Archive for July, 2008

This question was put forward by Simon in a comment on the ‘Ask James‘ page.

Simon: – James, as the mainstream parties political continue to move towards the centre, would you say that political ideology still has a realistic place in Maltese politics?

Me: – As regards the mainstream political parties, it is true that their policies seem to be heading towards a common mono-rail. However at times I have been given reason to question whether it is truly two political parties whose’ manoeuvres we are witness to and not a puppet act; with the Labour party thus far playing the puppet, seemingly taking a fall at too many important junctures in the past decade to shrug off as mere misfortune.

1998 – Was Labour taking the heat for utility price rises and CET to pave the way for the Nationalist’s surcharge and VAT increases?

2003 – Was “Switzerland in the Mediterranean/ Partnership” ever properly explained? Why were voters against EU-entry instructed to split their vote (don’t vote, spoil the vote, etc.)?

2008 – How did Labour retain Alfred Sant as leader and manage to lose the election… again? Who kept him there and why? Isn’t it interesting just how friendly and comfortable the Nationalists seem to be with the new leader?

Would you like a cheese burger or a hamburger Mr. Voter? 9_9

…But that wasn’t your question. ;c)

I would say that political ideology not only has a realistic place in Maltese politics but that the Maltese Islands are desperately in need of ideology. Without ideology reality is destined to deteriorate as you would get little progress (progress itself resulting from ideological processes).

Unfortunately I do not believe that the Maltese Islands have sufficient ideology in politics. This has resulted in a knock-on effect. Without political ideology there is no means by which a population can truly relate to the structures of governance that they have endorsed. The people become apathetic, just as they are today. The people worry about the cost of food and the lowness of the wages – important – but miss the wood for the trees. Tuna does not give a human being a purpose in life and neither does a one-Euro increase in wages (though welcome). What gives a human a feeling of purpose in life is to feel that one belongs, that one matters, that one has a role that one has chosen and that one will be appreciated for, that one is able to grow within their society, rather than wither beneath the jealous, vindictive or malign stares of others.

Realism can give Malta more of the same, and a practical means to achieve – but without ideology the best that one can aim to achieve is what one already is… and as they say, you need to aim for the mountains to reach the peak of a hill.

Do let me know if I fall short of answering your question in any way. :c)

Simon: – No, you haven`t fallen short at all. I appreciate another informed and well-expressed opinion. Like you, I would like to see political ideology return to the domain of political debate or, failing that, for the political actors to just come out and admit that they have no ideological convictions if that is the case.

At the moment, it seems that they want to have their cake and eat it by paying lip service to the ideological traditions in order to curry favour with certain parts of the electorate but essentially ignoring it when it comes to governance.

Me: – You’re welcome and thank you for another excellent question. While things do not look positive for the future of Maltese politics, what with both sides of the mainstream party locking down upon power in whatever means they deem necessary (under the pretence of “strengthening democracy”…). Indeed it seems that they are having their cake and they are eating it and this cannot very well be denied considering the mess that I witnessed at the counting halls during the last election.

However defeatism never ever brought about progress even in the most seemingly hopeless hollows.

This question was put forward by Simon in a comment on the ‘Ask James‘ page.

Simon: – James, is Satanism a problem in Malta? If so, what can be done to tackle it?

Me: – Hello Simon.

While I am of the impression that there is a presence of Satanism in Malta I am also of the impression that public opinion on the matter has been sculpted by a Roman Catholic manipulated media and is hence likely not as reliable as one would be led to believe.

For instance, the article carried on illum a month or so ago about “Satan” being born in Mater Dei hospital was an exercise in misinformation and sensationalism – the child was born to a Pagan mother who, as an individual of a different religion, refused access to the child for the clergy on-site. It naturally doesn’t help that Pagans are sometimes mistaken for Satanists if they aren’t too overly careful about blending into Catholic society.

There is also the misconception that every person who wears black and a few piercings, tattoos or trinkets is probably a Satanist, which again is taking public perception a lot further than the bounds of logic.

Is Satanism a problem in and of itself? It is, to the Roman Catholic institution, but Satanism is an anti-religion and is therefore itself a sect of Catholicism. What the Catholic institution should do therefore is ask itself this same question and look within for the answer.

My own stand on the matter is that an individual is entitled to believe, or not believe, whatever he or she wishes to – even in some divine fluffy dice in the sky, if they should wish to choose to. However I also am of the stand that religious freedom should begin and end with the individual and should not cross the threshold into state or active influence of the state as this is where there lies the greatest potential of subjugating minorities as the Catholic Church has done within Malta (Just one example in the form of a question: – should the academic future of a child be jeopardized by a compulsory religion exam should that child fail?).

In conclusion Satanism in and of itself is not the problem per se, it is the acts of Satanism that contradict the rights of others that are potentially the problem and this is where action should be aimed. Trying to raise the status of minority religions to the point of permitting non-socially invasive shrines is one thing that I would like to see done as I suspect that there do exist minorities whom are forced to the fringes of society in order to practice whatever legitimate worship that they would wish to practice.

I hope that that long-winded response sufficiently answers your question. :c)

Simon: – Thank you very much for your informed and detailed response. It has provided ample food for thought and given me some previously unconsidered perspective on the issue.

You’re welcome Simon and thank you for such an interesting question.

Well this is a right mess. The transportation workers have decided to go on strike, possibly inspired somewhat by their counterparts in Europe. Busy roads came to a standstill, the city was besieged and the shopkeepers felt rather lonesome. Tempers flared and acts of aggression, intimidation and vandalism took place in the presence of locals and tourists alike and many opted, voluntarily or otherwise, to remain at home.

I am of two minds about the strike. While on the one hand I despise the fact that the transport workers took their protests to the general public, their peers and also the tourists whom we owe a happy holiday (lest we forget that they actually pay to visit the Islands), and while I do not feel that the liberalization of the hearse sector warranted anything of this sort, I have heard rumours that the Nationalist government had offered promises not to liberalize the transportation sector during the election’s eleventh hour. It seems that the transportation drivers are in possession of a letter signed by Mugliett supporting this claim… and I personally do not take kindly to deceit or broken electoral promises. If this claim is indeed true then it would be more than safe to say that the wrong party is in power today, having won an election upon the wings of deceit and misinformation. If true then Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi should both call an investigation and either relinquish a seat to the Opposition in the spirit of stepping up to the plate of accountability or, if he would like to continue dancing the ballad of unaccountability, call for a vote of confidence.

However… a few comments about the Government’s handling of the protest. I am of the opinion that the daily slash in subsidies was an extremely efficient if slightly heavy-handed approach to seek to end it. The setting up of alternative forms of transportation was also commendable, even if it has hit a number of speed bumps due to resistance. While I also commend the initiative to set up an alternative taxi service for chauffeur-driven vehicles I would suggest that € 15 is a ludicrous price for any but the longest journeys upon the Islands, and is in fact a step backwards.

Lastly I would like to point out the obvious. Any situation where drivers own the vehicles is a situation where drivers likewise have a lot of clout. If one were to remove this privilege then the driver would no longer have the protest dynamic of a small entrepreneur but of a regular employee. Hence it would only be a matter of hiring replacements on a short term basis until resolution.

A spokesperson for the EU border security agency Frontex has stated that Nautilus is not the solution to Malta’s illegal immigration. The general feeling gotten is that it is Libya that is to blame for the failure of Frontex to solve the problem. This spokesperson then went on to compare Nautilus with the sister project Hera in the vicinity of the Canary Islands and how relative success was achieved there thanks in no small part to the cooperative efforts of Senegal and Mauritania.

This may indeed be the case and Libya may very well not be cooperating with Nautilus but there is a fundamental question that nobody in Europe seems to be asking. Why should Libya bear the weight in responsibility for the mass illegal migration from an entire continent? Is this truly a productive or constructive attitude towards solving the problem or is it merely provoking the very same stonewalling that Libya is accused of?

Libya is every bit as much of a victim in this matter as Malta is and likewise has every bit as much of an interest in solving the problem of illegal immigration from their own perspective. Libya unofficially has some control over the flow of illegal migrants from its shores; it is almost unfathomable to imagine it being any other way considering the highly engineered flow of immigrant, waxing and waning to conveniently cater for political events.

However how different is this strategy from the concept of “burden sharing” brought up in the run-up to the previous election? It may sound good on paper and I am pretty sure that Josie Muscat had done his homework on the matter (which compares favourably to the Nationalist’s non-plan of action in both its previous term and its current term in government) but I feel that there remain a number of logical flaws, some of which are pungently, if effectively, highlighted through comparison to Libya’s own brand of “burden sharing”.

Returning to Libya as a topic, let us attempt to identify its relationship to the issue at hand, illegal immigration, and classify it accordingly. Firstly Libya is not a source country but a country of transit, just as some people claim that Malta is. Secondly Libya is criticized for its treatment of African immigrants within its borders – it is not a picture of harmony. Therefore to attempt to ‘solve’ illegal immigration from a purely pan-European perspective would be an exercise in futility as too many essential pieces of the puzzle are disregarded.

We will get absolutely nowhere if we continue regarding our closest southern neighbour with this degree of suspicion and disregard to their own interests. Once we successfully adjust our egotistically-geared nationalistic perspectives to more communitarian-geared nationalistic perspectives, where benefit within a neighbouring nation is deemed a positive not only to that nation but to one’s own nation, especially if prominent in its adjacency, then I feel that we would have taken a second crucial step to solving the illegal immigration issue.

You are yourself every bit as much as I am myself. It seems obvious right? Well it is obvious but within debates both in Malta and World-wide we seem all too often to forget this essential truth. There is no element of choice in being who you are. It is a reflection of the sum of your personal interpretation of your internalized interpretation of your observations of the stimuli that surrounds your life.

Likewise thinking what you think is relatively involuntary and therefore not a choice. This is why many persons experience unpleasant thoughts that they desperately try to push out of their minds while other persons wonder where their previous more pleasant thoughts drifted from.

The way that you express yourself is more down to choice but even so there remains a degree of impulsiveness – of habits that are hard to suppress. In western countries there is the tendency to shake hands upon meeting. In fact I would break this section down into three parts. Firstly, one’s habits, secondly one’s communications, where one converts one’s thoughts into a medium through which those thoughts are successfully conveyed, and thirdly there is the performance, a series of acts that are devoid of the real implications attached to equivalent actions in reality (an example of such would be acting out a stabbing motion upon a stage). Lastly the actions that you perform are primarily down to choice, though the root may be entrenched within that which you think or are, and this completes the hierarchy from the internal to the external.

The reason why I consider this to be important lies within my belief that the legal and political systems within many countries fail to recognize the above in their daily dealings. The result is that the conclusions which are reached are logically incomplete and sometimes even incompatible with society at large.

Example fields where this blind-sightedness strikes include the inequitable treatment of different sexes, races, sexual orientations, marital statuses,political orientations, religions and more, within the context of identical circumstances. Likewise this same blind-sightedness applies to the loading of certain forms of deviance against other forms of deviances.

This aside, if one were to take the adjectives to be, to think, to express and to do, and were to throw each into the context of representing different grades of rights, then one would end up with a very simple, conservative yet liberal and also effective means of evaluating and comparing the conflicting interests that can make up some of the more profound of dilemmas. For example, is it wrong for one human to kill another? Why or why not? Do traditional instructions of indoctrination provide ourselves with a reason better than ‘because it is written in this text’ or ‘because the other person has the right to live’? The later statement is by far more credible a response than any variant of ‘because X says so’ but would we be able to explain this effectively or would we get caught within indefinite loops of ‘because’?

Through the acceptance of a certain hierarchy in the different degrees of rights and the use of such as a logical tool in the quantification and assessment of ethical questions one may find that the result would be a social fabric of greater consistency and with fewer elements of hypocrisy than that which more traditional legal concerns provide.

Well it is painfully clear who took the last election with a little help of media deceit (withholding information and offering an incomplete picture is a form of deceit), propaganda and the legal texts crafted and amended by… ‘drum rolls’ those who took the last election. What was the previous year a restrained flow has now amplified and, with the Summer being such a favourable time of year for travel, the Maltese Islands are seeing dozens to one or two hundreds of illegal immigrants on a daily basis.

It looks like we may very well be setting a record in illegal immigrants received this year. Perhaps we should apply to Guinness for the dubious honour of ‘record illegal immigrants retained per capita in the World’ and also for the equally dubious honour of ‘record amount in welfare paid to the upkeep of illegal immigrants per capita’. Indeed together anything is possible when it comes to scraping the bottom of the barrel in ludicrousity. Do we truly plan on waiting for another five years to demand our votes back?

It is also very annoying that certain quarters are keen to play the mythologically sharpened ‘race card’ against practically any and all who would find this situation completely unacceptable. Perhaps this is why so few remain who dare to express their thoughts and concerns on the matter. Vilification within what has been emerging as a bureaucratic police state (a state where the police and mechanics of law are deemed required to retain absolute control over the populace) could have had something to do with that. After all this country has the dubious honour of sentencing a person to two years imprisonment suspended for four years, plus a significant fine, for expressing his thoughts and concerns and anger on the situation (oh yes and for “insulting ‘His Excellency the President of Malta’”).

Well illegal immigration is a major problem in Malta. I would say that it trumps and dwarfs the utilities surcharge & the rise in fuel prices combined (not to mention others) as it is ongoing, escalating and exacerbating. Furthermore the mushrooming population of illegal immigrants represent similarly mushrooming costs and the money has to come from somewhere.

But before any talk of solutions can begin, the issue has to be recognized to be the problem that it is. As Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi relatively recently and indirectly sputtered out, and as Norman Lowell had incessantly claimed before himself and Josie Muscat and practically all other individuals calling themselves politicians (including myself) the problem of illegal immigration could be likened to an ‘invasion’. So let us start to perceive it as the national crisis that it is!

This is the third segment in a three-part series recalling different facets of the Bulgarian crisis back in 2007. Focus shall finally placed upon evaluating Malta’s role, supposed and actual, in this crisis as well as the reflections that should be made following the conclusion of this saga.

Throughout the Bulgarian saga the diplomatic machinery of the Maltese Islands remained idle. Hardly any prominence was given to this heated controversy which had been unfolding mere hundreds of kilometres south of our shores. This while six persons, five of them citizens of the European Union, were struggled over through all legal and diplomatic channels in order to spare them a fate of death by firing squad within the North African nation of Libya. Very little pressure, if any at all, came from the Maltese Islands and this, in the opinion of myself, would have been a tarnishing stain upon our name had the crisis not been resolved and the lives of the medics been lost.

There are undoubtedly a number of arguments that support Malta’s actions, or lack thereof, throughout the crisis. One could say that it was not the responsibility of the Maltese to enter into diplomatic haggling over individuals who were not Maltese citizens. After all, we are to be loyal to our own. One could also say that Malta was in no position to throw its weight around on the issue, placed hundreds of kilometres north of Libya’s shores and exposed as a military target. After all, it is unwise to talk the talk if one is unable to walk the walk, to bastardize some contemporary pop culture.

However Malta’s non-action has thrown it in a negative light very unfitting of its rich past. Ever since Malta’s entry into the European Union in 2003 it officially became the closest EU member nation (Lampedusa is a colony) to Libya’s shores. While the ‘not our problem’ mentality may have been passable prior to 2003 it no longer remained the case following entry. Upon entry the Maltese Islands became a crucial strategic position for asserting pressure during the crisis and yet the Maltese authorities failed to do so with little more than the odd cursory minimalistic comment passed within parliament on the matter, weakly whispering a hope for a positive resolution. And this remained true even when the last in the legal appeals were exhausted.

Strangely it had to be non-government sources to recognize and act upon their ethical and circumstantial responsibility in the crisis, such as Moviment Graffiti earlier on and individuals supposedly from the opposite end of the political spectrum at the 11th hour.

A more legitimate concern was that of repercussions upon the Maltese for speaking up during the crisis – but such would have been a very unflattering reason for the Islands to remain silent. Indeed one might suggest that non-action was an act both in disowning the efforts of our forefathers in their efforts to uphold their virtues in the face of hostilities as well as denying our grandchildren something to feel proud of within this age where pride is spoken of in the past tense.

A final possibility is that the Maltese authorities secretly believed that the medics were guilty and that they deserved the death penalty. The absolute truth of the machinery at play may never be confirmed with full clarity but in the meantime the Maltese effected by this third instalment can take heart in the fact that no blood was spilled to their inaction. It is my hope that we as a nation will know better in future and not be afraid to actively offer our voice to such dilemmas that may yet unfold.