Invisible people

There was a documentary on Discovery not long ago - I imagine it is now available on YouTube, but sadly I've forgotten the title - about the curiously consistent habit of dictatorial regimes to 'doctor' photos (and video footage, where available) in order to 'remove' various undesirables from public view.

As I recall Josef Stalin was by far the most regular item on the menu: largely thanks to his penchant for suddenly declaring former allies and comrades as 'enemies of the state'... and, having duly liquidated the individual/s concerned, the logical next step was obviously to remove all documentary evidence that they had ever existed.

Not all cases were quite as sinister, however. One example that stuck in my mind was a rather famous photograph of a sword-wielding Benito Mussolini striking a distinctly Napoleonic pose on horseback. In the best-known version of that photo, which I even remember from our history textbooks at school, Il Duce himself was the only human figure visible. We now know, however, that the original photograph also featured a second human subject: the horse had to be held in check by a horse-handler while the photo was being taken.

Looked back on today, it seems a rather laughable exercise in political megalomania: but you can still more or less appreciate the strategy at work. After all, 'great leaders' should be obeyed and revered by all and sundry... and that presumably includes their horses as well. It wouldn't do, Mussolini's propagandists reasoned, to project the image of the Great Duce needing someone else to keep his horse still. It might conceivably impart the notion that Benito himself was somewhat less than superhuman - unable to bend even such a lowly equestrian brain to his own iron will - and as that was naturally unthinkable, the horse-boy had to go.

Well, Mussolini, Stalin et al were by no means the only people we know to have resorted to such elaborate pre-Photoshop techniques to make sure their version of history got into the history books. Even here in Malta we have witnessed our own fair share of celluloid 'disappearances' over the years... and some bore a remarkable resemblance to the Mussolini method.

The most widely cited example remains to this day the 1980s Xandir Malta policy of reducing Eddie Fenech Adami to nothing more than a nameless, shadowy figure referred to only as 'Il-Kap tal-Oppozizzjoni'. And at roughly the same time (though this was not quite as immediately evident) the map of the world behind the newscaster was also 'doctored': this time it was Great Britain, no less, that was temporarily removed from the picture altogether.

In any case: times change, governments fall and are replaced... but the same strategy has been upheld throughout. A much more recent example was a 2003 NET TV report, ostensibly about MEUSAC's pre-referendum consultation with civil society, in which the video footage was crudely edited to remove AD chairman Harry Vassallo from all the frames.

Curiously, for a political party that had deplored an identical tactic when used against its own leader, the PN had clearly instructed its media to pursue Benito's policy of removing from the picture anything that might reduce his own importance in the grander scheme of things. So in the run-up to the 2004 election, Harry Vassallo became a 'non-person' (not perhaps in the Stalinist sense of the word, but certainly in the horse-boy sense) at the helm of a 'non-party'.

And sure enough the same technique rears its decidedly ugly head today. Only this time, the irony is of truly monumental proportions. Remember the TV station formerly known as 'Xandir Malta' - that's right, the very same that had once censored Fenech Adami's name altogether, and had even tried to rewrite European geography to suit the propaganda purposes of the government that controlled it at the time? Well, it has just celebrated its 50^th anniversary... without a single mention or a single image of virtually any of the people who contributed (regardless how, or to what effect) to that same station's development over the same 50 years.

Norman Hamilton, Josette Grech (now also Hamilton), Joe Vella, Mario Micallef, Charles Flores... these are but a few of today's 'non-people' as far as the controllers of Malta's national station are concerned. Not only were they omitted from the guest-list of Xandir Malta's 50^th anniversary celebrations (the Hamiltons' being arguably the most glaring omissions here... having been part of the furniture at the same Television House, Gwardamangia, for nearly half that station's existence), but they were studiously omitted even from the video installations projected onto the building's façade to commemorate the occasion.

What all these cases have in common is a very simple equation that lies at the heart of all political propaganda. Benito Mussolini felt that 'a true picture' of events would be to his disadvantage... so he simply presented a fake one instead. Around 70- years later, the Nationalist Party clearly feels a true picture of TVM's chequered history would undermine its own influence - presumably by reminding  people that there was a time, long ago, when the PN did not actually control everything at all - and just like all the little tin-pot dictators this little planet of ours has ever seen, today's government felt its own short-term self-interest was of far greater importance than the truth.

The exact same equation applied equally to the 1980s Mintoff/KMB regime, which had also regularly distorted the true picture in order to achieve its own political aims. So is there any reason under the sun - any reason at all - why it should not also apply to the government led by Lawrence Gonzi... a government that has time and again proved to be simply no better than the people it likes to criticise so much?

I don't think there is a reason myself. So just as the PN has always (quite rightly) demanded apologies over the shameful excesses of Xandir Malta in the 1980s, I for one feel that an apology is now in order for the same stations' shoddy distortion of its own recent history. And it's not just the Hamiltons, the Vellas, the Micallefs, et al, who deserve an apology, either.

It's also to us, the prime shareholders in a national station that has now officially gone all the way back to its darkest days of 'Run Rabbit Run'.