Even a broken clock is right twice a day

I hope you brought your tinfoil hats, folks – it’s time for a dive into the mind of the unhinged.

Joseph Muscat’s stooges are on the loose, a delightful break from their usual activity of licking their master’s backside. I suppose it’s a nice little distraction from the headlines about his cowardly withdrawal of a libel against Christian Grima.

Amidst all the chaos caused by the AFM’s embarrassing failure to protect one, singular container full of cannabis, we all missed out on the conspiracy of the decade.

Faithful as ever to the news portal’s morbid fetish for arrogant, ignorant men, Lovin Malta wrote an “article” about Karl Stagno Navarra’s latest obsession.

Normally, I hate to waste column inches on such individuals. But this latest one really is just too hysterical to ignore, mainly because it’s the closest I’ve seen that fraudulent freeloader get to the truth. Just not in the way he thinks he has.

After spending a few days in Facebook jail – one truly wonders why anyone would have reported such an affable, reasonable man – Stagno Navarra claims that anti-corruption activist Robert Aquilina and his brother, Nationalist MP Karol Aquilina, are engaged in a “diabolical plot.”

With the language he uses, one would think the Aquilina brothers are currently locked up in a secret underground bunker piled with weapons of mass destruction.

The “diabolical plot”, he claims, is a concerted plan to usher the country into a new era of civil disobedience, with the intent of forcing prime minister Robert Abela to call a snap election before the legislature runs through its normal course.

Of course, Lovin Malta never bothered to reach out to either Robert or Karol for their comments. Why do journalism when we can just copy a shitty Facebook post from a serial liar without any further context?

So, I reached out to both of them to see what they had to say. While it took a couple of hours to get security clearance for the underground Aquilina bunker, they finally let me through.

“Everyone knows who Karl Stagno Navarra is. Even ONE doesn’t give him any airtime anymore. I see no reason to waste my time on him. At most, I’ll light a candle for him,” Karol Aquilina said when contacted.

That obvious sense of disdain towards the worst of the Labour Party’s cesspool of political operators is the same exact reason Karol Aquilina is a constant target for the government.

Stagno Navarra’s goal is obvious – he is trying to pile pressure on Opposition leader Bernard Grech to remove Aquilina from his party’s ranks. In classic Labour stooge tradition, he then ends his hateful diatribe by claiming that the government must continue to “spread love for our Malta.”

Robert Aquilina is equally hated by the Labour Party. Though his approach to active democratic participation is entirely different to what his brother does in Parliament, the demonisation is practically on the same level.

“Contrary to what Karl Stagno Navarra affirmed, I do not need to be part of a conspiracy, nor am I interested in doing so. I say what I have to say in broad daylight, where everyone can hear me,” Robert Aquilina said when reached.

“However, Karl Stagno Navarra’s idea to call for civil disobedience is a good one – that’s the only way to stop this fascist government. I would not be surprised if we had to walk down that path soon. Our country needs and deserves to be defended from those who possessed it to rob their own people,” he added.

And there you have it, folks – crystal clearly laid out as best as it can be done.

By definition, civil disobedience is the coordination of non-violent actions meant to signal disapproval of unjust laws or policies. As such, anything that has been done to date by civil society falls under this category.

Stagno Navarra is so clueless about such terms and the nuances of their definitions that he describes civil disobedience as if the Aquilina brothers are calling for the guillotine.

In truth, the kind of “civil disobedience” that’s got the government wetting the bed is exactly what the country needs.

The very fact that they put Stagno Navarra up to this just continues to prove that this is what they are afraid of most – streets full of thousands of people, demanding their resignation rather than appealing to their good sense.

Though I personally feel like the country is not ready for this debate, the fact is that this country needs to shed the “civil” part from the “disobedience” that Stagno Navarra is desperately trying to throttle.

Though we may not like it, the fact is that for peaceful protests to really work, your opponent must have a conscience. The government has no conscience. It only speaks the languages of money and power.

In Malta’s case, power is concentrated into the hands of the prime minister, his Cabinet, and the dozens of extremely wealthy crooks who finance their party and their media empire. That kind of power cannot be effectively pushed back with placards and loud chanting.

We can hit the streets another hundred times this year: the fact is that even when we did have thousands of people in the streets, we had only mustered just enough force to push out Muscat and his closest while giving them enough time to install his lawyer in the prime minister’s seat instead.

Any aspiring activist who fails to see that this is no longer a country that tolerates diplomacy and civic debate is endangering their own cause and themselves.

This is no time to be pushovers – we either move militant, or we will no longer have the right to move.