If this were a normal country and we kept holding vigils on the 16th of every month for a crowd of less than a hundred people, I’d have been among the first to call it a day.
But this is the sun-soaked fiefdom of Malta we’re talking about. A place where the greed of the few triumphs over the needs of the many on a daily basis. Where the press is content to waste multiple front pages on a shitty concert but fails to recognise the severity of the harassment faced by civil society.
This isn’t a normal country.
The fact that civil society still exists in the face of overt hostility and general indifference is no small feat.
Last week, I was one of the speakers at this month’s vigil for Daphne Caruana Galizia. Throughout the years, I must have done it half a dozen times by now.
Since 2018 or so, I’ve seen the crowd swell and then roll back; an unpredictable tide of whims bunched together into what should hopefully look like the collective will of society.
Sometimes, we numbered a solid couple of thousand people. Recently, it’s mostly been a much slimmer crowd. Enough to not get wiped off the face of the planet completely, but not enough to make power feel really insecure.
Of course, the relentless propaganda campaign against Daphne Caruana Galizia and her legacy can never stop.
This deliberate vilification extends not just to Daphne as an individual, but also the staggering cache of stories she published. Tearing down that legacy – or at the very least, downplaying the scale of its impact – in turn feeds into attacking anyone who is still demanding answers for the questions she had asked.
The objective of this propaganda campaign is to demoralise anyone who’s still standing. It’s Labour’s rule of mob, through and through.
With that kind of framing, it is only natural for the Labour Party’s foot soldiers to celebrate whenever a few dozen people show up for the vigil.
In their parallel universe, it is undeniable proof that their work is paying off. To some extent, that is largely true.
If you dehumanise someone day in, day out, people will eventually tune out anything to do with that person entirely. I’d tell you to ask the Palestinians about it, but it will be difficult to find someone to speak to among all the rubble we’re looking away from.
The admission fee for living in that parallel universe is the unyielding assumption that what the Labour government does everyday is fair game. That there is absolutely nothing wrong with Cabinet members becoming millionaires by stealth as long as the country’s coffers are prospering.
Most of all, you must also assume that there is no relation between the decline in civil society support and the government’s hostility towards it. Rather than the behemoth of government stampeding all over democratic norms, it is the democratic norm that is stampeding all over the behemoth.
All at once, they want you to believe that we are both a non-entity and a threat. That we are just a handful of people who somehow also have the means to harm an entire country through our malicious criticism.
Believe me when I say that if I had the kind of international reach they claim “the establishment” has, I wouldn’t be at the mercy of people’s donations to sustain my little slice of sanity on the internet – at this point, I’d may as well be stockpiling AK47s and calling for a goddamn coup d’état. But that’s just me, venting after a decade’s worth of this bullshit.
The fact is that after sustaining all this punishment and with a total letdown of support from the general public to boot, it is an absolute miracle that there is still a group of people left to even talk about whenever we gather in front of Daphne’s memorial.
The Labour Party’s machine mocks us. It seeks to destroy that which does not serve its own singular interests, even if it comes at the expense of the fundamental concepts of what a democracy should be.
The reality of it is that it is not a badge of a shame to be among a conscientious minority. Those who view all this is as wrong but choose to do nothing to make it right are as guilty as those who actively participate in the oppression.
If anything, I consider it a badge of honour to be counted among people who still care about what happens to our democracy, even if we number just a handful and the trolls are rabidly foaming at the mouth.
No amount of intimidation can take any of that away.
Well said.
It is precisely the reason why I make it a point to be there on the 16th of every month.
And it makes me equally sad that most of Malta doesn’t care….