Yesterday’s Labour Party Freedom Day celebrations in Birgu were held during a supposed debate on Malta’s defence, which Labour has been using to go on the offensive against the Opposition. Undoubtedly, yesterday’s celebrations should have served the Labour Party to revisit its history in the context of today’s events, but no effort has been made by the Party to make any historic sense of the event in the context of our times.
Ironically, the Prime Minister himself did sound reasonable for some time. The Prime Minister said that despite Labour’s policy of neutrality and “peace”, Labour understands the defence exigencies of other European countries. This echoes the point made by the Prime Minister at the Emergency European Council for defence that Malta won’t interference with Europe’s defence plans, and effectively Malta wouldn’t be taking Hungary’s disruptive foreign policy position.
However, the Prime Minister did not miss the opportunity to reduce the national holiday and the defence debate to the absurd by saying that the government wont be “borrowing money” to spend in defence because it prefers to spend on social welfare. This is the reductive argument that Labour has been making about our defence and national security, and it’s also word for word Russian propaganda.
The Prime Minister also made some announcements which had nothing to do with the celebrations and the national holiday such as for example, his mention of a car-racing track which he said will be developed soon.
The speakers in the celebrations included the Chairman of Heritage Malta, Mario Cutajar and previous Labour MP Deborah Schembri. There was music of decades ago, rehashed and replayed on the Freedom Day Monument itself, and also a documentary with the same script of a decade ago.
What was particularly striking about the celebrations is that the Labour Party isn’t genuinely making an effort to understand its own history, let alone interpret it in the context of today’s events. Labour doesn’t even have intellectuals who could take on this role, and its propagandists are, at best, only capable of producing propaganda reports for television. There is absolutely no music, art or any culture being produced in the context of these celebrations: Labour has no culture left.
These aren’t matters that can be addressed with specific initiatives, but rather characteristics of the party’s state that has been brought as a result of its rising criminality and authoritarianism at the expense of its morality and culture.
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