of equality. This is no longer the Party of social justice, a value that the social-democrats and the left wing of the Christian democrats share, namely helping the (economically) less fortunate. Having become immune to the plight of such people, Muscatian-Abelian Labour whole-heartedly embraced an ideology of twisted equality. By so doing, Labour shed, snake-like, its traditional social-conscience skin.

Notwithstanding the fact that thousands of Maltese live close to poverty, and many more do actually live in poverty (and mind you, this hurts them directly but indirectly it hurts other categories of society too), Muscatian-Abelian politics involved dumping truckloads of buzzwords and positive thinking unto these poor souls to stupefy them. Though he did protest (a bit too much, methinks) that he had a social conscience and so on, Robert Abela continued Muscatism as Labour’s dominant ideology. And, all said and done, Muscatism-Abelism is turning out to be the opium of the people.

When addressing the lower classes, Labour’s ideology of equality conjures up the ghost of class dynamics. Minister Camilleri based his entire speech on this ghost. He used himself as an example of Labour’s “new” equality, that exorcises the ghost of social class dynamics. He argued that though he hails from a working-class family, he managed to become a Minister.

Whether it is true that his is a working-class family, I wouldn’t know. The only thing I remember about Minister Camilleri is his statement of affairs declaration, in which he declared the ownership of a lot of undivided shares in different properties, which is probably not the normal situation of working-class families. “Working-class” usually denotes limited means and difficulties in making ends meet because the finances of the family are what they are as “capitalists keep salaries low in order to exploit the workers and maximise profits”. How Minister Camilleri can say he hails from a working-class background when he has inherited a considerable portfolio of undivided shares in real estate, is difficult to comprehend.

But that is hardly the point. My argument is not personal – I don’t know Minister Camilleri personally and I have no beef with him. My argument is analytical. Minister Camilleri was last Sunday peddling the class-dynamics argument, with the implied message being that there are neither ħamalli nor puliti under this Administration but all are equal in Labour. In a sense it’s a rehashed Pauline message, a conception of the world influenced by St Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Seems like “We are ONE” – ONE TV’s motto – was also lifted from St Paul.)

Substitute “Christ Jesus” with “Labour” and “slave” and “free man” with “ħamalli” and “puliti”, and you get a Christian message regurgitated as secular mantra. It’s a message that the audience finds new (the form) and yet a message it’s already accustomed to (the content is old, and actually fundamental in a Judeo-Christian society like ours): There is neither ħamallu nor pulit, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Muscatian-Abelian Labour.

This narration is obviously mythical, stemming not from empirical data but from manipulative descriptions and arbitrary analyses of social dynamics.

The transformation of Christian theology into secular political “philosophy” isn’t novel: scholars have long been analysing how ideas change when they take off from Christian theology and land in political discourse. But the flight of fancy that gives rise to ideology is not apparent, and many don’t see it.

Ideology is like water in a fishbowl and humans are the goldfish that swim in it without being aware of it.

Then there’s Owen Bonnici’s article, “The Land of Equality”, a piece brimming with the usual radical-liberal drivel about patriarchy and women’s sexual (as opposed to financial) oppression. He asserted that the amendments to the Criminal Code introducing the dubious concept of “femicide” will bring about equality, even though some of our foremost jurists have demonstrated that this innovation amounts to discrimination (I subscribe completely to this view).

The radical liberals push the outlandish claim that certain women are killed because they are women. (Or else that all women are killed because they are women – it’s not quite clear where the liberals stand on this nuanced point.)

Which begs the question: why aren’t men also killed because they are men? If a heterosexual man kills a woman because she’s a woman, doesn’t a homosexual man kill a man because he’s a man? In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini – the poet and film-maker, who was gay – was murdered by his male lover. Wouldn’t that be the male version of femicide?

Furthermore, if a rich woman gets killed, is it because she’s a woman or is it because she’s rich? But, if the victim is a poor woman, does she get killed just because she’s a woman? If the victim’s a woman but she’s not sexually attractive, do we still have femicide, or does the murderer eye beauty in the victim?

Anyway, whatever the answers to all those questions, what should really concern us is where it’s all going. The (contorted) logic runs along these lines: femicide exists because of patriarchy, therefore patriarchy exists, therefore men control women’s bodies, and – hey presto! – out pops, like the rabbit from the magician’s hat, the radical feminists’ fixation: therefore  we need to legalise abortion…

Labour is pandering to this anti-maternal instinct that apparently preoccupies a segment of society, by offering equality. Both men and women should have sex with no consequences, thereby achieving equality. If having sex produces its natural outcome, then equality demands that that outcome be suppressed. Suppression of the unborn to undo the patriarchal oppression of women.

The working classes in a welfare State are less interested in abortion, as an unplanned pregnancy implies lower opportunity costs. It’s some members of the other class who clamour for sex-with-no-consequences, as unplanned pregnancies disrupt other plans.

This is the masterful plan concocted by Labour. Offering equality in different guises to the two different classes. The working class gets a mythical equality based on manipulative narratives of class dynamics. The other class, a practical equality that assuages the tensions caused by the risks involved in fulfilling a biological need the natural consequences of which have to be postponed because of other long-term priorities and objectives.

Where does this leave the Nationalists? In a veritable quagmire if you ask me. They have to overcome the class-dynamics mythology Labour keeps firing at them. And whereas it’s true that the class that needs to “overthrow the patriarchy” prefers the cleaner politics offered by the Nationalists to the sordid politics of Muscatian-Abelian Labour (particularly considering the scandalous €17,000-a-month retainer, and, according to Prof. E.A. Mallia, collusion in illegal acts at the Planning Authority). When it comes to choose, this class reckons that right now “no patriarchy” is more high-priority than “cleaner politics”.

The Nationalists insist on cleaner politics but they also propose other ideas. Yet, somehow, they fail to drive the point home. Let’s be frank about two things. One, it’s true that the Nationalists are no saints, but it’s also true that their politics are over all cleaner than Labour’s. Despite their shortcomings, the country gets a better administration with the Nationalists in government. Two, without an overarching narrative, the Nationalists can propose the best ideas imaginable – those ideas will remain individual musical notes waiting to find their place in a symphony.

In the meantime, a word of warning to Labour. No cunning plan, consisting of distributing equality with largesse and fat cheques to party apparatchiks and assorted sycophants, will make this country a better place. You’re pushing this country over the edge of the cliff.

Just be forewarned so that when the hour of reckoning comes, you don’t claim you didn’t know.

My Personal Video Library ()

2081 is a 2009 sci-fi movie that cost $100,000 to make but it’s probably one hundred thousand times better than many mainstream movies.

Directed by Chandler Tuttle and starring James Cosmo, Julie Hagerty, Patricia Clarkson, and Armie Hammer, it’s an intelligent adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron” that narrates how in 2081 there will be a powerful, dictatorial government that takes all measures to ensure absolute equality between all individuals.

There’s a Cabinet minister called Handicapper-General whose job it is to ensure people wear devices that eradicate all qualities making individuals exceptional. These devices eliminate a person’s advantages, such as strength, beauty, intelligence. That way, everybody is made equal, and the country can live its “golden age of equality.”

But there’s something rotten in the Land of Equality. The exceptionally strong, intelligent, and handsome Harrison Bergeron wants people to break free from this prison of equality. He was arrested for terrorism six years earlier but now manages to escape and make his way to a theatre where beautiful ballerinas clad in masks (to hide their beauty) are performing the Sleeping Beauty ballet and it’s being broadcast live on TV.

The authorities see Bergeron on the stage and dispatch the a police unit to arrest him. The Handicapper-General accompanies them and – since this is an American movie – shoots him down, on air.

This dystopian movie has a clear message: despite the radical liberals’ promises, Equality ends up suffocating Freedom. The radical liberals seem oblivious to the fact that the balance between Equality and Freedom is achieved only through Justice.

The promise of the radical liberals that all can be equal by renouncing to what distinguishes us, is a false promise. In reality, equality can only be achieved by adjusting each individual’s freedom in a just way, by respecting that individual while at the same time respecting other individuals too.