Well, what do you know? The Nationalist Party appears to have turned turtle on its previous stand regarding the case against Mark Camilleri – the 21-year-old editor facing criminal charges over a short story published in a student newspaper – and is now backing the Morality Brigade to the hilt.
Judging by Net TV’s coverage over the past few days, the general argument now favoured by the Stamperija in Pietà – so named because it seeks to ‘stamp’ its own views of morality onto the nation’s subconscious – is that the University rector was entirely correct to ban Ir-Realtà from his campus, and even to report its editor to the police... because the story in question is a ‘glorification of pornography’.
Oh? This is interesting. Are we to understand, therefore, that ‘glorifying pornography’ is suddenly a crime in Malta? And if so: can anyone at Net TV kindly explain to me why no criminal action has ever been taken against the One, Holy, Catholic & Apostolic Government of Malta? After all, this institution does not merely ‘glorify pornography’: it also helps to disseminate it to all five inhabited continents of this planet via the World Wide Web – making millions of euros in the process.
Yes, you read right. And it’s all been said before, too – though without any noticeable repercussions, and certainly without the brouhaha currently surrounding the Realtà case. It seems that ‘moral sentiments’ of self-publicising Christians tend to evaporate pretty quickly, when it is their own beloved Nationalist government to be raking in millions of euros from the profits of the hardcore pornography trade. But when a single, non-profit campus publication uses bad language in a piece of fiction? That, it seems, they just cannot endure.
So in case you missed it all when it was first brought to your attention by my colleague Karl Schembri five years ago, here is how it works. The government currently administered by the PN – the same party which coincidentally also pays all the journalists’ salaries at Net TV – has tacitly allowed the country to be used as a hub for Europe’s entire internet porn industry.
Not only does it tolerate the existence in our country of international internet billing giants whose clients include various sites specialising in dedicated porn sites – running the full gamut of fetishism – from fellatio, to anal fisting, to bukkake, to bondage and way, way beyond – but for all its insistence on sound principles and family values, the Christian conscience of the One, Holy, Catholic & Apostolic Government of Malta appears to be untroubled by the fact the global internet porn industry contributes millions in tax to its own coffers.
That’s right. Shortly after the Bishops of Malta and Gozo reminded us all (rightly, at least according to their faith) that ‘Thou canst not serve God and Mammon’, along comes the One, Holy Catholic & Apostolic Government to contradict them both in spectacular fashion. Thou canst indeed serve Mammon with all thy heart and all thy soul, my dear Paul and Mario; and thou canst do this whilst at the same time also casting thyself as the star defender of everything God is supposed to represent. Indeed, the present government has turned this practice into an art form in its own right. I wonder what, if anything, Christ Himself might have had to say about it all.
But back to the really interesting thing in all this, which of course is the undeniable fact that our Oh-So-Catholic country – at present engaged in a crusade against a tiny, insignificant campus newspaper over ‘obscenity’ – is itself partly financed by a multi-million pornography industry, characterised by such virtuous role-models as she-males, dominatrixes, teen sluts and ‘monsters of cock’.
It seems our One, Holy Catholic & Apostolic Government ministers are quite happy to accept this money – despite the fact that it comes directly from credit-card transactions involving subscriptions to pay-porn sites – while at the same time expressing intense ‘concern’ when a Maltese novelist uses words like ‘ghoxx’ and ‘zobb’ in a single short story.
How did this astonishingly, unbelievably hypocritical situation come to pass? Very simply. While nobody was really looking (for let’s face it: nobody ever really looks) the government of Malta busied itself over the past five years to ‘reform’ our nation’s tax regime with the specific (declared) intention of attracting global internet companies to set up shop here.
Ostensibly the reason was highly valid: Malta planned (and still plans) to become a ‘centre of IT excellence’, at a time when the entire world is investing in IT. The real reason, however, was another. While the rest of Europe fortified its tax regimes specifically to ward against such industries as internet porn and online gaming, Malta espied the opportunity to offer tax incentives to precisely these industries – without, it seems, bothering too much with the dubious morality of the activities in which they are involved.
Among the international (American, in this case) companies to exploit the new opportunities generously provided by the Holy Maltese Government was one named ‘CCBill’: a massive IT billing agency specialising in (among many other things) pay porn sites... and which numbers all the following fine examples among its clients:
Soundpunishment.com;
GothicSluts.com;
Threepillows.com;
Achtungfetish.com;
WomenofWrestling.net
Asian-Boy-Models.com.
And those, I hasten to add, are just the ones we know about. One shudders to think what other, similarly explicit websites are actively promulgated by the Nationalist-administered government under the battlecry of ‘Religio et Patria’.
In any case: fact of the matter is that, at any time of day you care to name, someone, somewhere around the world will be glued to his computer terminal and (to resuscitate a priceless expression from a long-forgotten slang) “shaking hands with his wife’s best friend.” And in many cases – certainly in the case of the above websites – this would have been made possible by the collusion of the same government which now claims to be Europe’s custodians of Christian values.
So there you have it. With every thwack of leather on bare buttocks to be heard on Soundpunishment.com, the One, Holy, Catholic & Apostolic Government of Malta delights in the music of chinking coins, as they land unerringly in its coffers. And with every Asian-Boy-Model to be sodomised on someone’s computer screen somewhere, the same government of Malta claims a little cut from the millions upon millions of euros paid in subscriptions by internet porn consumers the world over.
In case you think I am exaggerating, this is how the overall process is described in an article I found online: “Many of the porn sites in question use CCBill, or other similar payment services, to collect subscription fees for their site. Consequently, a user who wished to view the images on a particular porn site would be directed to CCBill’s payment gateway where the user’s payment would be processed. Upon completion of the payment transaction, CCBill would then redirect the user to the full access version of the porn site.”
What this description omits to mention is that CCBill’s payment gateway happens to be located in Strait Street, Valletta – fittingly enough, I suppose – and that the legal firm representing this online porn billing company was (according to the first press reports) none other than Sapiano and Associates: fronted by Dr Georg Sapiano, who contested the 2004 general elections on the ticket of the same Nationalist Party which today piously denounces ‘pornography’ from the pulpit of its ill-gotten TV station, Net TV.
Before proceeding any further, be it known that I myself do not consider Georg to be part of the army of outrageous Nationalist hypocrites, for two reasons: one, he never struck me as being particularly ‘holier-than-thou’ in the first place, and two; we all know that lawyer-client relations can’t exactly be based on mutual respect and approval of all aspects of the activities concerned (otherwise, some criminals would be permanently stuck for legal representation).
But having dispensed with this disclaimer: can anyone kindly explain why Net TV gets all high and mighty about a single short story published in a campus newspaper... but then has absolutely nothing to say about the fact that a former PN candidate (and present-day PN guru) doubles up as the legal representative of a company that makes its money directly from hardcore porn? And which also contributes a percentage of its astronomical profits to the One, Holy, Catholic & Apostolic Government of Malta, without anyone so much as batting an eyelid?
The answer, of course, can be summed up in a single word (which happens to also be the only language understood by the entire of population of Malta, bar none).
Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below. Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.
Search:
MALTATODAY
BUSINESSTODAY
Download MaltaToday Sunday issue front page in pdf file format
