April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” These are the opening lines of T.S. Elliott’s famous poem, The Wasteland. Written in 1922, after the devastating aftermath of World War I, his painful bitterness ekes through: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
One hundred years later, Europe is in the midst of another devastating war. Man never learns. Elliott’s poem of dark pain and futility has long been forgotten, at our own cost.
“What are the roots that cluster, what branches grow out of the stony rubbish? Son of man you cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water; there is shadow under this rock, (come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning, striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
That handful of dust is amply provided by the war. The loss of life, the destruction of heritage, wheat, churches, hospitals, bridges, libraries, schools and concert halls is relentless. Day in, day out, precious life is pounded into the dust. What life is left is scarred beyond retrieval.
Yet, despite the horror and brutality of it all, Malta is only interested in its own narrow interests. A recent Eurostat survey sadly exposed the deep cynicism of the Maltese – price stability matters more than freedom and democracy. We didn’t need the Eurostat survey to highlight the country’s priorities.
We’ve just had two general elections in which Malta resoundingly and emphatically applauded its own valueless society, completely disinterested in righteousness, justice or fairness. Interested only in greed, personal instant gratification, comfort and luxury, even at the cost of our future generations. Me before my children is Malta’s motto. I before my fellow countrymen, is our guiding principle.
We are not moved by the death and destruction in Ukraine. We are only moved by the rising price of bread and milk- Kevin Cassar
Almost two-thirds of Maltese (63 per cent) prioritise price stability over freedom and democracy. Malta is ready to give up everything for comfort and convenience. Malta will sell its soul. That’s why the majority support sale of citizenship, or why nobody bothers about the repeated rejection of Freedom of Information requests, the secrecy and deception of its own government, the flagrant abusive propaganda of the state broadcaster.
In sharp contrast, only 39 per cent of Europeans put price stability before freedom and democracy. We were never true Europeans at heart, in spirit or in values.
NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg pleaded at the World Economic Forum in Davos: “Freedom is more important than free trade, the protection of our values is more important than profit.”
Malta’s finance minister, Clyde Caruana, just laughed in his face. “We must protect our standard of living,” Caruana insisted in the Maltese parliament. He means our nails, our hair, our cars and mobile phones, our nights out, our Eurovision contest, our Capaldi concert. He knows what matters to his voters and it’s not values or principles.
Caruana’s concerns are not the threat to European democracy. He’s worried that “the war will cause economic struggles” and questioned the effectiveness of European sanctions. He lamented that “the people in the countries imposing the sanctions are being affected more than those in the country on which they’re imposed”.
Malta’s not worried that it is continuing to fund Vladimir Putin’s war. Malta’s more interested in continuing to sell citizenship to Russian oligarchs, to protect their luxury yachts, to continue its shipping business with Russia. We’re not interested whether the money we deal in is dirty money. We don’t mind whether it’s blood money either. As long as it’s money, we’ll take it.
Putin’s war is an unjust, unprovoked war of terror and destruction. Yet, it is odd that Catholic Malta is always on the wrong side when it comes to moral decision making – money before justice, comfort before democracy, convenience before liberty, greed before compassion.
Morality is not a calculation of interests, prices, inflation. Morality is a defence of principles, not just the supreme value of life but the values of justice and liberty that are the essential foundations of any moral political order.
Putin’s war exposes the end game of autocracy, the crushing of liberty through injustice. Malta is not interested in Putin’s ruthless suppression of freedom. It’s only interested in making money, not least our own prime minister who rented his uninhabitable Żejtun property to absent Russian passport buyers. His rental allowed Russians with no links to the country to claim a link and buy citizenship while artificially raising rental costs for the rest of us.
The war indicts Russia. It also indicts Labour, which enjoyed the prosperity those Russians bought.
Labour did not think about the threats to Malta’s or Europe’s security. It did not worry about the widening gap between rich and poor. It was not interested in enforcing the rules of genuine links to the country before handing out citizenship.
Labour enabled Putin’s oligarchs to gain a foothold into Europe and Western European financial structures. The reason is obvious. Malta does not live by the values of Western democracies. Its values are primarily greed, comfort, personal wealth and convenience. Values of justice, freedom and democracy are willingly traded off.
Our real place is not inside the EU but within the illiberal oppressive autocracies of Hungary, Turkey and Russia.
We are not moved by the death and destruction in Ukraine. We are only moved by the rising price of bread and milk. We are moved only by the squeeze on our purchasing power. We are only concerned about whether to give up our weekly visit at the hairdresser’s or the new tattoo we’d planned.
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”
Malta risks becoming a true wasteland.
Kevin Cassar is a professor of surgery.