On the eve of the third anniversary of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination, it is inevitable that we hear, once more, of the contrast between two codes of silence.
There is the reserved sober silence of Cabinet responsibility and of parliamentarian loyalty to the party whip – which is how a procession of ministers, before the Caruana Galizia inquiry, have justified their silence on Panamagate and all that followed.
Then there is the silence of which the ministers are accused: omertà. According to this code, you do not rat on your colleagues to the authorities, even if they wrong you. You keep disagreements in-house.
But these two stark choices are too simple for a country that has as many kinds of silence as it has words for crap.
Let us first consider the opposite of silence: the treatment meted out to people who just will not shut up.
First, there was Caruana Galizia herself. Before she was killed, there was a campaign across the broadcast and social media to portray her as an apostle of hate. Even today, many speak of her death as the silencing of hate.
Was it hate? Caruana Galizia gave no quarter. She practised the arts of mockery, ridicule and vituperation – for which there is a long tradition. People who complain about her clearly have never read what Martin Luther said about the Pope.
We don’t need to go that far back. The late Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher and Matt Taibbi all danced on someone’s grave at around the same time that Daphne popped the champagne to celebrate Dom Mintoff’s passing. All three are part of the mainstream media in the US. Their invective is readily accessible on YouTube.
It’s this kind of strong medicine – appalling, offensive, crude – that the right of freedom of expression was created to defend. It’s offensive speech that needs defending against organised power, not inoffensive speech that does no harm.
Human rights jurisprudence protects offensive speech, with room for negotiation only on the margins. To call it hate speech is to legitimise shutting it down. Hate speech is not protected.
What we got was an organised campaign against Caruana Galizia by a political party in government – precisely the kind of power from which individual rights protect us.
We cannot assess the silence of government ministers without appreciating that they, better than most, know the ferocity of the campaign that can be mounted against those who speak up. So maybe theirs is the silence of fear of their own side.
Perhaps, too, they were victims of their own naivety or cynicism. Campaigns against those who cross the party line are well known. Arguably, you could cynically believe it was part of the political game, the heat in the kitchen. Naively, you could believe that it had gone on for so long against Caruana Galizia that it was intense but within strictly established limits.
Such naivety and cynicism, too, were blown up three years ago. I believe the ministers who say they were struck dumb when they heard about the assassination – even if, just a generation ago, a culture of political impunity had also had fatal consequences.
Ministers cannot continue to play dazed and confused- Ranier Fsadni
But the ministers cannot continue to play dazed and confused. Three years have passed – and people who will not shut up continue to be accused of hate by organised campaigns. They are led by, among others, Labour’s online army, whose colonels are on the public payroll as persons of trust.
Caruana Galizia herself continues to be vilified. Where did the shock at her brutal assassination go?
Her sons have been called enemies of the state. Robert Abela, as backbench MP, once accused them of hating Malta so much that they preferred not to see the case solved. He has since retracted the statement but not apologised for it. It was a baseless accusation but it rode on the back of another organised campaign. It included the strategic hanging of banners around the country, implying that the sons had hidden their mother’s laptop for nefarious reasons.
Banners are not prepared and then hung across the land spontaneously. You need resources and organisation. No NGO took responsibility for those banners (unlike the banners put up by Occupy Justice). Does anyone seriously believe that campaign was not connected to some part, however darkly hidden, of the Labour machine?
Others were accused of hate: those who appealed to European and international monitoring agencies. David Casa and Roberta Metsola were accused, essentially, of breaking with omertà. Their sin was to appeal to ‘outside’ authorities. People often forget that the code of omertà has a flip side. You do not report to outside authorities because the ‘legitimate’ reaction to being wronged is to carry out a vendetta.
We can thus see that what Casa, Metsola and others were doing, by appealing to monitoring authorities, was attempting to break the cycle of vendetta. Yet, they were accused of hate. Besides, the monitoring agencies are not ‘outside’ relative to us. They are ours. It is thanks to institutions like the Council of Europe that we got the public inquiry we deserve. Through it we are learning, if only through a glass darkly, of just how sinister are the forces who accuse others of hate.
Even the judges have been accused of speaking out of turn and of not falling silent on schedule. They are accused of ‘politicising’ an assassination when the brief is to investigate its political context.
Over the last three years, the accusation of hate has shifted onto other journalists and members of civil society. Even more chillingly, if that’s possible, now it is the turn of the lawyers of the Caruana Galizia family to be pronounced hateful.
Daphne. Her sons. Other journalists. Civil society activists. The Caruana Galizia’s family lawyers. All systemically accused of ‘hate’. We must get rid of hate, the organised campaign says.
Before all this, the ministers have remained silent as though mindful that careless talk costs lives. Three years on, it’s about time they face up to their responsibilities. Careless silence costs lives too.