The Roman emperors had a very simple way of keeping the ragged, simple, non-wealthy Roman citizens calm and avoiding rebellion among the masses.

They gave them cheap bread and provided lots of shows and festivals in their colossae (plural of colosseum, in English colosseums for those of you who are not from the generation that learnt Latin at school or at the university) and in their amphitheatres.

The French King Louis the 16th and his wife Marie Antoinette came to a bloody end during the French Revolution because when the queen was told that the people were hungry, while the royal family and all the aristocracy and business oligarchs of the time lived a life of extreme luxury, she told her major-domo “if they are hungry give them cake” when the granaries were empty.

Arrogant as she was, she met a bloody end and so did most of the aristocrats of the time.

In Russia, the czar, who also lived a life of luxury with the nobles in their palaces and dachas while the common Russia peasant was tied to the earth in a form of eternal slavery called serfdom, had nothing to eat and had no shoes on their feet in the bitter cold Russian winters, was overthrown and killed when the people suddenly rose up and  many nobles were forced to flee.

Some of them even came to Malta. Lawyers in those days sold them Maltese or British citizenship and provided visas for a fee. My grandfather, unfortunately, was as greedy as the modern lawyers helping foreign criminals, oppressors and dictators obtain visas, Maltese passports and tax avoidance advice.

Instead of helping to get these aristocrats, who had downtrodden their serfs for hundreds of years, to go in jail, he went so far as to help them get asylum and made a packet of money by doing so. I feel great shame for my ancestor as I do for my lawyer friends and school comrades today.

All these stories force me to think of what happened recently when the Valletta festivals committee set up an evening of ‘panem et circenses’ (bread and circuses), of food and shows in our beautiful UNESCO protected world heritage city of Valletta.

The populace, including many foreigners who are here as tourists or slave workers, all flocked there to be lulled into a sense of bunga bunga disco sounds believing that life is as beautiful as the Romans, the French and the Russian peasants thought in the past and forgot their poverty for a few hours. The masses at the Notte Bianca numbered over 85,000.

Compare this to the relatively few who attend the monthly vigils for truth and justice honouring the murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia or the recent protest meeting in Valletta organised by the Nationalist Party to combat the erosion of the quality of life in Malta.

The serious and important events attract a few but the rubbish shows and cheap street food causing indigestion and gastric flu plus a bit of drunkenness mobilise many more.

Shame on us all for continuing to be fooled- John Vassallo

As long as people are prepared to accept a two-tier society like the old Roman one at the end of the empire or the French one in the late 1700s or the Russian one at the start of the 20th century things will continue to appear to go well for the new nouveau-riche Maltese ‘elite’ of contractors, hoteliers, developers, persons of trust and politicians.

They will continue to go to Ragusa on their yachts, to Dubai to get their cash reserves, to 17 Black to collect their bribes and to Sicily to their estates. Others will avoid paying taxes in their original countries of birth having chosen to get a Maltese passport or a fake residence card pretending to spend most of the year in this dirty, shabby and infrastructurally almost collapsing country.

Yet, all that glitters is not gold and the rotten wealth that these persons are collecting off the backs of poor pensioners, lowly paid teachers, nurses and public service employees will one day force the populace even here in our ‘blessed country’ to rise up.

Let us hope that the uprising will not be violent like the Roman, French or Russian uprisings before us nor as violent as the end of the Mintoffian era where Lorry Sant and his gang of brutal followers frightened all of us until the Maltese rose up and Dom Mintoff himself, after having handed over to the nasty Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici,  helped to democratically bring Malta back to a sense of normality.

In 2013, Joseph Muscat, with fake promises, with propaganda led by Cambridge Analytica and Henley, fooled the Maltese masses that they were badly off. They were promised transparency, accountability and fairness. Instead, we were led by the nose down the path of bribery, secrecy, the sale of national assets and bribes paid into secret bank accounts in Panama.

It is now nine years later and the population is still under the influence of the PR programme of bread, cheques at elections, supposedly lower electricity bills, the borrowing tons of money, direct orders given to friends and highly paid jobs to friends of ministers, thus bankrupting the country and burdening our children for many years to come.

Shame on us all for continuing to be fooled. But cream always finally rises to the surface and the cream of Maltese society, the youths of this country, who today are voting with their legs and leaving Malta, will one day return and help us rise up to overthrow this corrupt government.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.

Correction October 21, 2022: A previous version incorrectly referenced Oxford Analytica. It was Cambridge Analytica that helped Joseph Muscat.