Editor's note: This article was submitted before PBS announced the Mintoff documentary would go ahead after all.
PBS has just axed a four-part documentary on Dom Mintoff. Without watching the biography, we obviously can’t judge its merits. But we can certainly pass judgement on the reason given to Times of Malta for the cancellation.
It seems PBS fears a backlash from the Nationalist Party since there is no biography of a Nationalist Party figure planned to “counterbalance” that of Mintoff.
No doubt, there would indeed be protests of imbalance, probably from all sides if Mintoff’s record were looked at unflinchingly. But it’s disingenuous to suggest it would be provoked simply by this programming decision. There’s a wider context where PBS programming has, systematically, been an arm of Labour propaganda.
If PBS truly functioned as an impartial public broadcaster, it would have the authority to stand its ground – as the BBC usually does – against any criticism of partisan bias. There’s nothing like a consistent public record of impartiality to disprove the critics. The public would be ready to accept assurances that later programming would equally commemorate, and scrutinise, figures of other political parties.
But PBS is in no position to do that. And the loss is everyone’s, not just Mintoff’s fans.
Let’s use this moment to think about what our public culture would be like if PBS felt confident enough to broadcast unflinching, balanced biographies of controversial public figures.
No biography of any dominant Maltese political figure, who was active in living memory, is ever going to satisfy everyone. Their lives mean more than we can ever say. They were dominant and controversial precisely because their political programme hit a raw nerve of our collective life.
Irrespective of whether we supported or opposed a figure like Mintoff, or Eddie Fenech Adami, to recall their times is to relive the neuralgic pain of crisis that brought them to political prominence.
Here lies the value of an unflinching biography: it begins (or continues) the process of confronting the past that still haunts our present.
It helps us recognise, as a society, our own active part in how a controversial, charismatic leader came to be needed, to exercise a hold on us and, finally, to lose grip.
A good political biography is always the story of a balancing act: how one of us emerged from the crowd to stand apart, gradually found his balance in partisan competition and national turmoil, walked the tightrope and then lost balance and fell from power.
With controversial figures like Mintoff – as, say, with Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump – aiming only for detached judgement is a mistake. Such figures are inherently divisive. They disrupt the status quo. A true portrait would show how they unbalanced the rest of us, driving some to adulation and others to vituperation.
There’s no point in trusting fellow voters if we can’t even acknowledge they may have good reasons for voting differently from us- Ranier Fsadni
Charismatic figures emerge out of an institutional, cultural crisis that predates them. They come to embody it. For better, and for worse, they transform our lives so profoundly that we cannot tell our own life story without giving such leaders a role to play, whether it’s as the saviour or as the devil.
The health of our democratic culture requires us to be open to listen to what others saw in such figures that we did not.
In 1962, an għannej nicknamed il-Papa, and the guitarist Carmelo Cardona, it-Tapp, recorded an għana epic under the English name, Mintoff Story, almost certainly meant to evoke the WWII film, Malta Story.
It was at the height of the confrontation between the Church and Mintoff, with him losing ground to the Nationalist Party.
Like the film, the song is the story of siege and heroic resistance, a nation’s struggle embodied in the life of the protagonist. Mintoff Story vividly captures the sense of life experienced as mythic drama. In Mintoff’s struggles, the audience is meant to see its own.
I have sometimes had the privilege of listening to elderly Labour supporters tell me what their life was like in the 1960s, under the Church’s interdiction. I was told of the horrors undergone by particular families. I was pointed to the street where this or that happened. I heard about the impact of religious stigma and everyday humiliations, of family members having nervous breakdowns and others broken with grief.
Decades after the events, the stories were not just told. They were re-enacted before my eyes, moment by moment, the anger and grief rising again. In them I heard the rhythms of Mintoff’s speeches. Or, perhaps, it was the other way round and Mintoff’s fiery speeches channelled the anger of those everyday dramas and humiliations.
I’ve also heard the stories told by Nationalist supporters who had to endure the thug-rule and vendettas of the late 1970s and 1980s. I’m struck by the recurrence of the phrase “We suffered”. Again, what’s meant is personal suffering, seared in memory and flesh, not a reference to a recycled documentary.
Both sets of stories are part of Mintoff’s political biography. Can’t we agree that it’s a pity, a tragic pity, that we’re not given the chance to hear such stories together, side by side?
It wouldn’t mean letting go of the facts. We need not shunt aside the judgement of historians.
It would simply mean that we are given a chance to understand each other’s reasons for feeling and voting in ways we otherwise find difficult to comprehend. It would be an acknowledgement that our adversaries were motivated by reasons rooted in circumstances that we are all complicit in and responsible for fixing.
It would be an exercise in political empathy, without which faith in democracy is eroded. There’s no point in trusting fellow voters if we can’t even acknowledge they may have good reasons for voting differently from us.
That is what we all lose when our public broadcaster doesn’t have the independence of stature to air a political biography that’s bound to stir controversy. We are deprived of the chance to confront our inner demons, even as today’s politicians rouse them.