When Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated, an entire world was blown up to pieces with her. Malta is now a foreign country with foreign masters. We cannot begin to understand our own dumbstruck silence if we reduce it to psychological shock or a failure to find the right words.

The problem is not lack of composure or vocabulary. It’s not the speaker’s state of mind but our entire language – the benchmarks and appeals to common sense we use to explain how our world works – that is shattered.

Believing such an assassination couldn’t happen in Malta – that the enemy of the rule of law was not that sinister – has been exposed as not much different from believing in witchcraft or lucky underwear. Our common sense was a lie. We now recall our old selves speak and realise that all along we had been saying that 2 x 2 = 13.

It turns out she wasn’t being over the top when she said criminal organisations were taking over the country. She got it exactly right. Or perhaps, for once, she understated matters. The sheer violence of her death far exceeds what she claimed. The enemy wants us to know its fury is volcanic.

It wants more. The assassination’s aim was pour encourager les autres, to ‘encourage’ the others, to cite one of Daphne’s favourite expressions.

Les autres. That’s all of us who demand justice. Our common sense had all the proportions wrong. Now we must find a truly proportionate response.

It must be adequate to the scale of the challenge: fighting for justice in a country of cardboard institutions, where many of those supposed to help catch her killers were denounced for their conflicted or absent loyalties where the rule of law is concerned.

No response is adequate without action. But the first action has to be getting our language right so that, finally, we can recognise things as they are.

We must be ruthless even with well-meant language. No, je ne suis pas Daphne.  Not a single one of us is Daphne. She was the one blown up. We are still here.

The enemy doesn’t mind us saying we’re Daphne. It smacks of a mask we choose to wear: a step forward while hiding behind her name. It’s a ritual condemnation. Good enough for catharsis, perhaps, but it will wear off, just like the effect of a memorial, a plaque, a street name – all tombstones, not doorways to justice.

We must be les autres, the strangers in their own land, ready like Daphne to stake their own name. Now that we’ve discovered Malta is a foreign country, a foreign collective name is what we need.

Let us also be cautious with analogies, as they can be misleading. It is understandable that comparisons are made to the violent attack, almost 40 years ago, on this newspaper. That, too, was an attack on free expression. But there are important differences.

Then, some of the attackers were identified, even if not brought to justice. Daphne’s assassins are faceless and with a hand choosing its timing carefully, so as to bog the investigators down in multiple avenues of inquiry.

At the time, violence was routine. Its aim was to keep people disturbed. This time, the violence is selective and meant to be rare. Its aim is to promise peace and quiet to those who shut up.

Its insidious aim is to fragment the opposition to it. It takes over the institutions as a hidden hand. You can never be sure whether to trust the public servant before you, whether he is your ally or your enemy. So you get used to contenting yourself with the protection of those who might themselves attack you.

This time, the violence is selective and meant to berare. Its aim is to promise peace and quiet to those who shut up

Here is a difference from the mid-1980s. Then, everyone felt the end had to be close, one way or the other. Daphne’s death feels like it is just a beginning.

If it isn’t – if it is the end – then it can only mean one of two things. Either justice will be done. Or else her assassination will, in time, come to seem like that of Karen Grech. Unsolved and only ritually remembered.

Let us then be aware of the real stakes. Matthew Caruana Galizia is objectively right when he describes his mother’s assassination as war. He is naming it for what it is.

‘War’ is not the howl of anguish of a grieving son who found his mother’s torn-apart body scattered all around him. It is the right term to describe a bombing aimed at retaining control over part of our country.

No, it wasn’t just an attack on freedom of expression. It was a planned military attack that took out a leader of free opinion.

One of the first actions of a coup d’état is a takeover of the main broadcasting stations and the destruction of communication lines. This assassination sought to destroy Daphne’s website and information network, without which some of our country’s greatest scandals would not have been exposed.

So it’s war. And Daphne’s death will mark all of us because we are all, now, a war generation. It remains only to find out what part we shall play: the resistance, the collaborators, the black marketeers...

One thing is clear. It will be almost impossible to identify her killers with certainty if motive cannot be established. Which means that the court cases instigated by her claims must continue – if nothing else to prove her mistaken and eliminate unnecessary suspicions of motive.

Her most important claims – like those against Joseph Muscat, Keith Schembri, Konrad Mizzi, Chris Cardona and Adrian Delia – must now be investigated with urgency by experts and agencies who have the public’s trust.

If Muscat is serious about leaving no stone unturned and making sure justice is seen to be done, then he and the Panama gang must immediately drop their appeal against Simon Busuttil’s case calling for their investigation. If they are innocent, the investigation will show it.

It is not mere remembrance that we owe Daphne. We must not let ourselves become merely those who can remember where they were when they heard she was blown up.

We owe it to her, and to ourselves, to be les autres, the war generation. Those who can remember the precise moment when they decided to enlist and fight back.

ranierfsadni@europe.com