Lest it be thought that we are opining off the hoof - constructive conspiracy is the theory used to prove many so-called facts pertaining to the genocide of the Jews. The BBC article makes a point of quoting Justice Grey has having found that Irving was an "anti-semite and holocaust denier". One of the issues in Irving v. Lipstadt was whether it was reasonable for Irving to have denied the existence of gas chambers -- that is, a method of killing alleged to have taken place at Auschwitz. Of course the reasonableness of the denial depended on whether gas chambers had in fact existed. Lo and behold -- to Justice Grey's own surprise -- there was no hard fact, certain evidence that they had. There was a lot of rumour and inuendo and hearsay witnesses but no smoking pellet. The theory urged by Lipstadt's attorney and accpted by Justice Grey was that there was a "convergence" of bits and pieces of evidence of some sort or another such that a threshold of probability had been reached that gas chambers had existed; i.e. that the sum of zeros is more than zero.
This is the same type of reasoning process that is invovled in proving that X, Y, Z, facts -- taken together -- must have resulted from a "conspiracy" as to which there is otherwise no direct proof.
This reasoning process is not entirely fallacious, as a practical matter; it is simply very weak. Of course none of this get considered, much less discussed, in BBC's Holo-boos.
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This is the same type of reasoning process that is invovled in proving that X, Y, Z, facts -- taken together -- must have resulted from a "conspiracy" as to which there is otherwise no direct proof.
This reasoning process is not entirely fallacious, as a practical matter; it is simply very weak. Of course none of this get considered, much less discussed, in BBC's Holo-boos.
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