Who cares if Daphne was right?

In Malta, everyone, from our loony patriots to Joseph Muscat’s and Adrian Delia’s cheerleaders, cares about democracy.

They are vociferous about saving and safeguarding our deep-seated and hard-fought for democratic credentials. Hurrah for all our shields of liberty and freedoms. Even our own President of the Republic, HE Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, constantly – in between her full-time job of collecting pennies for all good causes – is heading a right and proper defence of the future of our democracy.

All speak about various facets of our intrinsic need to look after what we humans living on this little isle in the Med need most to exercise our rights as citizens of the Republic.

Yet even if all seem to be discussing and acting as paladins of democracy, the fissures in our fundamentals are growing visibly wider. We talk and pay lip service to this democracy while it is being eroded away in ever- stranger ways.

They say that while Rome burnt the emperor stuck to his fiddle and played away completely oblivious of all around him. While we speak and discuss and hosanna our ideals of democracy, we let true democracy burn away. We see it collapse and we – or most of us – do nothing.

Take the most heinous crime committed in Malta since independence, and probably way before that. The Daphne Caruana Galizia assassination will long remain our denial of anything coming close to democracy. A woman killed brutally is bad enough; a woman who is silenced because she knew too much and chased too much is beyond bad and brutal.

Yet what keeps being repeated hardly makes sense. A few good people in Malta and a whole phalanx of people all over the globe talk highly of how insightful Daphne was. The vow by many is to keep her investigative journalism alive and kicking.

But forgive me if I sound even more of a loon than the patriots do, or whoever is most absurd in this land of absurdity. I do not give a hoot, a fig or a flying duck if she was right or not. In fact for all I care she could be – and has been and be uncovered as – very wrong. Wrong in all she did, all she wrote, all she brought to light.

The whole scenario of her assassination – and pre-assassination executions – does not change one iota whether she spoke a whole deluge of crap or not.

To speak out, to say what you want, to investigate, to probe into things usually unprobed, all that was her sacrosanct right.

Nothing she ever did, undid, or failed to cover gave anyone the right to attack her the way they did; and nothing she ever did could ever justify her assassination.

That she was terribly right about our complete loss of true democracy, that we are faced with the possibility of a dictatorial take-over by the Labour Party and the complete dissolution of the values of the PN makes it all the worse. That she uncovered whole segments of society shackled to the underworld and all things shady; that she realised that the major deals signed by the Government of Malta post-2013 were all part of the roadmap to fatten the pockets of the few and to keep Labour perpetually in power, is even more shocking.

Since Daphne is conveniently gone, both Labour and PN hardly have anyone denouncing their dirty tricks and horrendous scandals.

All this – after all that the government and PN spokespersons did to demonise and dehumanise her – is even more horrific because she has been proved right about almost all she said.

That she rocked us to our core makes the perpetrators and those who internally are singing hallelujah that she is gone, guiltier of the worst crime against our freedom and our right to speak out.

Until that is truly understood, the clowns now discussing our future democracy might have a better future sticking to their circus of lost causes.