All aboard the right train

PHILIP BEATTIE says the right-wingers are being left behind in a country overrun by a liberal agenda. Well, I never…

University lecturer Philip Beattie is leading a demonstration tomorrow against illegal immigration. His battle-cry is ‘defend your country’, splashed across billboards which the movement Alleanza Nazzjonali Repubblikana has self-financed. Tomorrow Beattie will talk about safeguarding Malta’s national interest, its culture, its territorial integrity, and how the country is victim to a ‘silent invasion’. Although he declares he is not a racist, and that he is against illegal immigration from wherever it comes, I doubt his invocations tomorrow will be filtered by his audience not to mean ‘black African’.
Beattie denies any links with Norman Lowell. “Sometimes I have difficulties in understanding what his ideology… I can only answer on what we believe not on what he believes… but do you see me as a member of Imperium Europa? I think it is immoral and unlawful to preach racial hatred. But I also think that if Lowell had to repackage his message in such a way by which he jettisons this extremism and he focuses on the real issues of immigration, he would do us a favour.”
Indeed, a favour from Lowell himself. Tomorrow Beattie leads the first demonstration against illegal immigration. No racist messages tolerated, their pamphlet reads, obviously expecting that their audience will be of the, say racist orientation.
But you can still, if you will bother to listen in to the ANR inveighing against illegal immigration tomorrow, be sure that this new right-wing political movement does not have its facts right on refugee dynamics.
Beattie for example, believes that NGO representatives are on the Refugee Commission, a government-appointed body that operates the UN high commission for refugees criteria to establish who is a refugee or not. He is, of course, incorrect about that. Anybody can check the Refugee Act to see what is what about refugees in Malta. NGOs are not present or responsible for who is declared to be a refugee or not. I am not sure ANR or Beattie himself have even read the Refugee Act – especially when he says he believes refugees should not be given citizenship or the right to vote. They don’t. And nobody is talking about giving them the right to vote anyway.
Never mind the symbolism of the Italian AN, the national alliance, formerly the post-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano which hosted Mussolini’s granddaughter Alesssandra – the ANR’s red-white tricolor flame has nothing to do with neo-fascism or neo-racism, Beattie says. “It is also true AN is no longer a fascist party. Gianfranco Fini himself said, very wisely, that all the good that Mussolini did will not be disowned, but the lack of democracy, the violence and the lack of tolerance and the concept that the state is an idol, would be jettisoned.”
So far, so predictable. A 41-year-old lecturer in banking and finance, Beattie, well-spoken, rational, engaging, is part of a new breed of disillusioned right-wing conservatives stuck in liberal hell, now that the PN is no longer a right-wing party that believes in Religio et Patria. “That’s a canard… the people who believe in traditional beliefs, the concept of the nation and national identity, have nobody to represent them as far as I can see.”
On his desk is the 1886 book ‘Liberalism Is A Sin’, written by a Barcelona Catholic priest, which he quotes from: “ ‘Liberalism is the dogmatic affirmation of the absolute independence of the individual and of social reason,’ in other words, each individual who is entitled to their own rights has no duty or obligations but unlimited rights. But Catholicism is the dogma of the absolute subjection of the individual and the social order according to the revealed law of God. So one doctrine is the exact antithesis of the order. And between this Catholic doctrine and liberalism there can be no compromise.”
A practising Catholic, Beattie suspects a liberal conspiracy at the heart of the Maltese media, not least MaltaToday, and so many other usual suspects: I.M.Beck, Daphne, etcetera etcetera. All this compounded by a “huge emptiness” in the country for “traditional, right-wing and conservative principles.”
“The liberal agenda basically proclaims the freedom of all instincts, where there isn’t a right and a wrong, and that you have to be tolerant of all views and have equal rights regardless of whether they are right and wrong. People on our side of the spectrum believe there is natural law, which is inherent in our nature, and which tells us that there is a right and wrong.”
Against this setting, Beattie, a member of the Una Voce international federation dedicated to restoring the use of Latin, Gregorian Chant, and sacred polyphony in Catholic liturgy, says natural law, as given by God, precludes a discourse on rights which go beyond those which dignify the existence of a human being. It’s like the whole Church-homosexuality debate: “The Church says homosexuals are to be respected for their dignity as human beings. However, a man cannot claim rights for himself as a homosexual, to go beyond those rights as a human being and claim additional rights just because he happens to be a homosexual. Because homosexuality, according to the Catholic Church, is abhorrent because it goes against natural law, of which God Himself is the author.”
With the ANR motto of fides, patria et familia (faith, nation and family), Beattie still does not come across as a Catholic happy-clappy. “We’re not a confessional organisation. We’re not the DC of Italy, exploiting the support of the parish chaplain. We believe in church-state separation, that if a secular state is influenced by the principles of the Catholic faith, there it will find real progress, rather than being influenced by liberal principles which tell you: ‘if that’s your opinion, you are entitled to it and that’s fine.’”
In fact, he is more akin to a Buttiglione, like him sharing a distaste for the assault that is “dechristianising” Europe: “The breakdown of morals we are witnessing right now in the local context has been accompanied by the marginalisation of the Catholic Church in Malta. If an archbishop takes a stand on divorce, social and political movements and parties will attack him not on what he says but on who he is.”
It’s a degeneration he says has been coming since the free sixties, when they “started preaching free love and to get stoned and sell ganja to Vietnam soldiers,” what he calls the proclamation of the freedom of all instincts. “So what did Dany Cohn-Bendit do in the Sorbonne riots? Proclaim the only law should be to forbid to forbid, and go back to anarchism and tribal roots.”
Likewise in Malta, he admits the consumerist drive heralded by none other than Eddie Fenech Adami, has contributed to the battered moral fibre of a once staunchly Catholic island. “I think Eddie Fenech Adami did a lot of good for the country, finding a country in a state of great political hatred… he did try to make an effort to regenerate the economy, reduce this socialist mentality that the state should be our master from the cradle to the grave, and give the private sector the space it deserves. But then things started going too far. Liberalism both in its moral and economic aspects started to take over. What do we have as a result? Look at the national debt, so many indebted families, breakdown of marriages, people living beyond their means… this is what a political party should address. So although Fenech Adami did manage to resuscitate the country, the Nationalist government actually also helped assist in this degeneration of values in our countries. Now whether they did this deliberately or not is another thing, but it did happen.”
Conscious about his unusually traditionalist agenda, Beattie knows that Maltese society today has become attuned to ‘liberal attitudes’, as discussion falls on divorce: “Liberal arguments use numbers and majorities. Put divorce to the democratic test, and be consistent. Put divorce to the democratic test and let the majority decide. Even if the majority decides in favour of divorce, it does not mean it is right.”
In fact, that is where the crux is with all the Catholic social doctrine that proclaims a belief in democracy, but which then cannot play by its rules – if it’s not about the common good by Ratzinger standards, then democracy does not work: “John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor said that democracy could be a form of dictatorship in itself and various popes spoke about democracy,” Beattie says “The problem is that this is not about tolerance but imposition. Certain things could be imposed through a democracy and they might be intrinsically evil and imposed through the dictatorship of democracy. The fact that a majority imposes its will in a country should be respected through the body of law.”
What Beattie seems to falter about, and that is what looks worrying about a new movement that aims at christening a new right-wing movement with a protest against illegal immigration, is his knowledge of the dynamics of refugee law.
Surely, he states an obvious opposition against illegal immigration. “We are against those who abuse our system: economic migrants from relatively stable countries. We think the Immigration Act 1970 needs to be amended in order to take account the circumstances of today. Our demonstration is trying to raise awareness about the fact that laws are being broken.”
But then he talks about refugees and those who are awarded temporary humanitarian protection as “blurred distinctions”, as if they were some sort of convenient inventions of the Maltese state, when in fact they are recognised UN standards of classification.
But even his suspicion of whether a refugee is indeed genuine or not, contradicts the logic of awarding refugee status. He says there is a need for a serious investigation of those who actually got refugee status since 2000 “because I think the criteria being used by the refugee commission, including the fact there are NGOs on the panels, are biased.” His error in believing that NGOs are on the Refugee Commission is not his only mistake. I point out that if the Refugee Commission uses UNHCR criteria to establish who is a refugee or not, they are entrusted with identifying only those who have a genuine case. A “refugee” is by definition “genuine” – if Beattie is worried about illegal immigration, he is quibbling with a legalistic question defined by international law.
“It is not a legalistic question only, but also moral. Charity and solidarity are intrinsic in Christian social doctrine. In 1952, Pope Pius, when discussing immigration, also spoke about the need to consider the national interest if this is jeopardised, and in Malta it certainly could be jeopardised economically by employers who pay pittances. And I am not referring to the boat people only, but also those coming in from the Eastern bloc, those from marriages of conveniences, and those who come in with bogus visas. African people are part of the problem, and we believe the vast majority of those are economic migrants.”
Equally as inveighing against illegal migrants, “even if they are Canadians”, he calls the criminal networks which traffic human beings “the real racists.” Still he talks about increased immigration threatening the island’s social tranquillity, even posing a safety risk that might translate into increased criminality.
He has little hopes about a Ghaddafi visit round about CHOGM time, amid all the diplomatic chaos, but he wants to see the EU putting its money where its mouth is – and not only by solving Africa’s long-term problems, but also hoping Malta is not bullied by Brussels. “In the short-term we have to see what we are going to do about our problems as well. We will need to either repatriate or burden-share with the other countries … If government has to take unilateral action to protect our culture and national identity they should not be bullied by Brussels if they don’t know the extent of our problem. I find it worrying that our army is outnumbered by asylum seekers who threaten our territorial integrity, because it is the army that defends this territorial integrity.”