Human rights apply to masons, too…

Around 20 years ago I spent a year in the United States: most of it in Kansas as an exchange student. 

The Sunflower State was disappointing in some ways, and rewarding in others. There were plenty of tornadoes, for instance… but as Kansas is only marginally smaller than Italy, these tended to take place as far away as I currently am from the Dolomites.

On one occasion, I even got a phone call from my mother to enquire if I was still alive, after she saw a news bulletin about a twister near Topeka. (As it happens, news of this tornado managed to reach her in Malta, on the clean other side of the globe, before reaching me in Lawrence, a mere 400 miles away.)

So in the end, I was never whisked away to the land of Oz… which was all along my original plan. No cowardly lions. No tin woodmen, either. Any amount of talking scarecrows, though... most of whom tried selling me drugs in bus stations. A classic case, I suppose, of how the book is always going to be better than the real life experience…

On the plus side, I can now safely assert that “I am not in Kansas anymore”… and for a change, it would actually be true. 

In any case: Kansas made up for its lack of munchkins and flying monkeys in other, unpredictable ways. I discovered what must be the best value-for-money street food served anywhere in the world: $1.99 for a prime cut of fillet, served with a mountain of chips (sorry, ‘fries’) through a sidewalk-level window on Massachussets Avenue.

I also learnt that the huge, imposing Gothic edifice frowning over the entire town was not, as I first imagined, the ‘Town Hall’. It was actually the local Masonic Lodge, complete with masonic symbols above the main door.

Even now I remember my jaw dropping at this discovery. What do you mean, a masonic lodge? Isn’t freemasonry supposed to be a ‘secret’ society? Don’t they gather in people’s basements, wear aprons, and hatch plots for world domination, etc.?

‘Oh yes’, I was cheerfully told (that, by the way, was another pleasant surprise about Kansas. Everyone’s so goddamn cheerful all the time…) ‘… but only in the movies’.

In real life, by way of contrast, it was more or less customary for the largest building in any Midwestern town – occupying the same prominence as a parish church in a Maltese setting – to be a masonic lodge. And far from congregating in secret, freemasons in America tend to be very conspicuous, respectable and active members of the community. 

They are mostly associated with charity, I was told.

Well, I remember thinking: that’s not exactly how the case for freemasonry was presented to us back home. In Malta, the phenomenon was talked about in almost exactly the same terms usually reserved for Satanism. Even the Maltese word for it has a quality of horror about it somehow. ‘Mazun’: it reverberates with untold, unsleeping malice…

And there is evidence that this sinister word still has the power to cause minor shockwaves. The prime minister, for instance, has just expressed his opinion that ‘freemasonry’ should be banned altogether: i.e., consigned to the same level of criminality we associate with illegal drugs. 

In Malta, freemasonry IS a secret society. I don’t know if its members plot global domination, or even wear aprons… but it is rumoured that joining a masonic lodge entails ‘perks’ for the members; that masons try to infiltrate various power nodes – for instance, the judiciary – and use those positions for their fraternity’s mutual benefit.

The same perception also exists in the States, by the way. But in that context, it is no different from the sort of legitimate power network that is already broadly accepted in the form of ‘old boys’ networks’: the Ivy League springs to mind, or even campus fraternities.

Why, then, is our attitude towards masonry so different? Why is it acceptable in one culture, and absolutely ‘verboten’ in another?

To answer that question, you’d have to go into our bizarre history of association with this (locally) mysterious phenomenon.  And that would involve having to explain how the word ‘Mazun’, in years gone by, was deliberately blown out of proportion to be used as a weapon against political adversaries. 

This, for instance, is a quote from an article that appeared in the Times in 2011: “One good starting point for a critical reassessment of Lord Strickland would be a study of the hysterical hate that he aroused in the Church and the Nationalist establishments. The pelting of him and his daughters during the campaign of 1927, the swearing of a false affidavit by Ettore Bono (Terinu) to the effect that 30 years before he had seen Lord Strickland dressed in full Masonic regalia (“the Nationalists’ nastiest move … which, for the greatest possible effect, they left up to the very last moment of the election”, Aquilina, p. 178) and his attempted assassination would have been unthinkable were it not for the atmosphere created by the establishment…”

So the ‘nastiest move’ imaginable, back in the 1920s, was to label someone a ‘mason’. How on earth do you explain that to someone who regards ‘masons’ as little more than harmless philanthropists, to be found in any town or city across the American Midwest? 

And that was in the 1920s, when the Church-State ‘establishment’, alluded to in this quote, was infinitely more powerful than it is today. Yet even now, there are calls to declare the entire concept of ‘freemasonry’ illegal… in a country which also recognises ‘freedom of association’ as a fundamental, inalienable human right.

At which point, the precise meaning of the word ‘masonry’ becomes important to define. You can’t (as Muscat did) talk about banning something, unless you are very clear what it is you would like to ban, and why.

These questions were easier to answer in the 1920s. When Ettore ‘Terinu’ Bono testified against Lord Strickland, the implication was not so much that Strickland was a member of a secret society that used its influence in unholy ways. It was more that he was (according to the fabricated charges) a member of a mysterious and little understood cult-like phenomenon one associated at the time with the Occult. 

What powered the hysteria about ‘mazuneria’ back then was its almost supernatural aura… not its actual activities, legally questionable though these may have been, and may still be. And the same, artificially-inflated hysteria can be seen to have served a political purpose.

Would things have worked out differently for the masons, had their not cause not been hijacked by an establishment hell-bent on destroying one politician in 1927? Might we otherwise be in a situation today whereby masons – like their American equivalents – are just another legitimate organisation, alongside the Rotary Club or the Hospice Movement?

Probably not, because the stigma associated with masonry goes back much further than that. But the possibility is worth contemplating all the same. And the end of the day, masons in Malta were driven underground by an all-too recognisable pattern of fear, nourished through ignorance and fuelled by political manipulation. And once underground, the society found it easier to enact precisely those alleged activities that render them so suspicious in the first place.

Had they been out in the open all along… as they are in Kansas… they might find it slightly harder to indulge in all the things their horrendous local reputation is built on. Like diverting the course of justice, for instance. 

To put it another way: if we mistrust masonry because of its ‘secrecy’… then the problem is very clearly the secrecy, not the organisation itself. And if that secrecy is used by masons for illegal ends… then, by the same token, it is the same illegal ends that should concern us, not masonry.

In all this talk of ‘banning’ masonry, we seem to have overlooked the most basic of legal considerations. As a rule, it is the activity that constitutes the crime, not the perpetrator. The Mafia, for instance, would not be classified as a secret criminal organisation if it sold flowers openly by the roadside. It was a combination of extortion, drug trafficking, murder and other various underground criminal activities that earned it its international notoriety over the centuries. 

And when Mafiosi are brought to trial, they are tried for the crimes they committed… not just for their association with the Mafia. 

The same applies (or should apply) to all other organisations and belief systems. We do not ‘ban Islam’ when a Muslim suicide bomber blows up a market place. Instead, we strengthen anti-terror laws, and combat the act of terrorism in itself. Likewise, we do not talk of ‘banning the Catholic Church’ when its members are caught molesting little children.

In all such cases, we make the distinction between the institution and the actions of its constituents. Yet when members of another organisation are suspected of crimes, our knee-jerk reaction is to propose banning the organisation altogether… overlooking the tiny detail that ‘freemasonry’ has historically thrived precisely for having been placed outside the law, and therefore beyond its reach.

So instead of proposing a ban on freemasonry, it would be considerably more helpful of Muscat to strengthen the country’s institutional watchdogs: you know, the authorities that supposedly exist to scrutinise public administration, and keep their eyes open for precisely the sort of malfeasance we associate with masonry In the first place.

This way, we might be able to start addressing the country’s maladministration problems… without blatantly violating the fundamental right to freedom of association.