A couple of Saturdays ago I drove over to the Barren Valley Shopping Centre for brekkie. There’s a cubby in the food court that serves breakfast for $7.90. It’s cheap, it’s nearby, and best of all, I don’t have to cook it.

It was too early for the weekend rush so I had a chat with the woman on duty while the cook went about the task of sizzling and toasting. I’d bought The Age, which lay open on the counter. The woman noted President Obama’s photo on the front page — he’d just given the Cairo speech — and wondered how long he had to live. I seconded her worry, remarking that politicians who spoke of uniting different cultures and especially religions were usually targeted for death by Right Wing dividers.

To my surprise she started to talk about the situation in Israel. She knew all about hardliner Binyamin Netanyahu and moderate Tzipi Livni and their opposing views on a separate Palestinian state. I was blown away. Most people who work in a food court are barely able to grunt when local politics are raised, let alone foreign affairs.

Then she returned to Obama’s speech. She wasn’t so sure about his opening salutation of Salaam Aleikum. I was about to differ on its utter appropriateness when the brekkie was delivered. Putting the plate on a tray, she said: “Almost the very next thing Obama talked about was the Holocaust. You know, don’t you, that millions being killed is a lie. I doubt the toll was more than a hundred thousand.”

Now I was blown away again. I gibbered something before saying, “Well, I’m off to eat. See you later.” I found a table well away from the food court and sat there for a stunned minute or two before opening The Age to read the news of the day. But for the life of me, I was unable to concentrate. What in the hell had I just heard?

Here was a woman in her mid-fifties, seemingly intelligent and definitely articulate. A Holocaust denier. So how, in the face of irrefutable proof, could she maintain the belief that the Holocaust had killed so few? I guess I was lucky to get away before she could go on about “what really happened”.

Are the brains of Holocaust-deniers (and creationists too, for that matter) defective? What part of their cognitive faculties is switched off so that belief replaces reality? I have no problem with debating reality: what it really is and how many of them there are. Reality, in this case, is what we all agree on, but beliefs are the stillborn offspring of dogma, and, as Robert Anton Wilson said, “When dogma enters brain, all intellectual activity ceases.” The vital signs are there, but the brain is dead.

Belief is where you part company with complexity. Holocaust deniers believe that six million Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and the physically and mentally impaired did not perish at the hands of the Nazis, just as creationists believe that God created the earth in six days some four or five millennia ago. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in both cases.

If Holocaust denial weren’t bad enough, my face almost fell into the eggs when I read about what amounts to the other extreme end of this spectrum. That of Michael Ben-Ari, an MP for the right-wing Nation Union Party in Israel. He was recently arrested during rioting by settlers in the occupied West Bank. These settlers are as blind as their opposites in Holocaust denial. They regard the Palestinians the same way the Nazis regarded the Jews. Of Obama’s speech, Ben-Ari said: “Mr Obama’s hatred for the people of Israel led him to deliver a most dangerous speech that exposed his pro-Islamic trends.”

Is this man insane? How could he interpret Obama’s speech as full of hatred or pro anything except world peace … unless he is stark raving mad?

But this is the world we live in. Peopled by far too many subs ‘n’ duds who are clearly out of their minds.

But leave us not forget their leaders. That Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Burmese Generals continue to rule with unrelenting cruelty while the Free World looks on is indicative of the moral failure that plagues all governments. Kim Jong-il of North Korea may be the worst of all. He has the mental capacity of a booze-addled eleven-year-old in charge of a military with nuclear capabilities. Recently we’ve heard that Kim is favouring his youngest son to replace him as Dear Leader. And why not the eldest son? Well, that nong fell out of favour with daddy when it was discovered that he snuck into Japan to go to Disneyland.

At least we hear on the odd occasion of Zimbabweans and Burmese challenging authority. But, aside from the international antics of disgraced number one son, the people of North Korea are phantoms.

Remember that lethal fool George W. Bush? Like the madmen above, he simply stole elections. A fundamentalist Christian, he is identical to his fundamentalist Muslim enemy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Bush claimed over and over that God was instructing him in everything he did. Ahmadinejad claimed that he was surrounded by light when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2005. But the “light” wasn’t coming from Dubya’s God, it was coming from his own personal deity.

The beat thuds on when we read that the world’s most wanted war criminal, Ratko Mladic, is living openly in Belgrade; or if not there, elsewhere. Serbian authorities are miffed that the unauthorized release of this information might jeopardise their entry into the EU. But they are mum about successive Serbian governments and the military keeping him safe all this time. The point being surely that his alleged part in the murder of 7000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica was no more than a soldier doing his duty. One thing is sure, the world’s overfunded spy agencies have been conspicuously impotent in his capture. Just as they allowed hundreds of Nazis to get away after WWII. In some cases they even helped the war criminals to migrate freely to other countries.

We also read of James von Brunn, an 88-year-old American Holocaust-denying fascist who walked into Washington’s Holocaust Center and shot dead a black security guard. He was wounded by two other security guards before he got the chance to murder others. A fellow white supremacist wrote on his blog: “He was trying to set Our Race free”. If only this representative of “Our Race” would look in the mirror he would see that the only members of the race he is trying to save amount to white trash.

Racism and nationalism go hand on spotty cock. To paraphrase Yu Hua, referring to the post-Tiananmen Square generation of Chinese nationalists: They “have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities.” Indeed, they could easily devolve into today’s equivalent of the fanatically murderous Red Guards. The only thing separating the Chinese nationalists with the inbreds among their Western brethren is religion.

It’s like we’re still living in the Dark Ages; or worse, trying to return to them. During Europe’s nadir at least the Islamic world flourished. Now every last religion is in mortal danger of being overrun by its extremist elements. They may be a minority, but they are a minority with weapons and the fanatic’s lust to use them in the name of each religion’s blinkered self-righteousness.

Tariq Ali is correct in naming the present era a “clash of fundamentalisms”. Anti-evolutionary extremists are like robots run amuck. The Christian who believes a foetus has more rights than its mother; the Jewish settler who burns Palestinian crops because his God decreed the land to be sacred for Jews and Jews only; The Islamic terrorist who beats to death a young girl because she went to school. It is these people, those among us, who look just like us, who have declared war on humanity. But it’s not just a battle between tolerance and intolerance, your god or his god, it’s a battle between sanity and insanity.
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Addendum: The man whose name could be transmogrified into Ahm-as-mad-as-a-Djinn was never in doubt to win the Iranian election. When a nation is ruled by clerics, you can be sure their chosen halfwit will be victorious. Just look at Franco of Spain. The Catholic Church backed him to the hilt, the other end of which he drove into the heart of his nation.

Technorati Tags: Christian fundamentalists, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Jewish settlers, nationalism, Obama, religion, Taliban, terrorism

Blog Tags: Christian fundamentalists, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Jewish settlers, nationalism, Obama, religion, Taliban, terrorism