I HAD a strangely sobering thought this week, and it really was strange, considering the hours spent at the Mahogany Ridge, but what if we were all quite mistaken about our politicians? That they're not the grubbing miscreants we so often take them for but rather inherently noble folk who, in their commitment to the public good, had unwittingly fallen victim to widespread self-delusion?
What brought about this odd notion was not the predictably unctuous speeches in defence of President Jacob Zuma's feeble State of the Nation Address address (to which we shall return), but rather a fascinating new book by the Australian journalist Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (Picador).
Researching the book, Storr spent time with a wide range of nutters. There were, for example, yoga fundamentalists, UFO-spotters, those who babbled on about past life regression, and creationists who believed in Adam and Eve and that the Earth was a mere 6 000 years old. This is the fun part of The Heretics, running with those whose loopy beliefs, though demonstrably false, are, well, just loopy. As Storr puts it, "I like to write about these people, it is like being a tourist in another universe."
But then comes an altogether darker business. Storr travelled to Poland to join a group of racists and Adolf Hitler apologists on a tour of a Nazi death camp led by David Irving, the disgraced academic and Holocaust denialist.
There Irving, a once respected historian, led them to a gas chamber and explained that it was a fake, that it could not have been a place where Jews, homosexuals, Communists and others were exterminated because the door to the chamber had a handle on the inside and that anyone in that chamber could easily have opened the door. What kind of gas chamber was that?
Unfortunately -- and this everyone in that strange group noticed, including Irving -- that door also had two massive bolts on the outside which, once in place, meant that, handle or no handle, it stayed shut. Storr began to question why Irving had not mentioned this and, more to the point, why it was that the simple facts of the matter -- the bolts, in this case -- just did not work with people like him.