Note to Pesutto: Don’t mention the war

John Pesutto might have done himself a favour if he’d acquainted himself with an arch law of the internet or had studied a little political philosophy from the last century.

Had the Victorian Liberal leader done so, he might have stumbled across two sage pieces of advice for those unwise enough to reference Nazis in their arguments – and saved himself a lot of trouble after a judge found today that he defamed ousted Liberal Moira Deeming as a Nazi sympathiser.

Opposition Leader John Pesutto speaks to the media at Parliament House after the judgment.Credit: Eddie Jim

Both boil down to the idea that if you mention the Nazis, you’ve already lost the argument.

The first is graced with a little made-up Latin, presumably to give it gravitas.

“Reductio ad Hitlerum” is a phrase invented by the Jewish German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss in 1951, just six years after the Nazis lost World War II.

It means “reduction to Hitler” and is a play on the much older concept of reductio ad absurdum, which has been around since the ancient Greeks and translates as “reduction to absurdity”.

At its simplest, Strauss’ principle meant that trying to prop up your argument by introducing references to Hitler or the Nazis regularly reduced it to the absurd – rendering the argument fallacious, an empty appeal to emotion, an irrelevance.

It was, he proposed – and here, Pesutto, might have found cause for caution – too often an attempt to rationalise guilt by association.

The second piece of advice is more recent.

It’s called “Godwin’s Law” after another American, lawyer and author Mike Godwin, who cemented his place in online history by inventing in 1993 the term “internet meme”.

Godwin’s Law itself has become a meme since Godwin, fed up with too many online arguments relying on what he felt were inappropriate analogies to the Nazis, first articulated it in 1991.

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” he declared drily.

Godwin’s Law has since been applied to anyone using Nazi analogies in any public forum, not simply on the internet.

It has come to mean that playing the Nazi card automatically means your argument has failed.

Such a blanket definition was not quite what either Strauss or Godwin meant. Both have said that some comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis are perfectly appropriate.

Godwin wrote in a 2018 Los Angeles Times article that his so-called law is about remembering history well enough to draw parallels that are deeply considered – and that “sometimes those comparisons are going to be appropriate, and on those occasions, [Godwin’s Law] should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter”.

By then, however, the horse had bolted.

In 2012, the Oxford English Dictionary defined Godwin’s Law as “a facetious aphorism maintaining that as an online debate increases in length, it becomes inevitable that someone will eventually compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis”.

A copy of the Oxford, you’d imagine, might be found in the Victorian parliamentary library.

Too late for Pesutto to refer to it, of course.

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