There can be no disguising the symptoms anymore: Malta is now regressing at an alarming rate, and the results are now visible for all to see.
Two developments in the past few days alone should serve as a serious wake-up call for anyone remotely interested in the status of civil liberties in our country.
The first was the remarkable revelation that the police had asked local rock bands to submit their lyrics for ‘approval’, ahead of Saturday’s Carnival concert at Nadur. Coming hard on the heels of a veritable tsunami of censorship over the past 12 months, this latest attempt to gag a section of the public has sounded alarm bells across the entire spectrum of the arts.
In a statement issued this week, a group numbering almost 50 writers and artists (the list of signatories is growing day by day) voiced their serious concern at what they term a “threat to freedom of expression in this country”.
“There is a clear and imminent danger that Malta will lose its democratic credentials if these actions, that are apparently sanctioned by the country’s authorities, are to continue,” the 50-odd writers and artists cautioned.
Their concern is far from unjustified. After all, the active censorship of popular music lyrics is precisely the sort of behaviour one would expect from the paranoid military regimes of North Korea and Burma. It is scarcely credible that in 21st century Malta – an EU member state since 2004 –things have degenerated to such an extent that local performing artists and songwriters are pressured to conform to ‘officially acceptable’ lyrics, on pain of being banned outright by the police.
Besides, there are too many unanswered questions surrounding this initiative. The police on Monday claimed that, contrary to what had earlier been reported, they requested ‘only’ a list of song titles. But individual band-members told this newspaper that Monday’s statement came out at least three days after they had already submitted their lyrics. Evidently, then, the bands themselves were given a very different impression of what was expected of them – which was either unclear to begin with, or else retrospectively amended to disguise the real motive behind the request.
Either way, the general public is clearly owed an explanation – not just for this bizarre incident, but also for the way such decisions appear to consistently be taken without any clear chain of responsibility or command.
Was the Police Commissioner acting entirely on his own initiative? Was he obeying orders from above? Or has the country’s law enforcement capability somehow been hijacked by a powerful lobby group with a regressive agenda?
The second (and far more worrying) alarm bell rang when the Social Affairs Committee announced it was considering a proposal which would result in ‘care orders’ for unborn children – an irrational and highly dangerous precedent, which would place partners of pregnant women (or indeed any man who claims to be the child’s father, and conceivably even those who make no such claim) in the unacceptable position of being able to limit any woman’s freedom of choice and movement.
Unaccountably, individual members of this parliamentary committee have grossly contradicted each other on the details of this proposal. Chairman Edwin Vassallo (PN) claims that such ‘care orders’ are to be limited to pregnant women with drug problems. But Justyne Caruana (supposedly representing the ‘progressive’ Labour Party) insists that the proposal will also extend to issuing warrants of prohibitory injuncture against women suspected of intending to terminate a pregnancy abroad.
Incredibly, it appears that the Social Affairs Committee chose to listen only to the advice of a very limited section of civil society (namely, the government’s own drug agency, Sedqa) – while ignoring the opinions of several seasoned professionals in other relevant areas, who have since pointed out the glaring flaws with the Committee’s line of reasoning.
Family lawyer Dr Nicole Vella Defremaux has argued that the proposal will be “unworkable in practice” while University professor Anna Borg separately described it as “extremist”.
Prof. Borg is right. The proposal is indeed extremist, and also dangerous in a supposedly pluralistic society. Not only does it entail enormous potential for abuse, but it also betrays the underlying, quintessentially misogynistic view that a woman is nothing more than (as Prof. Borg herself put it) a “vessel for incubating children”.
One must at this point also question the true motives behind what can only be interpreted as an exponential increase in emotive fanaticism surrounding the plight of the unborn child in this country... a country which already boasts the most draconian abortion laws in the world.
Evidently Malta has been gripped by an unhealthy and unsound obsession with public morality, and this in turn can lead in only one direction: backwards, to a time of excessive interference of the State in matters which should ultimately remain private.
Who would have ever guessed, that the pro-EU movement would have resulted directly in a wholesale regression to the 1960s.?
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