Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1011650
24 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 5 AUGUST 2018 OPINION IT has been illuminating – if not occasionally amusing – to sit back and watch, popcorn in hand, while various pundits and opinion-formers trip up in their own efforts to grapple with the fall-out of the Egrant affair. I have now lost count of journalists and columnists who, until just a couple of weeks ago, had all contrib- uted to the narrative depict- ing Joseph Muscat as 'auto- matically guilty' of an alleged crime, in the absence of any proof (and, what's worse, in defiance of the sacro- sanct principles upon which our entire justice system is built)... but who now scram- ble desperately to rationalise their earlier opinions in light of the inquiry's conclusions. With a few solitary excep- tions – i.e., the incurable party diehards, who (let's face it) will simply never acknowledge any 'truth' that is somehow detrimental to their own party: not even if it whacks them in the face with a baseball bat – most of these media pundits now admit they had been wrong to assume the truth of the al- legation in the first place. What follows from that admission, however, tends to vary in proportion to the amount of pride being swal- lowed. Some (like Ranier Fsadni, writing in The Times) go on to instinctively defend former Opposition leader Si- mon Busuttil: arguing, inter alia, that there is no reason to suppose he was aware of the deceit, when he threw his party's full weight behind the claim in April 2017; and – somewhat more bizarrely – that the Egrant deception remains a lesser whopper than the frame-up of Pietru Pawl Busuttil in the 1980s. (In other words: 'Yeah, sure it was a lie... but 'their' lie was bigger than 'our' lie. Nya-na-na-na-na!') It would probably be a waste of time to counter those arguments point for point: but there is a generic rebuttal that has to be made, if we are to properly under- stand the dynamics of what has just occurred. Consider, for instance, how very differently the 'presumption of innocence' principle is applied to Simon Busuttil today, from Joseph Muscat over the past year. When no proof existed, Muscat was assumed by thousands to have been 'guilty as sin'... for no other reason than being the leader of the Labour (as opposed to Nationalist) Party. Yet now that proof of an orchestrated frame-up has emerged, the same people who were so quick to act as Muscat's judge, jury and ex- ecutioner – until two weeks ago, at any rate – very gener- ously extend the maximum possible benefit of the doubt to Simon Busuttil. To be brutally honest: in my 20-odd years of writing about Maltese politics, I have not seen a more blatant, con- spicuous and quite frankly nauseating example of typi- cal Maltese political double- standards in action. If you're Nationalist, you're not only 'innocent until proven guilty'... but remain innocent even after guilt is established. If you're La- bour, it's the clean other way round: no amount of evidence will ever exoner- ate you of any crime you are ever accused of. You remain 'guilty as charged', no matter what. The question to ask at this stage is: why? Why cling to that hopelessly discredited equation – i.e., "Nationalist = right, Labour = wrong" – even after the PN has been so dramatically proven to be (at best) mistaken? There are, of course, as many answers to that ques- tion as there are pundits/gu- rus to contradict their earlier positions. To me, however, the best answer came directly from Simon Busuttil himself, several months before the original Egrant allegation even emerged. In January 2017, he told a gathering of the party faithful that the upcoming elections will be "a fight between good and evil... The fight is not between red and blue but between good and evil, the truth and the false..." And to be fair, that as- tonishing, reality-defying assertion did not originate from Busuttil himself. Echoes of the same thought- processes can be discerned in his predecessor Lawrence Gonzi's observation – be- fore the 2013 election – that 'under the Nationalists, one is proud to be Maltese; under Labour, one is ashamed..." It would be interesting to know how 'proud' Gonzi feels of his party today, now that it has been caught out trying to overthrow a le- gitimate government on the basis of a lie. But no matter: even that instance cannot be defined as the first case of the PN's extraordinary 'superiority complex'. The same delu- sion was also evident in its resounding pre-1987 battle- cry, 'Is-Sewwa Jirbah Zgur'. Maltese being the flexible language it is, you could translate that as 'truth' and/ or 'justice' - but also 'right- eousness' – 'always prevails'. Inherent in that absurd belief-system is an element of self-flattery that is too dangerous to ignore. My experience on this plan- et, such that it is, has taught me never to trust people who openly align themselves with the 'forces of good'. They are far worse than those who openly align themselves with 'the forces of evil'... even if just for the reason that the second cat- egory quite simply does not exist, and has never existed, within any political system anywhere in the world. Oh no: to be in politics is, by definition, to be seduced by the automatic righteous- ness of one's cause... from which it follows, sure as day follows night, that anyone with any other political opin- ion must perforce be 'evil'. Paradoxically, the same goes for Labour, too. Eddie Fenech Adami's self-right- eousness in the 1970s and 1980s was counterbalanced by Dom Mintoff's quasi- Messianic appeal as 'Is-Sal- vatur Ta' Malta'. Then as now, there was a sensation among his fol- lowers that Mintoff could likewise 'do no wrong'... or, worse still, that any harm he might have inflicted was somehow 'necessary' within the greater scheme of things: it was automatically 'legiti- mised', in the name of the 'common good' Hence the historic perver- sion of that Biblical motif: 'min mhux maghna, kontra taghna' (he who is not for us, is against us). It is the sort of logic that can only hope to Raphael Vassallo Did the PN genuinely believe the truth in the Egrant allegation, when it so unwisely hitched its entire fate to that one issue? Or did it just shrug its shoulders and say: 'Who the heck even cares if it's true or not? Midnight in the garden of good and