Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1480753
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 2 OCTOBER 2022 OPINION 10 Raphael Vassallo OPINION Lessons in democracy, from Vladimir Putin… DON'T get me wrong: I'm sure there are plenty of other things – apart from democracy, of course – that Vladimir Putin is actually very well-positioned to lecture the rest of the world about, right now. Like, um… 'topless horse- back-riding', for instance. Or, even better, Photoshopping the pic to make it look like he was actually riding a bear… so that it becomes 'topless BEAR-BACK riding' instead! (Get it? 'Bare/ bear'? Oh, never mind…) But in any case: if you were in- terested in cultivating your own personal image, as a 'strongman, tin-pot, Banana-republic dicta- tor' – of the kind that is so hilar- iously lampooned by videogames such as Tropico , by the way – I can think of few better teachers than good old 'Vlad the Inhaler', you know. (So named because, let's face it: judging by his recent behaviour, he must be 'inhaling' some pretty strong stuff…) Same goes for 'How to hold the entire world to ransom, through the threat of nuclear war'. There was a time – and not that long ago, either (I caught the tail- end of it myself, as it happens) – when you could pursue an entire post-graduate degree in that subject, from universities in both Russia AND America… and find yourself lectured by experts such as Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy, Leonid Brezhnev, Richard Nixon, etc. Today? Not so much. Unless we extend the subject to 'holding the world to ransom, with nu- clear weapons that you DON'T actually possess' – in which case, we would have to add countries like North Korea, and terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, to the list – as far as I can see, there is only one world leader, alive to- day, who is openly (and credibly) threatening to 'press the Big Red But-ton' at any given moment. And that's already quite a lot more than any of the above Cold-War leaders ever really did them-selves… which makes Vladimir Putin by far the most qualified world-leader, alive to- day, to teach us all a thing or two about how to 'rule by fear'. By the same token, however: I wouldn't exactly go running to Moscow, right now, to take les- sons from Putin in 'democracy' (and even less, 'the protection of human life at all its stages'). And yet, that is EXACTLY what Mal- ta's pro-life lobby seems to have been doing, in recent months. How else can we explain that all its strategies, of late, seem to have been lifted directly from Putin's own playbook, on 'How to subvert democracy, for your own (anti-democratic) ends'? Take the National Youth Coun- cil's mock-parliamentary debate on abortion, for instance: which was held in the House of Repre- sentatives last Thursday… and which (surprise, surprise) ended up with a massive majority for the pro-life side. The operative word there, by the way, is 'massive'; and not 'majority' (which was all along to be expected anyway: given that the list of speakers was originally divided into 'around 27 partic- ipants to argue in favour of the motion to decriminalise abor- tion, and 30 to argue against.') What happened in practice, however, was that only nine (9) of the original 27 pro-choice par- tici-pants actually showed up for the debate: the rest having been (and here I quote from our news report) "forced to drop out […] after receiving flak when their names were shared on pro-life social media groups." It transpires that the full list of pro-choice speakers had been leaked to (and published by) a certain Simon Debono – who incidentally seems to have elect- ed himself as undisputed leader of Malta's entire pro-life move- ment, while nobody else was looking – with the result that the 27 pro-choice participants were targeted by a systematic online intimidation campaign. According to our news report, "some pro-life advocates went as far as to contact the parents of the participants to convince the speakers to drop out"; and more worryingly still, we were even told that: "Many medical stu- dents also began dropping out in fear of facing academic repercus- sions, if any of their conservative lecturers were to discover they are in favour of decriminalising abor-tion…" Right, I'll stop there for now; because already, we seem to looking at a classic re-enact- ment (albeit on a much smaller scale) of a certain strategy that Vladimir Putin himself has only just put into ac-tion, in Ukraine. Let's go over it again, shall we? In order to annex four of Ukraine's territories, Putin first invaded that country – a fact which, in and of itself, forced much of its pro-Ukraine popula- tion to flee for safety across the border (so much so, that Europe even had to deal with a Ukraini- an refugee crisis)… … and in the process, it also ensured that the only people to actually remain in those four re- gions, would be mostly 'pro-Rus- sian' to begin with: and therefore, more likely to be (overwhelming- ly) in favour of Putin's entire an- nexation scheme, than against. But still: so far, Putin had on- ly engineered the semblance of a majority, for the shambolic 'referen-dums' he was about to announce. And just like Malta's student pro-life movement… a majority, on its own, was clearly not enough. Oh no: Putin needed a 'MAS- SIVE majority' (large enough, indeed, to try and 'legitimise' his blatant theft of those four terri- tories, in the eyes of the rest of the world). So what did he do? Apart, of course, from simply exterminating all his political op- ponents, in both Ukrainian and Russian camps? Why, he turned the referen- dums themselves into military exercises, of course… so that vot- ers would quite literally be forced to cast their vote, under the in- timidating gaze of the Russian mili-tary. Can anyone be surprised, then, that the results ended up being as close to 100%, as is humanly pos- sible? (And more to the point: can anyone possibly be dumb enough, to actually accept that outcome at face value?) Now: admittedly, the local pro- life lobby's tactics have (so far, at least) been a lot less openly vio-lent, than any of that… but still: in principle, its approach to that mock-parliamentary debate re-mains not merely similar, but IDENTICAL to Vladimir Putin's approved methods. They first 'invaded' the priva- cy of their political opponents – forcing many of them to liter- ally 'flee for their safety', in the process – and then, they har- assed and bullied the few that remained, in a way that ensured that their own vote would like- wise be cast 'under the watch- ful eyes of the Mal-tese pro-life lynch-mob' (which apparently includes university lecturers, who might even fail their stu- dents because of their pro-choice views). I mean, honestly. Why not just fire a few scud-missiles at them too, while you're at it? But still: what makes all this so reminiscent of Russia's annex- ation of Ukrainian territory, is not so much the 'tactics used'… but the 'effect that was achieved'. Just like Putin before them, both