This commentary piece refers to a series of articles about mass protests. You can read them by clicking here: part one | update (1) | update (2) | update (3)
Intellectual honesty often carries a steep price.
I paid this steep price at a point in my career which could have easily spelled its end. This column is simply a matter of preserving an investment I already made. If preserving that investment means upsetting a few allies, so be it.
I always chose to support anyone pushing for tangible anti-corruption initiatives because I always understood that it is the root of all problems.
Public land became a playground for developers because those developers got busy wooing politicians. Cronies get to loot the public purse because they came attached with the crooks we elected. Our justice system is slow and ineffective because powerful people with a lot of dirty money are paying to keep it that way.
Corruption. Corruption. Corruption. There are, indeed, crooks everywhere you look.
Having spent my entire adult life so far fighting corruption, I am keenly aware that the only way to defeat the corrupt is knowing what actually impacts them. Victory can only be at hand when you know what terrorises them into taking a step back, because Christ knows these people are too far gone to make objective considerations on their own steam.
Reason, evidence, objective truths – these weapons are not effective when dealing with the corrupt. A degree of forcefulness must apply.
Someone who is corrupt already sold you down the river. They don’t give a shit about you. They’re already thinking of which yacht they’re going to buy next.
And so, to truly end despair, we must deploy effective tactics. The only language that the corrupt understand is mass dissent. They don’t care for your extensive paper outlining their rule of law failures. They don’t care about official reprimands, international scrutiny, or press conferences. They don’t care about our attempts at swaying them with facts and spirited debates. The only call to make when dealing with the corrupt is to use collective force as a battering ram. Not rising up to the occasion in this manner is the wrong call.
This is the sole reason why I launched a public appeal to inspire mass dissent. Given that I’ve allowed over three weeks’ time for responses to come in from relevant civil society groups, I feel like I am now in a position to comment on the massive disappointment I’ve been feeling throughout. Let it be known that this is my own personal perspective on things and that it is conditioned by nothing except my own judgement. I speak as a free man with no formal ties to any organisation.
I am disappointed because, from the responses that have come in to date, it is evident that nobody is organising anything. At best, there seems to be some murmured acknowledgement that mass protest is a useful tool. The problem is that nobody seems to be willing to pick the damn thing up and use it.
It is clear that Repubblika, which was previously instrumental in organising the mass protests we saw in 2019, has now shifted its focus towards softer tactics like playing a supporting role for journalists and generally serving the role of a think tank that is run by activist academics. Though Occupy Justice Malta were the only group to openly advocate for mass protests sooner rather than later, they are not currently engaged in any ongoing campaign.
I am furious about the fact that nobody is seeking to capitalise on the major discontent that followed the beginning of a major criminal trial involving the heads of our mafia state, the very same trial which would not have started without civil society’s efforts in the first place. And yet, nobody is setting the match alight when it is needed most.
Meanwhile, everyone else on the list of organisations which were previously involved in these protests seems to have just gone on a permanent holiday. At best, I can assume that whoever’s responsible for responding to media queries is doing a shit job at it, at worst, I can assume there is internal disagreement on how to move forward, or a deliberate refusal to respond. Frankly, I don’t know which is worse, so I will leave that up to you to decide.
So, as things stand, this is the situation the public is left to contend with: the former standard bearers, the ones we’d all follow out into Valletta’s streets on those cold winter nights, are now shifting towards a softer approach. There is a vacuum that needs to be filled, and the only ones who said they want to do something about it are not in a position to do it themselves.
I am here to declare that this softer approach in the face of spiraling corruption and depravity is like taking a butter knife to a gun fight. It is setting us all up for failure and I will not stand for it nor by it. A failure to pull off a real, collective show of force in the upcoming months – especially on the occasion of Daphne’s anniversary – will bear disastrous consequences for the long, arduous struggle that brought us to this moment.
These kinds of campaigns do not build themselves up out of the ether: they require concerted effort to get people motivated to show up in a combative mood, one that says ‘enough is enough, things must change, and they must change now.’
The occasion of Daphne’s anniversary by itself is no longer enough to motivate people to hit the streets and seize the reins of their future. It’s been seven years, and even the power evoked by the myth of a towering figure like Daphne is eventually outlasted by time and our fleeting collective memory.
Respectfully, I’d like to urge everyone to strongly reconsider their approach and truly think of what it means to live up to this moment in our history.
It is not enough to merely lay flowers in remembrance. We must also plant seeds for the future.
