The real threat to democracy

British author Will Self recently took his much more famous antecedent George Orwell to task over the ‘mediocrity’ of his literary output.

OK, I admit it might not be the most earth-shattering news item to have surfaced in the last few months; but given a choice between a high-profile literary catfight, and, say, yet another article about the unfinished parliament building in Valletta… I’d go with the literary catfight any day.

And this fight promised to be more entertaining than most. In literary circles, calling Orwell ‘mediocre’ is roughly the equivalent of claiming that Mozart had no ear for music, or that Napoleon was a bumbling idiot when it came to military strategy. It’s the sort of thing you just don’t say in public… unless you’re the author of books that have had at least a fraction of the literary influence Orwell has had over the past 50 years (or unless you’re commenting under any article published online, in which case you can write whatever bullshit you like).

So of course, I read the article, and... what a surprise. The author who has been dead for 64 years won the contest hands down, without even uttering a single insult.

The trouble with Will Self’s criticism – as is so often the case with deliberately provocative iconoclasm – is that it gets lost in minor details. He berates Orwell mostly for his writing style, in particular his quasi-Marxist ‘rules’ of simplicity and economy of words. He also finds fault with the “obvious didacticism” of Orwell’s most famous books, Animal Farm and 1984.

Yet what makes Orwell a literary giant is not his prose writing style, but his understanding of human nature. Sticking only to his best-known novels, Animal Farm and 1984 display a profound grasp of the basic forces at work behind political ideological movements (which are ultimately composed of, and driven by, people). And Orwell understood not only how people manipulated the power structures of his own day… but he accurately predicted how they would likewise manipulate structures which didn’t even exist when he wrote the book in 1948.

We can all see some of his predicted scenarios with our own eyes. ‘Newspeak’, for instance, revolved around the concept of controlling the public’s ability to think by limiting the language they are permitted to use. This has become a manifest reality today: jobs have been lost over thoughtless ‘tweets’, media corporations argue among themselves about how best to label issues for fear of provoking violent backlashes… in brief, we have created for ourselves the same Orwellian culture of fear when it comes to speaking our minds.

Control through surveillance is another Orwellian reality we live through day by day. Winston Smith had to move his writing desk into a corner of his bedroom to avoid being watched all day by the monitor on the wall. Google Earth can now track people in the streets where they live through photographs taken by geo-stationary satellites. The only difference is that most people don’t move their desks out of view: they quite happily upload all the details of their private lives onto Facebook, where the information is scanned by user profile software and sold to the highest bidder.

I could go on, but like I said George Orwell already won the fight without any help from me. The only reason I started with this digression in the first place is that the whole Self-versus-Orwell story forcefully reminded me of how accurately the latter’s portrayal of human nature applies to Malta in the 21st century.

There has been a lot of talk recently about ‘threats to Maltese democracy’, mostly in the form of a plan to postpone the next round of local council elections. I wrote about this last Wednesday, and was immediately struck by the quality of the responses I received. There was an unmistakable tone of personal offence expressed at my comparison between PN leader Simon Busuttil and Jackie Chan. Only it didn’t come from Simon Busuttil himself (or, even more surprisingly, from Jackie Chan). It came from people who are merely uninvolved spectators: your regular party supporters, in this case rooting for the PN.

The interesting thing is that I detected the exact same tone in responses to an article I wrote the preceding week, this time criticising the Labour government’s nominee for the Commission, Karmenu Vella. In both cases I was accused of wearing ‘partisan blinkers’. Yet the two objects of my criticism are actually from opposing parties… which makes those blinkers quite unique, in that they allow vision from two opposing angles. Sort of defeats the whole purpose of wearing blinkers, I would have thought.

But leaving aside the irony whereby the people who resort to that insult fail to ever see the blinkers they themselves are wearing: how does one rationalise the blatant contradiction between these two responses?

George Orwell would have had no difficulty whatsoever. It’s exactly how Animal Farm ends: when the farmyard animals look from the pigs to the humans, then from the humans to the pigs, and can no longer tell the difference. In this case, you can swap the comments (and by extension, the entire mind-set) of your typical diehard Labour and diehard Nationalist supporter, and nobody would even notice.

That, at least, is the obvious comparison. There is however a less obvious and rather more sinister one, this time from 1984. At one point in the novel, O’Brien – a senior agent of the Thought Police, though we don’t know it yet – interviews Winston Smith pretending to be recruiting for the resistance movement. One of the questions he asks him is: “If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?”

Winston’s reply is an unhesitant ‘yes’.

In both scenarios, there is an inevitable political paradox at work. In order to overthrow the humans (and then manage the farm profitably), the pigs of Animal Farm have to become human – i.e, the very thing they fought against. And in order to overthrow Big Brother, the resistance movement (helpfully named ‘the Brotherhood’, in case you hadn’t already spotted the resemblance) would effectively and willingly become as brutal and savage as the regime it was trying to replace.

Malta’s contemporary political reality may be far removed from the political context of either Animal Farm or 1984, but we have all seen the same paradox in action time and again over the past half century. I could start with the same example I brought up in one of the abovementioned articles – the ‘threat to democracy’, as described by Busuttil.

It goes like this: Joseph Muscat threatens democracy through a plan to cancel a round of local council elections… and this is utterly unacceptable to an Opposition party which had, when in government, cancelled elections in two localities through a cynical and ruthless electoral ploy. On his part, Muscat defends himself from Busuttil’s criticism by reminding everyone of what the PN did in Marsa and Zejtun…. conveniently forgetting that his own Labour Party had described those tactics in exactly the same way as Busuttil describes them today, as a threat to democracy.

What, then, are we left with? Both parties would willingly threaten democracy, and deprive thousands of people of the right to vote, if it somehow served their own partisan interest. Likewise, both parties will simply mutate into each other every few years, depending on whether they are in government or opposition. And of course, all the mindless automatons waving their flags will continue to insist that ‘their’ party is preferable to the other… even when both are blatantly guilty of the same anti-democratic behaviour.

That’s just one example. We got another this week, when a visiting UN human rights agency urged Malta to do more for the prevention of torture and ill-treatment of people deprived of their liberty.

“We acknowledge the first step the Maltese authorities have taken towards preventing torture and ill-treatment by ratifying the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, and designating two monitoring bodies,” it said.

How interesting, that Malta took its “first step” towards preventing torture in 2014… when this was actually one of the core promises before the 1987 election. “Ill-treatment of people deprived of their liberty” was an intrinsic component of the ‘Xoghol Gustizzja Liberta’ motif, overshadowed by the death of Nardu Debono in police custody in 1981. You can still find Youtube clips of the final 1987 electoral debate, in which Eddie Fenech Adami pledged to reform the police interrogation procedure if elected. The reality, however, is that PN governments resisted introducing more rights for people in custody for almost 25 years. Even today, we still have a malfunctioning police custody regime that has already been indicted by European Court of Human Rights rulings.

Evidently, things that were ‘undemocratic’ or reprehensible while that party was in opposition, suddenly became less undemocratic and more acceptable the moment it got into power.

At this point it should be getting clearer where the real threat to democracy really lies. And in classic Orwell fashion, it consists in the subtle manipulation of words.

When people like Simon Busuttil or Joseph Muscat talk about ‘threats to democracy’, their understanding of that word is not necessarily the same as you’ll find in any dictionary. They understand ‘democracy’ to mean a system which only works when their own party is in power. So any situation in which the other party is in power is automatically ‘undemocratic’… even if that party was elected fair and square, and behaves exactly the same as the other party when in government.

Labour illustrated this by condemning as ‘undemocratic’ the same PN government actions it plans to perpetrate today. The PN illustrated it by condemning as ‘undemocratic’ the same thing it did in 2004. It has, in a nutshell, become impossible to tell the difference between pigs and humans, and vice versa.

Where does this all lead? Inevitably, it leads to a totalitarian mindset of the kind Orwell tried to warn us against all those years ago. Already there is an overwhelming ideological belief in the inherent superiority of one’s own party. Take that concept to its natural conclusion, and you will end up with a situation whereby the great mass of voters in this country would willingly opt to turn Malta into a one-party state: ‘their’ party, to the exclusion of everyone else.

We can see this mentality in the increasingly unstable and contradictory behaviour of the two party leaders, but also in the knee-jerk responses to criticism by their more brainwashed supporters. For these people, the only important thing is that ‘their’ party achieves and maintains power at all costs. So if it becomes necessary to (hypothetically speaking… but who knows? In future maybe literally, too) “throw sulphuric acid into a child’s face” in order to achieve that aim… like Winston Smith, their unhesitant answer will be “yes”.

And that, my dear Joseph and Simon, is the real threat to democracy in this country, and I’m not surprised neither of you can see it. It is, after all, difficult to recognise a threat, when that threat is yourself.