A young man crossed the channel with his classmates in 1916, all of whom would die before he would return home a few years later from the “great adventure” that was to be World War I.

A war to end all wars, one that not only did not end war or Europe’s taste for it but also one in which no one really won… and everyone lost.

Twenty years later, another patriot would cross the European continent to join his native Russia in the fight against Germany, only to later be imprisoned by the country he fought for, all for expressing the “wrong opinions”.

The first man was Tolkien and the notes he etched in the trenches under enemy shellfire would go on to become the most articulate fictional narrative of good versus evil in recent history while the second was Solzhenitsyn, whose observations, drawn in the gulag under the whip of his own people, would go on to become a shocking narrative of the evils people are prepared to commit in the name of ideology.

Two men separated by time, space, armies and wars. 

Both drawing the same conclusion: that evil is not a monopoly of one group or another but an inner tendency we all must keep in check.

While Europe looked on as a new war unfolded following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Malta was busying itself with the exchange of blows across the domestic political fray. 

There were many proposals from both parties. Yet, not one word was uttered by either side on the matter of national security.

Should this conflict spill over into the Mediterranean in any way, what is the government’s plan? Equally concerning, what is the opposition’s evaluation of such a scenario?

The existence of politics and policy depends on the existence of the state: the perpetuation of people and territory. Considering a scenario with an existential threat to either, are our political parties providing us with any reassurances?

Is there a plan to safeguard national security or are we to hope that blowing the neutrality trumpet will forever turn all conceivable threats away from our shores?

The fact that neither political party voiced a syllable on this issue reflects the stance of the nation on the subject, ergo that security is not even remotely on the collective consciousness of our people, let alone a pressing concern.

In recent weeks, we have seen, as the world always sees with the rise of any conflict, the identification of individuals, groups, or nations, as main culprits for the course of history and the projection of the totality of evil onto them.

One side blames the other and all sides fall victim to the delusion that if only the other side was completely destroyed, then life could, indeed would, be infinitely better. 

Should this conflict spill over into the Mediterranean what is the government’s plan?- Mike Tabone

Europeans have taken this path before and we all know how well that worked out.

The projection of evil onto an adversary conveniently blinds us to our own shortcomings and grants us the deluded moral authority to eradicate the enemy off the face of this earth.

The indiscriminate termination of life – all life – is evil. It is as evil in Ukraine in 2022 as it was across Europe in 1945.

It was equally evil in Germany, where the Allied bombing campaign razed entire cities to the ground and killed thousands of civilians.

At the core of evil lies deception and let us not once again deceive ourselves that all the blame is on the other side of the fence.

The world “got away” with such rationale before, where the enemy’s wrongs were magnified and one’s own wrongs discarded from the collective memory of nations.

In the past, demonising enemies and pushing them to the brink of oblivion had a way of cowing them into submission.

Millions still died but the world managed a partial recovery. We will not get away with such errors of judgement again. The same methods today run the risk of triggering ultimate retaliations, at the expense of life itself.

Europe has bled enough to know continental feuds must inevitably end in diplomatic compromise.

The question is how much destruction must either side take before giving peace a chance – a question that should no longer exist.

As for Malta, may the parties and the people look past domestic squabbles and stop waiting on a cataclysm to revise our priorities.

Finances still sit on the top floor as they have done for decades of different administrations while integrity, health and security, indeed the roots of all prosperity, lie somewhere down there in a dull basement waiting to once again see the light of day.

The world’s most pressing problems are closer to our shores than we think. So are the solutions.

Mike Tabone, medical doctor, writer