It was in one of Jeremy Boissevain’s books that I first read about a phenomenon that my foreign friends have often spoken about: the Maltese don’t ask questions. We are trained from a very young age to be passive. Anyone with a natural inclination to ask questions is put in their place time and time again till the itch is squashed out of them.
I’ve seen it in workplaces where foreigners will ask ceaseless questions about changes in the company infrastructure, while their Maltese counterparts will put down their heads for fear of losing their jobs. I’ve seen it with foreign children whose parents encourage them to ask more questions while their Maltese counterparts are shushed.
For hundreds of years we had no education or food, colonisers we were unable to successfully overturn, and a belief system that we swallowed whole. I don’t need Boissevain to tell me that our passivity has stuck, and neither do our politicians. The latter take full advantage of it.
I’m fed up of saying last week this and that happened, but yet again, the past week brought with it more unsavoury revelations. Only they weren’t really revelations because half the stuff that came out was stuff most people could have quite easily deduced if they had done the bare minimum of questioning.
Most Maltese people don’t seem to understand that you don’t need to be caught with the actual gun in your hand and your other hand on your best friend’s thigh for you to be guilty. That doesn’t usually happen in the real world anyway.
Unfortunately, you have to do the legwork. You must read the articles, look at who stands to gain, look at who keeps lying to you, and well, ask questions. More importantly, you need to care when the answers are presented to you.
We are being abused and on top of being abused, we are thanking our abuser for abusing us- Anna Marie Galea
The vast majority of our politicians are not smarter than us, but the advantage they have is that they understand what makes us tick. When Keith Schembri went to court last week, he conveniently couldn’t seem to answer most of the questions put to him, but then was full of enthusiasm to supposedly spill the beans on Adrian Delia. It was one of the most transparent and cynical things he could have done, but stauncher members of the party gobbled up those red herrings like hungry cats.
Again, no questions asked. It fell into place beautifully with the usual narrative you see decorating so many walls of the faithful where they ignore what is happening now by bringing up the fact that the party in power before also did bad things.
When Konrad Mizzi said repeatedly that he doesn’t know who owns 17 Black and that he has no association with it, many people simply accepted it despite things pointing to a very different direction. He was re-elected in a way that left most of my foreign friends dumbfounded. Even after he was forced to resign last week without the serenity he seems to love so much, people came out in their droves to thank him for his hard work.
To say that we need to go back to the drawing board is an understatement. We are being abused, and on top of being abused we are thanking our abuser for abusing us. How hard is it for us to sit down quietly, look at things systematically and decide for ourselves?
Failing that, we can always create a new national slogan that would be worthy of our dystopian state: “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”