I am currently reading History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier by Deborah E. Lipstadt. It’s a personal account of Lipstadt’s nasty legal stoush (an understatement if ever there was one) with the terminally awful David Irving, who had taken her to court for comments she made about him in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

In the book, Lipstadt chronicles the events in the court-room. The following is a part of the transcript of the cross-examination between David Irving and Lipstadt’s barrister, Richard Rampton QC:

RAMPTON: How many people do you think – I mean innocent people, I am not talking about bombing raids, Mr Irving, I mean innocent Jewish people do you think the Germans killed deliberately?

IRVING: You mean like Anne Frank?

RAMPTON: I do not mind whether they are like Anne Frank or not. How many innocent Jewish people–

IRVING: Well, I mean, she is a typical example and a very useful example to take because everybody has heard of Anne Frank. She was innocent. I have daughters of my own and if what happened to her happened to one of my daughters, I would be extremely angry.

RAMPTON: Oh, I see, so Mr or Mrs Frank might not have been innocent, is that what you are trying to say?

IRVING: But I asked you about Anne Frank; I did not ask about her parents.

RAMPTON: No, I am sorry, Mr Irving. The procedure in this court is that you do not ask questions, I do. I asked you how many–

IRVING: I did not ask a question. I just said, I mean, shall we talk about Anne Frank.

RAMPTON: No, I do not want to talk about Anne Frank.

IRVING: You want to talk about nameless, unspecified Jews so that later on we can say, “Well, I was not meaning those ones, I meant those ones”? The reason you do not want to talk about Anne Frank, of course, is because she is a Jew who died in the Holocaust and yet she was not murdered, unless you take the broadest possible definition of murder.

A few pages later, Irving’s illogical and nonsensical “explanations” once again took my breath away.

Rampton next asked about Irving’s claim that, after having been “summoned,” Himmler was “obliged” to call Heydrich to order the cessation of the killings. The call to Heydrich was placed, according to Himmler’s diary, at 1.30 P.M., one hour before he met with Hitler. There was no documentary evidence to prove that Himmler saw Hitler before making the call. Rampton wondered who “obliged, that is to say, compelled Himmler to make this call?” Irving’s answer was unequivocal. “His own inner conscience. That was why I used the word ‘obliged’. Otherwise I would have said ‘ordered.’” Rampton rather laconically observed that Irving’s answers hardly constituted the “incontrovertible evidence” he had promised his readers. Moreover, Rampton admonished Irving, “when we say ‘evidence’ we mean ‘evidence’ not ‘inference.’”

After getting this far in the book, I was struck with the thought that this modus operandi of Irving’s sounded familiar. Then it hit me: I realised that each day I read/scan a number of right-wing blogs and columns and the writers do the same thing Irving is doing here: making inferences, turning questions back on people instead of answering questions, not providing cold hard evidence to back up their claims and allegations, and basically shifting the goal posts.

At the risk of sounding glib about David Irving (and I’m not), I ask, what is it with teh Right and smoke and mirrors? Does anyone else see the similarities here?

Disclaimer: please do not even think I’m suggesting the right-wing bloggers and columnists that I read are Holocaust denialists. I’m not. I’m talking about the smoke and mirror tactics that they employ when “debating” about something.

Australian bloggers shouted out in glee this morning when they took the three steps from their bed to their computer and read the news that a blogger in the USA has successfully sued another blogger for libel, winning US$5 million dollars in damages.

Within minutes, Australian bandwidth consumption skyrocketed as thousands of bloggers furiously travelled the internet archiving copies of their mortal blogging enemies’ web pages containing accusations against them of being “idiots”, “retards”, “lefties” and “Nazis”. At the same time, each of these bloggers was furiously trawling their own blogs deleting any insult they may have thrown towards their mortal blogging enemies, all the while nervously preparing defences for imagined court proceedings. By 9am this morning the Australian blogosphere resembled a desert with almost all content deleted and replaced by 404 errors, while emails were flying back and forth between Hotmail addresses to faceless pseudonyms threatening in illiterate blogging prose to “bring teh full forse of the law upon you becos of the outrite lies and unthuths youve been propegating about my charecter on teh internet.”

Make no mistake, threats to sue for libel will now become standard ammunition in any blog comments war, alongside Godwin’s Law which holds that most comment wars will end in a comparison of at least one party to Nazis. This new phenomenon will be known as GrodsLaw: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a threat to sue for libel approaches one.