Denial Is Not Just A River In Egypt – Part One.

Denial is an interesting business; it is a phenomenon which has ensnared the modern human and one which threatens, one way or another, to kill us all, and so here at Let’s Ask Elroy™ we say maybe it’s time to dip our tootsies in the water and see what it is we do and don’t believe, and who do and don’t believe it.

The denial industry is thriving at the moment; we have Iraq War denial, climate change denial, 9/11 denial and, shock horror, holocaust denial. Opposing tribes are at war and unfortunately, like all wars, truth is the first casualty, and it seems that whoever controls the truth gets to say who is in denial and who is being full, frank and honest with the population at large.

Lets take the Iraq War. Without the support of one Rupert Murdoch, the Iraq war would be over; in fact, it would never have been started and the War On Terror wouldn’t exit either. They were both predicated on intelligence now known to be suspect, and there were many voices at the time crying out the same message, but those voices were exiled to the wilderness. They were, we were assured, lone nuts and Internet partisans, heretics and traitors, maniacal deniers who had not left their bedrooms since 1996 and not anyone to take seriously.

Well, it looks like the lone nuts were right, but not for everyone. The war’s cheerleaders still believe that WMD are down there somewhere and that the USA will create Geneva-on-the-Tigris, and those that want to believe that do. The White House doesn’t, they know what’s going on, that’s why they have returned to funding Sunni extremists in order to fight the Shiites they came to save, but although the true believers keep on keepin’ on, the tide is turning on them; they are themselves becoming the one in denial.

However, the catastrophe in Iraq is, in some way finite, provable in the most gruesome of terms – refugees, body counts, blood n’ guts, collapsing infrastructure – but global warming is far more fertile ground for obfuscation. The concept of global warming has been around for a while, but as it is only now that it has reached some sort of critical mass, so it is only now that we see criticism of it ramped up to the point hysteria.

But this time the flipper is on the other foot as the establishment finds itself cast as the denier. Oops! Did I say denier? I meant realist! This time deniers are not nutbag partisans hell bent on nobbling the opposition because they are, well, the opposition, this time the deniers are noble crusaders for truth and justice. They are still heretics but more of your ‘Joan Of Arc’ stylee, and those that oppose them are but closed-minded zealots deaf to legitimate arguments and terrified of real debate.

Yes! Behold the brave forces of the Establishment as they dare to take on that mighty army of socialist radicals who hate industry, gasp with admiration as they toil against anti-capitalist commies who want nothing more to than take down the system and reduce us all to serfs whose very lives are dependent on five-year tractor quotas!

And thanks to the Murdoch noise machine this stuff is cutting through, but the next on the list of controversies has not been so favoured. The story of 9/11 is one of The Greatest Ever Told, and for this tale no dissent is to be tolerated. Far from being applauded for seeking honest discussion, those worried that the Legend Of September 11 might be tad iffy are maligned, marginalized and vilified to within an inch of their laptops; suddenly, heretics are back to being burned at the stake and any idea that they may have anything to add to the debate is spat upon. Funny that, eh?

The powers-that-be are also in no mood to be messin’ with the holocaust either. One of Western civilization’s last great taboos, to be accused of denying that the holocaust happened is one of the most potent pejoratives in the arsenal of political insults available to man; it is so serious a smear that all other ‘deniers’ are damned by implication, except for global warming ones who manage to use this association as proof of their victim hood while simultaneously employing it to mitigate their position (‘It’s not’, they whine, ‘as if we’re holocaust deniers!’).

If 9/11 deniers are heretics to be burned at the stake, then holocaust deniers are Satan incarnate. So foul are the connotations of being called a holocaust denier that historians who class themselves as holocaust revisionists are tarred with the same putrid bush; however, the revisionists merely claim that they are, with the benefit of sixty years’ worth of hindsight and technological advances, just trying to work out the truth of what happened.

So just as truth is relative, so is the search for it. You are either a champion of veracity and actuality, or you are an evil subversive heading for a detention camp for enemy-enablers nowhere near you depending on which, or whose, truth you seek. It would appear that the inside running for the truth is with whoever gets their story in first; the CIA, Pentagon, State Department and White House with Iraq, the Greenies and environmentalists on global warming, the White House et al again with 9/11 and the Allies, better known now as the UN Security Council, with the holocaust. Establishment United 3; Nutbags Athletic 1.

Watch out for Part 2 – The rest of the mess!