The second piece of advice is more recent.

Loading

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.

Loading

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 John Pesutto to refer to it, of course.