How do we describe denialism? – If a litany of evidence arose that consistently indicates that someone is not being entirely truthful would it be sensible to continue to implicitly believe what they say as if the evidence did not exist?

Should we then in the interests of self-interest pretend that all such damming evidence must await an ultimate disaster that may overthrow our enterprise?

During this week I [and you perhaps] have been presented with two instances of evidence being piled up and being absorbed by an ocean of indifferent denial. We have also had [or missed] our opportunities to act according to what we wanted.

The first of these involves a media blitz [in my home turf] regarding the chief of police. Evidence seems to exist that indicates that the chief may have been less than generous with the truth in his earlier observations relating to an ongoing murder investigation, and his involvement with elements incongruous with his status: in other words that he was [allegedly] hanging out with bad guys.

The mainstream media are screaming for the police chief’s suspension pending further investigation. The authorities are suggesting that the rules of evidence [innocence ’till proven- ] require that he continue to investigate the crime in which he is alleged to be complicit until he proves himself guilty [or innocent, as the case may transpire-]. The idea that the wolf could well be in the henhouse seems to have been ignored. In being ignored it will only fuel the manifest tensions implicit in our increasingly riven society. On the other hand does anyone really care? Denialism is ‘not-caring’ in action

The same thought about denialism came to me when I saw Al Gore’s movie this week at the cinema nouveaux [sic]. For those readers who missed it, Al Gore, the self-styled former, almost-President, of the USA, whose ancestors, I believe, once owned the land on which Washington was built, presumably after having ‘removed’ any previous inhabitants somehow, and who has some form of familial relationship to both the writer Gore Vidal and Mrs Jackie Onassis; this same Al Gore has produced a ‘wunderkind’ movie called ‘an inconvenient truth’ which makes a most plausible case for an impending global catastrophe of the likes unheard of since I wrote my [far less heralded] 21 episode piece called the Azanian Konfederacy some years ago.

I went to see the movie loaded with scepticism-In mind I had the recollection of my distaste at the so-thoroughly propagandistic [sic] piece of filmmaking -Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by that fellow Moore- I appreciated his basic movie- its style intent and argument, but found the absence of balance irritating. Ultimately. I was left less than convinced by the fellow’s virulently partisan argument. In a sense he went so far over the top that his case simply imploded, and his vested interest was exposed for all too see.

By contrast Gore’s message is all too real-The power being in the visuals…certainly one of the more impressive PowerPoint presentations I’ve seen over the years, and much of it validated [to me] by my own research over the past fifteen years leading up to my ‘Azanian Konfederacy’ Web presentations, January 2004.

With the Azanian Konfederacy I was setting out to construct a world that would be the context for the serialising cybersoapie [as I call it] the Yonka Memorandum, which is a giant ‘work-in-progress’ thing that I shall now return to: having finally signed off on the definitive Alpha edition of my book ‘ 7 Ways to get your money’-a handbook for debt collecting, which is proving as popular and entertaining as I had hoped and intended.

In order to write that story -the Yonka, – which I have been fooling around with now for more than twenty years [time flies while you’re having fun raising families and garnering wealth while words plod unexceptionally along] – I had to answer the question how did the world of my futuristic story [the Yonka Memorandum] come to be. Was it a dystopian world -it certainly is not utopian- but is it perhaps just a normal world like the one we know now but different because the values of that time [in the future] were different?

What I wanted for part three of my series: the Azanian Quartet, [the Yonka is part three], was/is a world in which a woman could [if she chose] walk naked the length and breadth of the Konfederacy with a purse of gold upon her head and not be molested.

There is an alleged precedent for this. Apparently the short-lived Mongol Empire was such a place. But there the basis was terror. The awful fate that befell anyone who molested a traveller combined with the awful fate of all that person’s relatives and extending associates who were all put to death in a most uncongenial way [not that I’m implying that there is a ‘congenial’ way to put anyone to death] so completely terrorise the local [wherever that was] citizenry that years went by without a traveller being molested, thereby giving rise the myth about the naked wanderer and the purse of gold

A simple requirement you may think. Just write about that world. My purpose was to write an adventure story set in a time when violence generally was exceptional not normal [by contrast to parts one and two where violence was standard] and how did one create such a world given that when I was writing all this I was living in one of the world’s most dangerous cities; a place in which I had had my own brushes with death, on many occasions?

My solution was to generate a catastrophe of such proportions that the world would be changed utterly by its outcome-It would in fact be the much heralded Armageddon-except that it came in the form of Tsunamis, earthquakes and all the horrors predicted by Nostradamus, Siener, the Mayans and of course Revelations, followed of course by all sorts of nasty genocidal activcities on the part of the survivors…escaping the drowning Indonesian archipeligoes and the freezing northern hemisphere.

Over a lifetime of shacking up in ‘one night stand’ hotels across the continent I have found myself reading Revelations on many occasions, in the wee hours, when unfamiliar surroundings drive out sleep; and, having read the local rag, I would toss and turn with the Gibbons standby bibles that proliferate, in hotel bedrooms, just about everywhere I’ve ever been.

I am an inherently secular person but nonetheless found myself asking the question-could such things be plausible? I thought this, back then in the early eighties when I first contrived this plot, that has not yet been written to completion-Then I was too early, like the fax machines I used to sell then-now it seems, according to Gore, that I may be too late, like those fax machines that are now obsolete.

Everything I have researched over the past two decades is reinforced by Gore’s conclusions. The world is in peril and the most important part of the problem [Gore seems to imply ] is the fact that there are more and more people pouring onto the planet and demanding shit.

Which brings us back to denialism.

When I drive about the city, which I do daily, I see no signs of the impending chaos predicted equally daily by the mainstream media. Over the past month for instance three, formerly inconvenient and time consuming intersections along my route have been quietly and efficiently upgraded, to facilitate effective traffic movement. The pavement outside my house [and the rest of the street] was recently demolished by the city council; to lay new electrical piping. They also ripped up my brick [paved] driveway and promised they would ‘fix it later’. Well it was later-later came-
they said about five weeks and about five weeks later people came and fixed the driveway- and now the trench that marred its beauty it is almost unnoticeable.

The streetlights go out and are fixed. Most weeks the garbage collectors collect the garbage -sometimes it takes all day for them to arrive and occasionally they are travelling the suburb at 21.oo but it is usually collected-I also heard only two gunshots in the night this week and it has been some months since I heard the last, compared to fifteen years ago when the gunfire was continuous.

Nonetheless Mr Gore assures us that we have about ten years to make important changes to the world or face catastrophe and we all know that we [the human race] can barely cope with the effects of living now, never mind living in a never land of the future, which may, or may not occur. And there are many who dispute with considerable substance that the problem described by Mr Gore is either real or inevitable. Others argue with disturbing conviction that the real issue is that there as a proliferation of poor people and that no programmes can cope and that perhaps the real programme requires unpleasant action..

My novel, the Yonka Memorandum is set in a future age well after the events that caused so many catastrophes; when the participants in the story have only the sketchiest knowledge or understanding of what happened, except that it was the time the world changed. In effect I was contemplating what happens when we reach the end of the script- in this case the script represented by ‘Revelations’ the arch- document of the gloom and doomists-

Imagine if you would, interviewing ten citizens at random: about an event today, and you would perhaps get some solid committed answers. Ask about an event ten years ago, say, the assassination of the person I call Konstant Mann, an event that almost caused our emerging democracy to come unstuck, and most of the ten would be a tad hasty although they may recollect the event. Ask about the Bambata Rebellion or the battle of Isandlwana, the so-called Third Frontier War, or even the war of 1899-1902 and their eyes will glaze over; and they will either puzzle or remain blank

This is the condition of the characters in my novel-The world picked itself up after the disaster and continued as it may well have done in the dim and distant past–[or if you prefer to be more real…as we all did after the great tsunami a few years back…

We have no real knowledge of our extreme past-10,000 years back but we do have a planet full of unexplained and inexplicable architectural artefacts; and as many inexplicable folk tales. People just get on with their lives irrespective of the chaos apparently reigning all about: the way those road workers put up those useful traffic circles last month and the other worker fellows who eventually, working their plod, plod way, along behind the diggers, reached my house and fixed the driveway. The idea that the sky is falling down and everything is about to end is too ridiculous for words: superstitious nonsense really…isn’t it?

In my preparations for the world-to-come in my novel I explored the role of the so called Atlantic Conveyer system, and found, as Mr Gore now proclaims, that it has been under threat for so long now the damage is probably irreversible and Europe stares a Newfoundland style climate in the face within Mr Gore’s decade without being able to do anything about it.

In my story I created a catastrophe that decimates the East coast of the United States and another that implodes the U S West coast, reducing the United States to a non-player in planetary affairs. The extended catastrophe decimates Japan and sets China back a decade during which time all the pent up rage stored as Yang energy by the infinitely suffering Chinese citizen, explodes in rage; and the forty million men deprived of access to a woman through the outcome of the one child policies of the present regime in China, rampage and consume all.

In our own world [here in the place i call Zone One ]we come face to face with the water supply crisis that is Zone One’s Achilles heel [Zone one is my fiction name for the “hard-to-pronounce” term Gauteng] and my heroine, taking her cue from similar projects in Spain and Australia undertakes to build the five, one kilometre high, Towers, that come to dominate the North Western corner of the tiny province and which supplement the water supplies to the city through evaporation and also provide for massive scale horticulture.

What freaked me out watching an ‘inconvenient truth’ was not that the subject may be pure propaganda for the eco-fascist movement. [This movement apparently tacitly concedes that for the world to survive the coming eco-meltdown predicted with such glee by so many for so long now, it will be necessary to reduce the global population by about four fifths. They assume this will occur through natural selection and perhaps much of it will.] Gore makes no such suggestions. He simply presents an accumulation of facts that have been piling up, according to my own delving, for decades now, and demonstrates the visual imagery that makes his case so profoundly real.

For instance he reveals footage of buildings sinking into the melting permafrost of Siberia. I scene I found to be almost incredible. I had read recently that Siberia was melting and saw some footage on a recent BBC programme but the visuals of what is happening were profound. The poignancy for me was also astounding:

During 1978 I gave a lecture at the now University of Zimbabwe. I spoke to a hostile audience, generally sourced from the various departments of the social sciences. The subject of my presentation related to the inevitable and impending collapse of the [now] former Soviet Union. As we now know the place collapsed eleven years later.

I have never considered the likelihood of a communist style repressive State surviving and prospering to be anything but inherently implausible, and so part of my argument in my speech related to rumours [now known to be well founded] that the Russian drive to exploit the oil reserves of Siberia were being thwarted by their inability to develop home grown drilling technology to facilitate access to the oil through 600 feet of rock solid permafrost.

This revelation proved too disingenuous for my audience who accused me of being a “Smith stooge” and a “capitalist lackey”, a “fascist” and other uncool stuff and I had to be escorted off the campus by the campus security for my own safety. In fact I was lucky to get off the stage undamaged by flying chairs and other missiles. It was good practice for the many bullets dodged on another occasion later.

Now here we are, not thirty years gone past and that solid, multi millenia old, permafrost that arguably proved the undoing of the Soviet Union is melting- why? – What happened? Gore suggests that centuries of climate affecting carbon emissions have finally reached a tipping point and the effect of warming is on an accelerating curve.

In my fictional world I suggested that the tipping point was accelerated by an event that precipitated what I called: ‘The Ringing’. Gore doesn’t mention this, perhaps because the two country’s concerned are now American allies and Mr Gore’s presentation is an inherently bi-partisan one [in an American sense]. Perhaps he doesn’t mention it because he gives it no credence, or perhaps none of his advisers, being scientific fellows, have given it credence.

As we know [and I have mentioned before] in 1998 India and Pakistan exploded a flurry of underground nuclear devices over a period of six months in a tit for tat episode in their serialised half-century conflict. Now, notwithstanding the arguments presented by numerous scientific types that the planet is too big to be affected by six nuclear explosions, even allowing for the cumulative shock wave effect, and that the idea that the earth’s axial rotation process was disrupted by the patterning of the explosions, I will persist in my hypothesis that what is affected is the resonance’s of the planet.

Mr Gore spends some of his movie referring to the many expert opinions that global warming was an illusion, and how they have been debunked; and my contention is that our knowledge of how the planet works is so inherently rudimentary that the idea that the planet ‘biorhythms’ if you like could have been abruptly disrupted by the compounding impact of nuclear energy patterns can not be simply ignored out of hand-So in the classic tradition of the ‘dime store novel’ I asked ‘what if’ – the planet’s biorhythms were fatally [from our limited perspective] wounded by the combined effect of a triple nuclear double-tap [see my piece ‘The triple nuclear double-tap’] and the vibration patterns became disruptive in some way. [In the same way that your car’s wheel’s ‘bounce’ and the steering wheel shudders at particular speeds when your tyres are not properly balanced.]

Reviewing Mr Gore’s presentation the idea that long standing trends are now accelerating to and beyond [perhaps] a tipping point seems more plausible than my dramatic Nuclear Ringing option-Either way the eight years since those explosions have been wracked with global disasters on an unprecedented scale many of them, almost disproportionately in the tectonic plate regions served by India and Pakistan.

In my fictional world the clouded memories of my characters have only a blurred recollection of the horror that came one night, generations earlier, on the 23rd of December 2012. My deadline is earlier than Mr Gore’s and it could be a race as to whether my fiction or his fact turns out to be the Planet’s truth. What is certain is that we may know the real story behind the present wave of denials about the actions [or inactions] of our police chief, long before we know whether Mr Gore or I, proved right or wrong.

In the meantime I have hedged my bets. I own property high above the projected new sea levels on a large piece of ground in Zone One. In my fictional world I wiped out Cape Town and the entire coastline of the country [following a secondary disaster actually hinted at but not explored by Mr Gore], which raised the global sea level by twenty metres. When I contrived this concept back in the nineties, I was being expansive -common wisdom prevailing only half a decade ago put sea level rising at about a metre over a century. Mr Gore now suggests far more than my generous twenty metres, and by twenty twenty nogal.

I also wiped out Mozambique, much of which is below 200 metres [above sea level] and had a tsunami scoop a giant land bridge between Africa and Madagascar. Indonesians invade Africa across the land bridge from Madagascar, to which millions of Indonesians fled after the great flooding, claiming ancient kinship ties of language as the basis of their claim to rights over Madagascar. [Ironically internally in South Africa [Southern Azania] the North West province secedes from the Republic and joins their blood brothers in Botswana in culmination of an ancient claim by that country on the territory .. I never referred in my text to the recent Swazi claim on the province of Mpumalanga, but based on the Mugabe precedent affirmed by the South African government, which as we know upholds the reasonable right to reclaim land arbitrarily confiscated by earlier regimes. Such claims were regarded by the International court to have credence.

[In other words if Robert Mugabe can seriously and legitimately claim back the confiscated farmlands of his despised former colonialist citizens on the grounds that the lands were originally misappropriated by ancestors of said colonialists, who is to gainsay the veracity of Swaziland’s claims that the same circumstances apply to the loss of their South African holdings in the nineteenth centuries, and that the Mugabe precedent, in fact the Israeli precedent as well, opens the door to retrospective claimants..]

Okay- I think that I have made my point- If Mr Gore is right [and the jury is still in deliberation] the rules of denial so manifest in the official response to the news about the police chief will make it a certainty that the impending catastrophe he is predicting for us shall come to pass and that as biblical types would have it, we are truly, living in ‘the end of days,’ and that it is therefore time to Party, Party, Party-

-.

Cheers.