Mintoff of Abel, Mintoff of Cain

Paying homage to his own lifelong hero and mentor, former Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici yesterday claimed that "Mintoff was divisive because conservatives resisted his reforms."

Coming from Mintoff's own anointed successor (who would play a lead role in many of the more contentious events that now define the man's legacy) this simple observation seems to place its finger squarely on the very fault-line of the division now clearly epitomised by Il-Perit.

Like all to have publicly eulogised the former MLP strongman since his death on Monday, Mifsud Bonnici's praise only tells us half the story. It projects Dom Mintoff as a benevolent, visionary but ultimately much misunderstood social reformer, whose plans to improve social welfare and mobility were at every point sabotaged by a capitalist elite hell-bent on defending its own ill-gotten privileges at all costs.

If I may elaborate on one of his own more memorable quotes from the distant 1970s, this represents the 'Mintoff of Abel' - a progressive, forward-looking and much-loved national leader, who was ultimately defeated by a combination of forces motivated (naturally, with the help of 'foreign interference') by brutish, unscrupulous greed.

As for his reforms, these would - always according to the same interpretation - include such seminal innovations as a national pension scheme (non-existent before 1956), as well as a local, arguably more generous version of Britain's National Health Service.

The Mintoff of Abel also consciously embarked on a partial secularization of Malta, aiming (in his own words, circa 1960) to 'remove the cobwebs of the Inquisition'.

Elsewhere, his admiration for Egypt's Abdul Gamal Nasser - who both nationalized the Suez canal in 1956, and fended off aggressive military intervention by both Britain and France - led to a similar programme of nationalization of strategic assets: mainly focusing on the private banking sector, whose annexation permitted the fledgling Socialist government of the early 1970s to hammer out the rudiments of a national economy, against a backdrop in which all the country's financial instruments had hitherto been in private (often foreign) hands.

Yet indirectly, Mifsud Bonnici's own praise also subconsciously makes the case for a diametrically opposed view - the 'Mintoff of Cain', whose own greed and brutish determination ultimately unravelled the bonds that might otherwise have kept us together as a united nation.

For whatever one makes of the mystery that is Mintoff, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was certainly right on one detail. Conservatives (and not just conservatives) did indeed resist many of Mintoff's reforms.

How could they do otherwise, when so many of these 'reforms' involved wresting from their ownership companies and institutions that their own families had patiently built up over generations... without compensation, and in some case through what his detractors insist was a skilful but ultimately dishonest abuse of the legal system of the day?

These grievances, coupled with frequent accusations of threats, blackmail and occasional violence, form the bulk of the many complaints that still simmer beneath the surface, in a country that has (let's face it) never fully recovered from the dilemmas and polemics of 40 years ago and more.

Moreover, the same 'reforms' alluded to by Mifsud Bonnici often ended up in national institutions being dismantled or even destroyed, sometimes taking decades to rebuild: for instance the University of Malta's Faculty of Arts, reduced to a token department within the newly formed Faculty of Education, because its members had earlier criticised government's handling of the doctors' strike of 1977 in a letter to The Times.

This in turn conjures up the image of 'Dom Mintoff the bulldozer', who used his political strength to literally smash his way through all resistance with little regard for the wreckage he left in his wake. And paradoxically, it is an image none too far removed from the one so evidently cherished and idolized by his many thousands of devotees.

Listening to wildly conflicting assessments from opposing camps, what immediately strikes the impartial observer (if such a creature can even be said to exist) is not so much how very different their respective recollections are from each other... rather, it is how different their reactions are to what is after all the same picture.

Take, for instance, very gruffness of Mintoff's rhetoric, that served to smash through the barricades of political correctness much as his government's policies smashed through so much of the country's political backdrop of his day. It terrified and appalled his opponents as much as it exhilarated and galvanized his supporters: at the same time, and for much the same reasons, too.

This may in turn shed light on why there can probably never be any common ground struck between the polar opposite extremes of public opinion. It has less to do with the sheer distance between these two sides, than with the fact Dom Mintoff was himself the product of a country whose loyalties were inherently divided long before he even came onto the scene in the late 1930s.

The Malta of Mintoff's childhood was itself a showcase for the very starkness of this divide. A glance at the diary of former British Governor Charles Bonham Carter (among other eye-witness accounts) reveals the intrinsically dichotomized landscape of the 1930s, in which filthy slums - inhabited by barefoot, lice-ridden multitudes - somehow nestled side by side with affluent neighbourhoods almost without any communication taking place between the two parallel universes.

For much the same reason Mintoff comes to represent an insoluble paradox unto himself: Socialist warhorse though he came to be known, Mintoff the man quite comfortably managed to straddle both worlds simultaneously. Born penniless in the backstreets of Bormla, the champion of the working class went on to become a Rhodes scholar, marry into a wealthy British family, and on his return to Malta made a small-ish fortune for himself in post-war reconstruction contracts.

Images from his later career reveal a Mintoff bedecked in almost laughable trappings of the upper middle class: his sprawling properties in Tarxien and Marsaxlokk, and above all his proverbial fondness for horses and horse-riding - with all the perceived 'elitism' this must have evoked at the time.

Even Mintoff's choice of political adversaries often pitched him on a collision course with the very faction he was supposed to represent. In a country where vast swathes of the population owed their livelihoods directly to British military presence (some 14,000 employed directly by the Dockyards in the mid-1950s, and countless more indirectly); the very idea of a Malta free from British military bases was simply terrifying to the working class on whose behalf Mintoff demanded it.

Likewise, his epochal clash with the Church must have both hurt and confused the very grassroots of his own party: the proverbial underprivileged, downtrodden masses, which had traditionally always viewed the Church as the very first line of defence against injustice.

And his career developed - and with it, the sphere of his own influence - it became manifest that it was not Mintoff himself (nor for that matter the Malta he shaped after his own image and likeness) that was irremediably divided. The entire world, as Mintoff knew it, was likewise torn asunder.

To return to Mintoff's 'two Europes' analogy, there was inevitably a choice of allegiance to be made everywhere one looked: a choice between the Europe of Cain and the Europe of Abel, or between the twin superpowers of the United States an the Soviet Union... a dichotomy that even managed, on Mintoff's insistence, to get inscribed into our Constitution.

Small wonder, then, that it still proves so hard to elicit anything resembling an objective unbiased assessment of the man called Mintoff. How can there be, when he was both a product and an architect of so much that still divides us?