The mourning after

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According to the very first Highway Code for motorists a vehicle had to be preceded by a man running before it waving flags in order to warn anybody of the oncoming machine. Oh how times have changed. Nowadays what we in Malta call “indicators” are considered to be an optional accessory that would take all the fun out of a surprise switch the of the lane, “road rage” is an accepted state of affairs and the existence or otherwise of traffic is a question of perception. I watched an intriguing documentary on arte this weekend about how the Ancient Egyptians built their chariots. The precision technology to obtain a perfect chassis and suspension is mind-boggling considering that these people lived further away from Jesus than we do today. Still, we have our own precision engineering don’t we? So precise that the best of the best dedicate most of their time foiling energy emission tests ad maiori aurigi comoditatem (for the drivers’ better convenience).

I digress. A “tragedy unfolded” during a charity event in Malta this weekend. A vehicle termed by those in the know as a “supercar” had one of those episodes where “the driver lost control of the vehicle” and it suddenly and unexpectedly “careened” into the unsuspecting crowd of onlookers grievously injuring upward of a score of them in the process. What follows is not written out of any disrespect to the injured – for there would be no point in disrespecting anyone who got injured really would there – it is a reflection if you will on what went on and what has been going on in the island of saints and fireworks.

They say that two wrongs do not make a right. There are so many wrongs here that the question of whether there could be a right in it all is actually not even one that we begin to contemplate. Charity. It all begins there. They tell me that this event has been going on for 10 years. Which is neither here nor there. From the ice bucket challenge to Presidential Yacht scurries across the fliegu we must have realised by now that our tendency to disguise a good day out in an excuse for charity is of world beating standards. Giving for the sake of giving without having to go through the shenanigans and posturing is not really a thing in an island where auctions are held publicly for the humble experience of carrying a titular statue on the shoulder. That the current lot in  government/ heading the state panders to this jamboree of  not so charitable showmanship only serves to fan the flames.

Which brings me back to the need for speed. I try my best not to be condescending but this paqpaqli business is all about people obsessed with speed and machines that deliver it. Like any other form of energy and power this is one that requires “control“.  Speed is harnessed into engines that express power in terms of horses – quite a large number of them in fact – and it seems that the thrill is all there… those few seconds when the human body is hurtled through the air in a metal (or modern material) box preferably while said box is making the sound of a giant farting his beans. Thrilling indeed. So thrilling that in order to make this event a “charitable ” one the organisers sell one-minute rides in a million euro machine to the gaping few who are there for a moment of happiness. They could have tried the russian mountains and rollercoasters in a fun fair but there would be no Porsche symbol emblazoned on the metal container of choice and in this society of appearances every little label counts… vorsprung dursh technik and all that.

The sad sad thing is that in a tiny country like Malta where estate is worth its price in gold (or corrupt politicians) there is nary a space to have a bona fide racetrack. We make do with a bit of an apron at Hal Far with empty plastic bollards standing in for safety barriers. Under the patronage of the Charitable President of the Republic the slaves of speed will wander around overpriced gas-guzzling machines taking selfies while in the background another of the machines tos and fros with its ecstatic passengers for the price of a luncheon for the poor. That this kind of entertainment clashes with the supposed charitable aims is just part of the problem. It also has no place on a tiny island. So sorry for the speed fanatics but if they really want to enjoy the thrill of a ride all they have to do is save up for a trip to Spa Francorchamps, Nurburgring or Monza and engage in a simple economic transaction – pay for a ride.

The logic of “we like it we want it” is ridiculous. It is as ridiculous as wanting to use up acres for a golf course, an indoor ski slope or any such fantasmagorical idea that is founded on the fantasy that Malta is the size of Texas.  That’s not all. It took Malta’s full complement of ambulances a double trip to despatch all the injured to hospital or clinics and this with the added assistance of a chopper. All the goodwill in the world cannot underestimate the inability of the small island to deal with such circumstances in the most ideal of situations. Our authorities enable this kind of thinking though. The political fear of failure is such that Chris Fearne was addressing the journalists on the minutae of operations at Mater Dei – in other words the system was National Alert Mode for a motor vehicle accident. “Thankfully” the context of the event lent itself to a flood of commiserations and clichés that happen when Malta goes in its very own Daily Mail patriotic mode.

Prayers for the injured, a tearful President, a burst in blood donations… that’s all well and good. It’s almost part of the show that must go on and I don’t intend to apologise for this cynical approach. We have seen it all before when a Fireworks Factory explodes to smithereens – the outbursts of compassion, the prayers, the politicians on site. the one thing we do not do from this kind of episode is learn. We have an obstinate approach when faced with the pedagogy of life events. We ignore.

So expect the Labour politicians to up their pandering to the idea of a “motor racetrack” as though it is a solution to the crazy need for speed. Expect a new event with faster cars and greater attendance to raise funds for those who were injured raising funds. Expect more of the same… and expect much, much more mourning when it inevitably goes wrong again. The mourning after.

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Fear and Loathing in tal-Qroqq

fearqroqq_akkuzaIn his speech as outgoing rector of the University, Professor Juanito Camilleri addressed the issue of migration, instructing students to make good use of the knowledge and skills they acquire at University. It could not and should not have been otherwise. The University should be churning out informed citizens who are better equipped to face the realities of this world. What struck me though was the distinct difference in emphasis that the editors of two English dailies made – at least in the online headlines – when reporting this speech (the third, MaltaToday, seems to have limited itself to reporting the number of students that have been added to the Uni count).

The Times of Malta ran with “Fight hatred and intolerance through knowledge, rector tells university students” – a direct reference to one of the problems that afflict the country. Only last week we were chronicling this on this blog and mentioning the importance of fighting misinformation with knowledge. Ignorance begets darkness and informed campaigns beget light. The Times editor/reporter made the right choice here, emphasizing the crux of what Professor Camilleri was on about in his last address to the students on opening day. The message was picked up and carried by the paper – not that it had to  of course, but it is arguably part of the mission of the press on this island where bigotry too often raises its voice to the detriment of sane discussion.

The Malta Independent on the other hand opted for a more sensational approach. In doing so it went rather in the opposite direction of what Professor Camilleri was advocating. The headline on the Independent read: University rector says migration in the Med so far ‘not even an appetizer of things to come’ . Did Prof Camilleri say that? Well of course he did. He spoke of the geopolitical realities of the African continent and that demographic and political pressures could eventually lead to more population movements and increases in population density in the Mediterreanan region. Why he said that seems to have been completely overlooked by the Indy reporter – in deference to the need to shock and pander to the gods of sensationalism and feed the gullible. Instead of focussing on the tools that Prof Camilleri was offering and highlighting, instead of stressing the need to be informed and fight hatred and intolerance through knowledge, the Indy headline (food for the lazy browsers) feeds the ugly part of the “threat of an invasion that is to come” by picking the armageddon-like statement out of context.

Is it fair journalism? Debatable. Is it right for J’accuse to make such a fuss out of this. Well, to be honest yes. This is just the kind of lazy labelling that feeds into the mouths of the “patrijotti maltin”. It is the kind of reporting that is based on terror-mongering rather than a quest for reasoned solution and discussion of the situation. It ends up with the leader of a nation taking up his time at the UN (between photo shoots with celebs along with the caravan of freeriders) closing ranks with rightist leaders like Viktor Orban calling for global quotas on migrants – taking his coffee smelling business into the halls of the world. In short, it all ends in a humanistic disaster.

“If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.”- George Orwell, 1984

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History Lessons

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Imre et lui déposèrent un dossier pour demander le statut de réfugiés politiques. L’hypocrite Rousseau qui dirigeait le service s’ingéniait a mettre des bâtons dans les roues des Hongrois qui affluaient. Comment prouver que vous êtes un fugitif, que votre vie est menacée quand vous avez quitte votre pays dans l’affolement?

– Il me faut des preuves, vous comprenez? C’est facile de dire que vous êtes pourchasses par la police politique. Si les Soviétiques sont intervenus, c’est a la demande du gouvernement hongrois que je sache et pour sauver ce pays de la contre-révolution des petits propriétaires. L’écrasante majorité de vos compatriotes approuve. Si ça se trouve, vous avez fui la Hongrie parce-que vous êtes délinquants ou que vous n’avez pas payez vos impôts. C’est a vous de me fournir les preuves, pas a moi. Pour l’instant, votre dossier est vide. Quand il passera en commission, vous avez intérêt a ce qu’il y ait du sérieux a l’intérieur. Sinon, ce sera refus. La France n’est pas une terre d’accueil pour les voyous étrangers! On a assez avec les nôtres.

(From Le Club des Incorrigibles Optimistes, Jean-Michel Guenassia) see translation below.

The lessons of history. We seem to have failed them. One of the biggest lessons that history teaches us is that man is constantly on the move. Whether conquering fellow man or discovering new worlds, homo sapiens sapiens has proven to be quite the globetrotter. Historic displacements have also been the misfortune of whole peoples from the biblical chosen people to the mass exodus of the sons of africa enslaved in their millions and taken to the new world. Few nations can claim to never have been part of a force or intended migration.

Orban’s Hungary is currently sticking out as a major opposer to any form of influx while building walls of discord and distaste. Only 49 years ago the people of Hungary had themselves tried to rebel against an oppressive communist inspired regime. By November 1956, the Soviet tanks had entered Budapest, purportedly upon invitation of the government of the time in order to quell the revolution. The sons of the soviets are now in Syria, supposedly on invitation of the benign Assad with the added excuse of fighting off the forces of the hated ISIS. The civil war and strife in Syria has displaced millions in a story now known to all.

It is part of those millions that are finding it hard to navigate the frontiers of Europe – particularly in places like Hungary where people with a very short memory seem to ask many questions about the real status of these migrants.

A short memory can be the downfall of us all. Much worse than a foreign invasion.

Read more about the Hungarian Revolution here.

“In the immediate aftermath, many thousands of Hungarians were arrested. Eventually, 26,000 of these were brought before the Hungarian courts, 22,000 were sentenced, 13,000 imprisoned, and several hundred executed. Hundreds were also deported to the Soviet Union, many without evidence. Approximately 200,000 fled Hungary as refugees.”

 

—

TRANSLATION OF TEXT:

Imre and him submitted a dossier requesting political refugee status. The hypocrite Rousseau who ran the service specialised in putting spokes in the wheels of the flood of Hungarians who were arriving.

– I need proof, you understand? It is easy to say that you are chased by the political police. As far as I know, the Soviets intervened because your government invited them to do so, and this to save the country from the counter-revolution of the small owners. The crushing majority of your compatriots approuve. It could very well be that you escaped Hungary because you are delinquents or you have not paid your taxes. It’s up to you to prove this, not up to me. For the moment your dossier is empty. When it ends up before the commission you should very well hope that there is something more substantial inside. If not, it will be a refusal. France is not a welcome land for foreign hooligans! We have had enough of our own.

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The European Troll Collective

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It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people. – Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn.

The world can be one big lie. This has been a pet subject for many a philosopher. Maybe the world we see is just an illusion, maybe we are just parts of a dream, maybe we are an imperfect parallel universe. It all seems to hinge around the concept of perception – how we receive data and what we do it. What we see, what we sense and how we perceive it is crucial to defining the world we live in. The internet has had an immense impact not only in the immediate processing of information but also in redefining our understanding the realities (or fakeries) of the world that we inhabit.

In the nineties the term “global village” was very much the vogue. The information superhighway would cut distances drastically and you would know whenever a bomb exploded in Kandahar, whenever a weird tsumani struck the shores of Indonesia, whatever the latest military putsch was doing and you would know it instantly. Technology would be at the service of humanity giving us information at our fingertips. This urge for immediacy had existed for over a century by the 1990s. Just look at what Senator Depew had to say about the inauguration of the New York Pneumatic Postal Service in 1897:

This is the age of speed. Everything that makes for speed contributes to happiness and is a distinct gain to civilization. We are ahead of the old countries in almost every respect, but we have been behind in methods of communication within our cities. In New York this condition of communication has hitherto been barbarous. If the Greater New York is to be a success, quick communication is absolutely necessary. (see Wikipedia)

What humanity did not predict was that with the information superhighway came the empowerment of the masses. Nothing wrong with that per se but when the masses have no standard reference as to the type of information that should be disseminated we end up with a perversion of the truth. Multiple perversions actually. Information, we learnt, can be manipulated. It is not only the usual suspects popular among conspiracy theorists who are hard at work.

During the cold war the issue of propaganda was easily pinnable on the parties, the movements and the governments. In the post 9/11 world, navigating the information superhighway is not such an easy black and white matter. The sources of information are multiple and few are those who bother to verify the reliability. A whisper in a corner of the global village can gather enough momentum to be a tsunami of shrieks and yells within hours.

Which is where the trolls come in. J’accuse has often repeated the great Pratchett’s quote that “a lie can travel around the world before the truth has had time to put its boots on”. Internet trolls have found the medium perfect to spin their lies – just look at the frantic anti-immigrant spamming of the past few months. Trumped up figures, photoshopped images and reasoning that wouldn’t hold good in a kindergarten of moot courts.

The responsibility in this day and age lies among the citizens who deign themselves to be informed. The trolls can only be defeated by counter-trolling and by the positive action of more informed participants.

This blog has been committed to this kind of action for as long as it has existed and aims to continue to do so as long as it can. The truth, if we lie.

 

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Those Colourful Racist Imbeciles

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It’s just idiots. Venting their anger (or vehemently opposing this or that idea) on facebook. At least they should be dismissed as such. The problem though is that they often represent a more generally held sentiment – held even among those who do not regularly frequent Zuckerberg’s fake mirror of society. A picture has been doing the rounds that features a black young lady delivering some sort of speech in Malta’s spanking new parliament. Behind the lady is MP Claudette Pace, to her right is a hijab-wearing other young lady. The picture (as you can see) is supposed to stir some form of anger : “Look at our parliament” it is captioned. We are supposed to react with disdain: “How did THEY make it in there?”.

I recognised the young black lady in the picture because by some stroke of luck and coincidence she formed part of a delegation of Mini-European Assembly winners who visited the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg (presumably as a prize for their sterling performance). I was lucky enough, privileged I would say, to be able to address the group and explain the workings of the Court. It is part of my job to regularly meet students from universities, professors or members of the judicature of EU countries who are on an educational visit to the Court. We normally take a break from our day to day task of drafting cases to share our knowledge of the workings of the court with such visitors.

This September (only two weeks ago actually) I remember walking into the room full of Mini-European Assembly visitors with a feeling of apprehension. They were a young group – younger than our usual visitors (most of them are finishing college before University) – and my recent idea of the produce of Maltese schools and university were not the most positive. My first look around the room I remember being surprised at the variety of students sat before me. Sure, I am of a generation where the “foreigner” in class was a token presence so the trigger “surprise” instinct can be forgiven if just for that. It did not take long for me to rubbish that little element of “surprise” to a corner of my brain.

Having finished the usual delivery we had a Q&A session. With university students (Sorbonne, Harvard and the like) we normally have to plead to get a question out of them and when we do we are often disappointed at the type of question being asked. This was not to be. The young first year lawyers and sixth-formers had loads of questions to ask – all pertinent, all intelligent and all interesting. That included the splendid lady in the centre of the picture now being circulated by oafs who wouldn’t know better.

They are Maltese students. Very intelligent, ambitious and interesting Maltese students. Each of them carries a dream. It’s a dream that they would like to see through living in a Maltese society. I’d very much like to think that one in every two Maltese students is like this group of fantastic ambassadors. Sadly I know that the Ernest Ferrante’s of this world vastly outnumber them.

It’s a tough task ahead for all of us and all of them. I can only wish the beautiful ladies who were exemplary on the visit and who feature in this sad racist meme all the best in their lives ahead. With courage and conviction much can be achieved.

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Photosensitive

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Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach.The photo was snapped moments before the body was picked up by a Turkish rescue operator. Within hours it became the internationally recognised symbol of the unfolding Syrian tragedy. Not the thousands of persons bandied across borders, not the hundreds of thousands of unwanted finding doors slammed in their faces, not a whole people that has become a European hot potato much to its own chagrin. No.

Just a little boy in a red t-shirt, shorts and shoes. Face down. Arms along his sides. At first glance it is not so much an image of death as one of exhaustion. Before you are struck by the dark reality of the death of an innocent you are first made to think of an exhausted loss of the will to go on. Then it hits you. This is a dead little boy. And this image has struck home in millions of households. It has been described as the ultimate eye-opener, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Did we really need the image of one dead kid set in a romantic position in order to unlock the last shreds of humanity? If so why?

Memory

Last night Rai3 showed the second of a two piece instalment called “Generation War“. The series, originally called “Our Mothers and Our Fathers” in German follows the fate of a group of five young Germans throughout World War II. The German channel ZDF had commissioned the series in order to act as a dialogue between generations. The series attracted huge criticism in Germany since it seemed to portray the Nazis as “others” to the German population but also served as an eye-opener to the great deception that Nazism had been to the young pre-war generation.

Dealing with history is hard enough. Remembrance and knowledge that results from not forgetting are crucial tools in understanding the freedoms and liberties that have been achieved in the last century. Reading abut Generation War I learnt that the first real big eye-opener in Germany with regards to the horror of the holocaust “only” appeared on TV in the form of a mini-series in 1978 (featuring among others a young Meryl Streep).

The media has an important role in shaping ideas about great events. There was no media as we know it at the time of the holocaust or anti-semite pogroms. Most news was state controlled and played to the tune of the dictatorship. More recently we can see the mediatic effect of reporting of mass exodus such as that of the East Germans in  1989. In fact it should not be too hard to remember that not too long ago the pathways of Austria and Hungary were flooded with another people eager to reach the Holy Grail of German free territory. At the time a collapsing East Germany witnessed a haemhorrage of citizens eager to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere behind the iron curtain.

27 years later East Germans are replaced by Syrians. The plight of the people running away from a war torn country had been gathering momentum for over three years now. It took a symbolic snapshot to bring home the reality. Those who had hitherto been numbed by the excessive amount of daily information covering tragedy after tragedy, war after war, displacement after displacement, were suddenly shocked into action.

Aylan was buried back in his tragic hometown of Kobane. The hopes that humanity can once again stir itself out of its egoistic stupor were not buried with him though. Right or wrong, the stolen snapshot of a dead boy’s curls playing with the waves on a turkish beach might have kicked off the tide of compassion and care that had long been lacking.

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