featured photo: Jessica Arena, Times of Malta
Something really does need to be said about the sheer arrogance of our political class and all the functionaries who spend their lives wishing they were attached to their masters’ hip.
Though I have three other articles in my drafts which I’d like to write up, I think that using this piece to dissect the enemy’s psyche must come first. Doing so also gives me some breathing room to digest all the information that has come in this week, so bear with me for a minute.
There are multiple ways to test someone’s mettle. When you want to test their morality, you assess how they address wrongdoing. A trustworthy individual holds themselves accountable for their own shortcomings by taking decisive remedial action. An untrustworthy individual will bluster at whoever is calling them out on their failures.
When you want to get a sense of someone’s reliability, you must watch how they go about holding themselves accountable, if at all. Is it a performative act meant to con spectators into lowering their guard, or is it a genuine act of contrition? Does the individual under inspection want to make amends, or are they on the offensive?
I ask these questions in the middle of a political crisis because I fear that amid all the propaganda and counter-propaganda, the revelations and the cover-ups, the accusations and the denials, we are failing to assess the personal nature of the people who are involved in this mess, their enablers, and the ones who are supposed to be doing their utmost to ensure those people are indeed held responsible in line with the laws of our country.
So, to really understand what you’re dealing with, you need to size up someone’s personality, and the best way to do so is infer insights as outlined above. The examined individual’s stated intent is secondary, and is only valid if and when it matches their actions in a positive manner.
To say that not a single ounce of humility has been shown by the government in relation to the hospitals concession fiasco is an understatement. Disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat has turned himself into a walking media circus, using his unquestioning allies in the press to push his narrative while sending out spooks like Jason Micallef to spy on journalists and then harass them on the same news platform that publishes them.
Prime minister Robert Abela must resort to inane mutterings about how an election that is meant to reflect Malta’s choice for who gets to administer its towns and its slice of EU representation is somehow going to be a judgment of his own failures as prime minister.
The situation is so morally barren that we are supposed to believe that Chris Fearne, who resigned from Cabinet on 10 March after being named as one of the 24 individuals and companies to be arraigned in court following the conclusion of the Vitals inquiry, upheld some standard of morality when he did so. The last health minister who truly made the correct call in a timely manner was Godfrey Farrugia. Fearne was overdue with his resignation a long time ago, even before he helped further con the country by calling Steward Healthcare “the real deal“.
Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri are nowhere to be found if you had to take our police force’s word for it. Financiers like Adrian Hillman and Pierre Sladden, who together with Keith Schembri are also involved in the shameful looting of the assets that once belonged to Times of Malta’s mother company, have not made any public declarations. Brian Tonna and Karl Cini, of Nexia BT fame, have done their best to keep their mouths firmly shut, too. Woe befalls the man who speaks about where the bodies are buried.
These individuals are but a few of the perpetrators of the great hospitals heist. There are, for example, all the permanent secretaries and high-ranking officials who quietly sanctioned the decisions which were made by Muscat, Mizzi, and Schembri. The rest of this lot of crooks are less well known, but just as important regardless.
What brings them all together – besides the fact that they’ve robbed us all blind, that is – is that they’ve all gone out on the offensive to try and force any and all opposition into submission, resorted to outright lies, manipulation, and baseless virtue signalling, or otherwise outright rejected any semblance of accountability.
What does all this say about these individuals and the political context which spawned them? And more importantly, what does the fact that we are still lumped with them say about Maltese society at large? Not too many pretty things, as you can probably imagine.
It says the following: we are governed by a collective of sociopaths who have effectively colonised an electoral majority of the population. The sole objective of this colonisation is to use the colonised like one would use a shovel or a hammer, a mere tool to be leveraged for the acquisition of power.
An individual who upholds a moral code and wishes to genuinely serve the greater good, as should be the duty of any political representative, would have never been involved with a criminal organisation like the Labour Party to begin with. If we had to stretch our goodwill by a mile and assume someone could be a part of this government’s civil service without harbouring any ill intent themselves, anyone who was within ten feet of this concession should have publicly spoken up about how corrupt it was the minute the file landed on their desk.
Someone whose integrity is unquestionable would never accept any kind of involvement in the ratification of a deal that was so obviously designed to benefit a shady company with no track record at the expense of the taxpayer, nor would they enable it or otherwise fail to prosecute it if the responsibility is incumbent on them, nor would they accept it or even applaud it.
No amount of pomp and bluster can make up for the intrinsic lack of value of someone who does not stand for anything.
After all, if you had to observe this kind of conniving behaviour in a potential partner, or friend, or business associate, you wouldn’t congratulate them about it and say ‘well, you’ve definitely got my vote!’ You’d give them a thorough bollocking.
If you wouldn’t tolerate it within the four walls of your home, then why would you tolerate it from the representatives who are supposed to take decisions for all of us?
