Categories
Values

Braying Donkeys and Hyenas

The Maltese have a saying ; “Ħanqa/naħqa ta’ ħmar qatt ma telgħet is-sema”. (A donkey’s braying never reached the sky). I never quite put my finger on what exactly we are to learn from this proverb and normally put it down to mean that the noises some individuals make are best ignored because of their emptiness.

I am reminded of the saying every time I come across posts by that sans pareil of Maltese wankellectualism Mario Azzopardi. It is not just now that he is steeped in controversy for his latest base brainfart attacking Roberta Metsola – it is practically always. The energumen has styled himself as some sort of facebook demagogue riding the filthy waves of jingoistic patriotism, unbridled racism and collective bigotry. His appeals are followed by a herd of like-minded individuals whose common lineage is found in the perverted interpretation of civil society that has prevailed in the age of TaghnaLkolllism.

Just before his tirade against Metsola, on St. George’s day, this latest version Malta’s illuminati had written his own appreciation of what politics is about:

He’d rather have a son of a bitch in power than a floppy romantic ‘saint’. Poor old Macchiavelli gets drawn into this Manual of the Political Warrior as Pilate in the creed. Were it a politician talking you might even salute the bold assertiveness of the position being taken. Black on white it is there. This is no politician though. This rabble rouser is a leech on the public purse – one of the many who enjoyed the patronage of Muscat’s Aqwa Zmien… one of the few for whom this was really a golden age.

Metsola rightly did not stoop to the levels of this hyena (far from sharks Mario, far from sharks) of the political jungle. Her reply to his ridiculous tirade was exemplary:

Yes, because lessons on what politics should be about are not to be taken from hyenas scavenging for some prize but from those who work hard for the common good. Incidentally it will not go unnoticed that the hyena’s efforts are part of a concerted effort encouraged daily by the authorities in power. Internet bullying and rabble rousing remains the order of the day as a long list of insignificant politicians and pseudo-politicians attempt to harness the anger of a misinformed population.

It is with the weapon of information that the hyenas and donkeys of this world will be finally relegated to the dust heap of irrelevance where they belong.

Categories
Citizenship Values

Public Cleansing, memorials and humanity

Paolo Polidori’s Facebook post

Last Friday (the 4th of January) the vice-mayor of the Italian city of Trieste put up a post on Facebook in which he explained that while walking through one of the streets of the city he had come across a pile of covers, jackets and other similar stuff.

“Since there was nobody around”, he posted, “I presumed that they were abandoned and as a normal citizen who has at heart the decorum of the city, I collected them and threw them away, may I add with satisfaction: now the place is decent! Will it last? We will see. The message is: zero tolerance. I want a clean Trieste!! PS I immediately washed my hands. And now may the do-gooders unleash their criticism, I don’t give a damn.”

Paolo Polidori hails from the party of Matteo Salvini, the same party that wants a zero tolerance policy on migration. He knew full well that the covers, jackets and other paraphernalia that help to shelter from the cold were not abandoned but belonged to a clochard – a homeless person. His act though was met with widespread indignation.

A group of citizens met at a caffe’ in Trieste and opted to act. They collected new covers and jackets and placed them in the same place on Via Carducci where the Vice-Mayor had performed his act of public cleansing. They added a cardboard sign with a written apology to the homeless person – an apology in the name of all the people of Trieste.

The clochard has yet to turn up on the site and claim his new materials for warmth and comfort. What happened though is that the space where the apology note was left has become a symbol: it has taken on a political meaning. It has become a focal point of public expressions of solidarity. On Sunday numerous citizens of Trieste visited the site and left something: a scarf, a sweater, a pullover a beret…. a cushion.

It is ironic that the story of the clochard’s sleeping space in Trieste is the story of memorials in reverse. In other parts of the world, Ministers and government apparatchiks hang on to the execrable excuse of cleanliness and public order in order to attempt to obliterate a public expression of justice and solidarity. Trieste’s space transformed into a strong symbol after the first cleansing by a misguided politician.

Other spaces around the world are still ‘cleansed’ daily by representatives and supporters of a political class that twists the understanding of basic tenets of the legal order and transforms the rule of law into rule by law. Public memory and expression is of fundamental importance in a democracy – just look at what is happening in Hungary and Czech Republic were the governments in the two countries are doing their utmost to forget to commemorate Imre Nagy and Jan Palach.


Categories
Values

9 months

Categories
Rule of Law Values

On Memorials

What was cleared last night was not Daphne’s memorial. What was cleared was the reminder that justice is failing, it was the reminder of a rebellion against impunity, a reminder that not all of society is prepared to keep their eyes, ears and mouths shut.

There will eventually be a time and place to discuss an eventual memorial to Daphne but this is not that time.

This is the time to return the candles, the messages and the photos that spell out clearly that the present political system operating in an ever dwindling space of rule of law will just not do.

There are crooks everywhere.

Categories
Mediawatch Values

The Truth when Lies are Paid for

Way back in 2005 I chose the slogan “the truth, if I lie” (la vérité si je mens) for this blog. The truth is an important aspect whether we are talking about reporting or opinion forming. Facts and the truth should be the basis of assessment in a normal democracy. We all know by now that in this age of post-truth this has changed:

“We have entered a new phase of political and intellectual combat, in which democratic orthodoxies and institutions are being shaken to their foundations by a wave of ugly populism. Rationality is threatened by emotion, diversity by nativism, liberty by a drift towards autocracy. More than ever, the practice of politics is perceived as a zero-sum game, rather than a contest between ideas. […] At the heart of this global trend is a crash in the value of truth, comparable to the collapse of a currency or a stock.” (Matthew D’Ancona, Post Truth, The new war on truth and how to fight back).

One manifestation of the manipulation of truth is the increasing use of space on mainstream media for paid propagation of information. Large chunks of public money are used to buy space on media to sell statements in an effort to turn them into universally accepted truths. More often than not the use of “statistics” is facilitated by the virtual disappearance of any proper watchdog and by the building of walls of silence that laugh in the face of the transparency that should be reinforcing the veracity of such statements.

Take the “record unemployment” figures that this government loves to flaunt. Behind such figures lie so many half-truths buried in statistical convolutions such as the reformed unemployment scheme that ensures that people vanish off the lists much before they enter gainful employment, such as the obvious reliance on a bloated civil service to take on more “jobs for the boys”. That same record unemployment was behind the use of the power of incumbency in the last election where famously Gozitan entrepreneurs and SME’s and employers in the entertainment industry found themselves short of staff simply because the government did the magic absorbing trick of vanishing their employees away into the civil service.

But there is another equally worrying trend. The government has found ways to buy “authenticity” by purchasing its way onto spaces in the media that could deceivingly be passed away as independent reporting. In the beginning it was close collaboration with houses like The Economist hosting talks in Malta packed full of government spokespersons and ministers. The Economist would be happy to lend its name to a national government paying its way into its discussion space. Two “The World in XXX” events plus one “Mediterranean Leadership Summit” were thus organised by the Economist in Malta at the Hilton Portomaso. The Mediterranean Leadership Summit, held in 2016, included Henley and Partners as its Gold Sponsor (we all know who these are), the Libyan Investment Authority as its Silver Sponsor (notwithstanding the fact that the LIA had had its assets frozen by the UN since 2011), and Finance Malta and Maltco lotteries as contributors.

It is not just events though. Articles can now be bought. Yes, you read that right. Articles on major international news portals can actually be “paid content”. Thus, the CNN article doing the rounds about Malta being one of the Top 15 country destinations for Christmas was apparently yet another paid article. Here are Andrew and Paul Caruana Galizia calling out another paid report, this time one that appeared on the Guardian:

Do not underestimate the government use of paid social media ads and posts (such as facebook campaigns). As time goes by, the Facebook algorithms are fine tuned to push to the top of your screens any paid information. While you scroll through the online papers and you see repeat adverts also paid for by government to promote its spin remember that. The campaign to disinform is much stronger than you think. The solution is to be vigilant and call out whenever you can.

Finally do not let the irony escape you that these lies and half-truths are funded by YOUR money. You are actually paying taxes that are then used to sell you untruths.

It’s a liars’ world out there. The truth, if I lie.

Categories
Constitutional Development Values

The Empress has no clothes!

 

Eleonora Sartori returns with a guest post concerning the concept of shame and its value in today’s society,

The Empress has no clothes! (Not that she would need much in the Bahamas).

“A sinner comes before you, Cersei of House Lannister. Mother to His Grace, King Tommen, widow of His Grace, King Robert. She has committed the acts of falsehood and fornication. She has confessed her sins, and begged for forgiveness. To demonstrate her repentance, she will cast aside all pride, all artifice, and present herself as the gods made her….

This is how George R.R. Martin describes the ritual of punishment and penance named “walk of atonement”, used to publicly shame women accused of adultery or prostitution. The confessed sinner has to walk a certain distance stripped of all clothing, exposed to the eyes and jeers of the common people.

Somehow, this brings back the image described in the Gospel of John, the Pharisees, when a woman who has committed adultery is brought unto Jesus since she is meant to be publicly shamed by being stoned. Shame is in fact a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute, the ignominy of being subject to a very degrading condition. However, Jesus unexpectedly answers back: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

“He that is without sin among you”. Another aspect of shame, this time related to the self-awareness of one’s own sins. Shame caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety.

Shame is indeed a manifold concept. It is also a very important pillar of humankind, as very well stressed by Professor Gardini in an article published some weeks ago on Sette – Corriere della Sera (Di cosa ti vergogni?).

But first, why am I talking about shame right now?

I felt the urge of sharing these thoughts when yesterday I read about the fact that the wife of your Prime Minister has been nominated Volunteer of the Year. As correctly put in an article published on The Shift, “The issue at stake was not the validity of Michelle Muscat’s contribution to charity which includes a 10-hour swim to raise funds for the charity she chairs, but the lack of institutional sobriety that comes across when organs of the State bestow honours on the immediate family members of high ranking officials” (It’s all about perception my dear).

The lack of institutional sobriety combines with the constant lack of transparence of appointment procedures on a worldwide scale. I’m just too tired of this ambiguous scenario we’re currently living in, where on the one hand, we have Ivanka Trump championing the cause of women empowerment by carrying out a Fashion Diplomacy strategy and on the other hand, we see Time Magazine nominating the members of the successful and long-awaited #MeToo campaign as Person of the Year.

Does no one feel ashamed for this current situation?

Then I remembered the article of Professor Gardini and I understood the core message conveyed by it. We’re no longer used to feel any shame nor to feel ashamed. Yet, I truly believe that restoring this precious feeling could only improve the democratic society in which we ought to be living in the 21st century.

Referring to Cicero in his analysis, Professor Gardini underlines that he who is capable of feeling shame presumes the existence of a superior entity, a so-called “superior thought”, that is able to assess and judge the insufficiency of one’s actions and in front of which one needs therefore to repent and rehabilitate. This superior thought is nothing but a set of values to which abides the community to whom we belong. A set of values respected by the other members of his community, who can judge and criticize you if you go off track.

Therefore, the sense of guilt is not merely private, but has a public dimension too. It’s the core expression of the principle of accountability.

But what about this principle in the digital era?

Professor Gardini correctly points out that nowadays we no longer belong to a community, but we choose virtual groups to which we want to belong. These groups do not form small societies based on confrontation and discussion, but instead exist as virtual projections of one’s imagine of one’s self. I create my group and in that group I am that particular version of myself.

Thus, in my virtual group I can always claim to be constantly right, since I have the right to reject every kind of confrontation and the arrogance not to take into account any potential different opinion. So much for the principle of accountability.

And yet, there is a very simple way to restore the role of shame in our modern society.

It’s every citizen’s duty to reintegrate into their daily routine the perception of shame and shameful actions. As well pointed out by the Background Paper published by SIDA on Accountability, Transparency and the Rule of Law within the Post-2015 Agenda, “the mere process and framework of accountability, transparency and the rule of law is not enough. What comes out of these structures and processes will, in the end, be determined by the social cohesion among people, as well as by the values and the political environment in society. Individuals have responsibilities and powers of their own to change and affect social norms and trends. Formal structures alone can never guarantee decent societies. »

It is you, the people, who have to publicly shame who you think does not abide by your set of values.

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” reads Genesis 3:7.