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Speech If you repeat a Big Lie often enough, people will believe it. Goebbels has his students and disciples everywhere, apparently. — David Irving A heads up for Down Under: for readers in Australia and NZ Monday, September 1, 2003 Common sense is the first casualty when commentators go to war.

He always attacks his opponents, not only with all arms, but also with snorts and objurgations – he is always filled with moral indignation – he is incapable of imagining honour in an antagonist, and hence incapable of honour himself. -H.L.

Mencken WHEN the Herald’s literary editor, Malcolm Knox , came back from last week’s Melbourne Writers Festival, he said he was stunned by the event’s conformity , its dominance by a self-reinforcing, self-congratulating insular consensus which allowed only token dissent.

I’ll take his word for it, especially as Knox is by no means someone who could be tarred with the epithet “conservative” and the festival’s keynote address was delivered by Tariq Ali , one of the great apologists for dictatorships, another example of the peculiar moral relativism of the progressive side of politics. Tariq used his latest visit to attend a reunion of fellow Trotskyites who had been members of the Fourth International.

The Melbourne Writers Festival also provided the launch of the latest example of a blood sport in Australian intellectual life, reputational rape, where a single adversary is hunted down and encircled by a large number of antagonists intent on destroying the reputation of the object of their contempt.

There have been several such attacks over the past year or so, one involving more than a dozen journalists against one woman whose career they sought to end and another involving about 30 journalists unjustly shredding the reputation of one man. Reputation rape serves the cultural purpose of sending a blunt message to the rest of us: this could happen to you.

At the launch of the latest pack attack in Melbourne last week, the term “Kulturkampf” was used to describe a supposed “culture war” being waged by John Howard ( left ) and his Government. Until recently, I had thought it was a debate, with the democratic process determining the outcome. Apparently it’s a war.

Hence the propensity, since the election of the Howard Government in 1996, for the self-styled progressive side of politics to make comparisons between democratic Australia and Nazi Germany, to use terms such as “concentration camps”, to make the analogies to Adolf Hitler and to appropriate the “Holocaust” – a phenomenon in which millions of people were exterminated in a system of murder factories – as a bludgeoning term. The rage is empty, particularly the screaming about race.

Since 1996, spending on indigenous affairs has increased by 30 per cent in real terms as people of goodwill, and the federal and state governments, grapple to find the best policies to advance the lives of Australia’s indigenous people. As for the alleged demonisation of Muslims, Australia under Howard is a place where the number of Muslims living in this country has surged by 50 per cent, from 200,000 according to the 1996 census to an estimated 300,000 today. Not exactly shutting the gates.

Such basic defining facts are brushed aside in an era where the media promote and protect commentators, not in spite of their hysterics but because of their hysterics.

I suppose this policy is vindicated when the most successful non-fiction book in Australia over the past year was Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men , still on the Herald’s bestseller list after 47 weeks and showing no signs of leaving, an emphatic commercial vindication of Moore’s use of intellectual dishonesty, vicious wit and white-hot hyperbole. AND now we have our own Robert Manne going for a piece of hyperbolic brinkmanship, albeit without a shred of wit.

He has been using the tactic of personal abuse for so long that two academic economists, William Coleman and Alf Hagger , were moved to write in their book, Exasperating Calculators , published in 2001: “Instead of arguments, what we receive in Manne is commentary on politicians; commentary on commentators accusations of malignity; and name calling Facts are there just to decorate; judgements are to intimidate (‘bizarre’, ‘breathtaking’, ‘mad’, ‘extraordinary’).

And, as of most rhetorical controversialising, the whole point, and test of achievement, is to execute some verbal perdition of the object of loathing. This is not ‘debate’.” No, it’s not debate. Last week, Manne was