Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/396532
19 they allow vision from two opposing angles. Sort of defeats the whole purpose of wearing blinkers, I would have thought. But leaving aside the irony whereby the people who resort to that insult fail to ever see the blinkers they themselves are wearing: how does one rationalise the blatant contradiction between these two responses? George Orwell would have had no difficulty whatsoever. It's exactly how Animal Farm ends: when the farmyard animals look from the pigs to the humans, then from the humans to the pigs, and can no longer tell the difference. In this case, you can swap the comments (and by extension, the entire mind- set) of your typical diehard Labour and diehard Nationalist supporter, and nobody would even notice. That, at least, is the obvious comparison. There is however a less obvious and rather more sinister one, this time from 1984. At one point in the novel, O'Brien – a senior agent of the Thought Police, though we don't know it yet – interviews Winston Smith pretending to be recruiting for the resistance movement. One of the questions he asks him is: "If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face – are you prepared to do that?" Winston's reply is an unhesitant 'yes'. In both scenarios, there is an inevitable political paradox at work. In order to overthrow the humans (and then manage the farm profitably), the pigs of Animal Farm have to become human – i.e, the very thing they fought against. And in order to overthrow Big Brother, the resistance movement (helpfully named 'the Brotherhood', in case you hadn't already spotted the resemblance) would effectively and willingly become as brutal and savage as the regime it was trying to replace. Malta's contemporary political reality may be far removed from the political context of either Animal Farm or 1984, but we have all seen the same paradox in action time and again over the past half century. I could start with the same example I brought up in one of the abovementioned articles – the 'threat to democracy', as described by Busuttil. It goes like this: Joseph Muscat threatens democracy through a plan to cancel a round of local council elections… and this is utterly unacceptable to an Opposition party which had, when in government, cancelled elections in two localities through a cynical and ruthless electoral ploy. On his part, Muscat defends himself from Busuttil's criticism by reminding everyone of what the PN did in Marsa and Zejtun…. conveniently forgetting that his own Labour Party had described those tactics in exactly the same way as Busuttil describes them today, as a threat to democracy. What, then, are we left with? Both parties would willingly threaten democracy, and deprive thousands of people of the right to vote, if it somehow served their own partisan interest. Likewise, both parties will simply mutate into each other every few years, depending on whether they are in government or opposition. And of course, all the mindless automatons waving their flags will continue to insist that 'their' party is preferable to the other… even when both are blatantly guilty of the same anti- democratic behaviour. That's just one example. We got another this week, when a visiting UN human rights agency urged Malta to do more for the prevention of torture and ill-treatment of people deprived of their liberty. "We acknowledge the first step the Maltese authorities have taken towards preventing torture and ill- treatment by ratifying the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, and designating two monitoring bodies," it said. How interesting, that Malta took its "first step" towards preventing torture in 2014… when this was actually one of the core promises before the 1987 election. "Ill- treatment of people deprived of their liberty" was an intrinsic component of the 'Xoghol Gustizzja Liberta' motif, overshadowed by the death of Nardu Debono in police custody in 1981. You can still find Youtube clips of the final 1987 electoral debate, in which Eddie Fenech Adami pledged to reform the police interrogation procedure if elected. The reality, however, is that PN governments resisted introducing more rights for people in custody for almost 25 years. Even today, we still have a malfunctioning police custody regime that has already been indicted by European Court of Human Rights rulings. Evidently, things that were 'undemocratic' or reprehensible while that party was in opposition, suddenly became less undemocratic and more acceptable the moment it got into power. At this point it should be getting clearer where the real threat to democracy really lies. And in classic Orwell fashion, it consists in the subtle manipulation of words. When people like Simon Busuttil or Joseph Muscat talk about 'threats to democracy', their understanding of that word is not necessarily the same as you'll find in any dictionary. They understand 'democracy' to mean a system which only works when their own party is in power. So any situation in which the other party is in power is automatically 'undemocratic'… even if that party was elected fair and square, and behaves exactly the same as the other party when in government. Labour illustrated this by condemning as 'undemocratic' the same PN government actions it plans to perpetrate today. The PN illustrated it by condemning as 'undemocratic' the same thing it did in 2004. It has, in a nutshell, become impossible to tell the difference between pigs and humans, and vice versa. Where does this all lead? Inevitably, it leads to a totalitarian mindset of the kind Orwell tried to warn us against all those years ago. Already there is an overwhelming ideological belief in the inherent superiority of one's own party. Take that concept to its natural conclusion, and you will end up with a situation whereby the great mass of voters in this country would willingly opt to turn Malta into a one-party state: 'their' party, to the exclusion of everyone else. We can see this mentality in the increasingly unstable and contradictory behaviour of the two party leaders, but also in the knee- jerk responses to criticism by their more brainwashed supporters. For these people, the only important thing is that 'their' party achieves and maintains power at all costs. So if it becomes necessary to (hypothetically speaking… but who knows? In future maybe literally, too) "throw sulphuric acid into a child's face" in order to achieve that aim… like Winston Smith, their unhesitant answer will be "yes". And that, my dear Joseph and Simon, is the real threat to democracy in this country, and I'm not surprised neither of you can see it. It is, after all, difficult to recognise a threat, when that threat is yourself. maltatoday, Sunday, 12 OctOber 2014 democracy Republic Street, Valletta next to the Courts