Most of this website’s readers probably heard the iconic line from George Orwell’s 1984:
“…If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
The relevance of that quote is so established that merely referencing it has become a cliche by now. The bit that precedes it earns less attention:
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But there will always be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.”
I’ve spent the past decade of my life warning people about the severity of this trampling. Though we’re not at the stage of lining up people for rounds of gratuitous torture, just about any expert in fascism will tell you the same thing.
It always begins with a gradual dismantlement of the rule of law. The process then accelerates. Savagery becomes increasingly commonplace, directly proportional to the scale and speed of the whole endeavour.
In this tiny island full of mean-spirited men with bulging wallets, informing the public amounts to treason. The process of life becomes transactional. Curiosity is fatal.
Following this week’s events, one can convincingly conclude that it took the Labour Party’s dismantlement efforts just twelve years to come to fruition.
The executive branch is merely interested in its own survival. Parliament is hopeless. The judiciary is fully exposed to further encroachment on its domain. It is only a matter of time before they manage to erode what’s left of that, too.
Those of you who were present at Wednesday’s protest know exactly what I’m talking about. Those of you who weren’t either don’t know or don’t care enough to be there. Ultimately, your share of the blame for the situation we are in depends on how much action you’ve taken to prevent it.
This country is still full of delusional people who actually believe life in Malta is the best it’s ever been. They argue that, if anything, the Labour Party injected more wealth into the country than any other government we’ve ever had. To them, it wasn’t a dismantlement, but a renaissance for their financial portfolios.
That holds true for anyone who is in a position to dip their snout in the trough. For just about everyone else, it has brought nothing but a simmering resentment towards politics and a long list of broken promises which their local representatives did not keep.
What we’ve seen in the last twelve years is only a prelude to the Labour Party’s wider ambitions.
During this time period, the government weakened resistance against its agenda with all the grace of a butcher breaking down a tough cut of meat with a mallet.
As things stand, Malta is ripe for the next phase of this plan.
Targeting dissidents has always been a hallmark of this government. Now, this targeting will no longer be restricted to propaganda and public shaming. It will become active.
As soon as they sense that support for civil society has waned enough, they will start turning the screws on anyone they can get their hands on. Activists will be isolated from their diminishing support base, and the state will make an example out of the most prominent among us to silence the rest of us.
For those living in la la land, this will sound far-fetched and alarmist. Those who can follow this logical sequence of events will find this to be true, as is the case in any other place where such trends have been observed.
Less than 24 hours after the government successfully gutted the right of a private citizen to request a magisterial inquiry, we learned that prime minister Robert Abela had already threatened to do the same to the office of the standards commissioner two years ago. Their propaganda stations haven’t been able to stop gloating about their latest achievement.
The only scenario that fits what happens next is this: increasingly vicious sanctions against the freedom of individuals who remain doggedly committed to their fight against the mafia state.
Try as I might, I have not managed to figure out a solution for the apathy that has entrenched itself within general public consciousness. I am stumped by the inertia of a country brimming with talent and ingenuity but still painfully unable to quit its very worst habits.
At this rate, it will actually take an even more severe escalation to jolt some urgently needed support the fight against corruption. It will take another assassination, an arrest, a sham trial. It will have to get far worse for any realistic prospect of things getting better.
By then, it may be too late to even bother.