Why Godwin’s Law isn’t law here
Fifteen years ago, when most people had never heard of the Internet and only people at universities and in various government departments had access to it, nobody had heard of PHP forums (or PHP itself) or blogging, and the main means of discussing things online was the Usenet newsgroup system, a guy called Mike Godwin propagated a doctrine called “Godwin’s Law”: that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”. Wikipedia further elaborates that:
There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin’s law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. Many people understand Godwin’s law to mean this, although (as is clear from the statement of the law above) this is not the original formulation.
Over the weekend I posted an article about London public transport, in which I referred to London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, as the “Führer”, meaning that he was behaving like a little dictator and riding roughshod over what everyone else thought. This appeared in the same paragraph as a reference to what I called “Nazi astroturfers” who used to call the Jon Gaunt show when that filled the 9am-noon slot on [BBC London Radio](http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/tv_and_radio/radio/index.shtml). Astroturf is fake grass; [astroturfing](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/astroturfing.html) is making the work of activists look like some sort of popular movement (fake grass roots, get it?) – in this case, by contacting the media without disclosing their connections. When I heard these goons rant on about immigration, I remember reading of a policy on the British far right to do precisely this, to contact the media and pretend to be “ordinary Joes” “telling it like it is”. I actually emailed Gaunty to tell him this, and he replied that he had to give people a chance to air their views just as he gave me a chance to air mine. (When it suited him, he was perfectly willing to cut people off.)
Anyway, a guy called “Baruch Spinoza” (which might have been his real name, but somehow I suspect it was a pseudonym) had a go at me for squeezing in “(ludicrous and pathetic) Nazi references”, when in fact only one of the two could possibly be called inappropriate. Far-right activists are commonly called nazis or fascists here, even though, were they to get to power, they might not launch another genocide or another big war, although it’s not something we’d like to find out. OK, Livingstone isn’t a Nazi. He’s not even a Führer, and I wrote the post relatively quickly within an hour of getting up on Sunday morning without much sleep, but for people to be called Hitler when they exhibit dictatorial tendencies is perhaps not as uncommon here as it is in other countries. People might even be called that for having a funny moustache. I remember my grandparents calling one of their cats Hitler, and they lived through the war! (I don’t think the name stuck.)
The point being that not everyone thinks that a comparison to Hitler is quite as obscene as perhaps certain ethnic groups do. The group which was the primary target of Hitler’s genocide campaign isn’t the only group who “owns” World War II; people living in most major (and some less major) cities were in the firing line as well, and many died. People ridiculed Hitler besides fearing him; has anyone ever heard songs like “Hitler has only got one ball”?
And there are, in fact, many circumstances where a Hitler reference might be more than appropriate. Of course, people often do say things like “you’re a Nazi” to finish off a conversation – to throw shame on their opponent. But there are times when you need to say to somebody that their ideas are *just wrong* no matter how rational that person makes them sound. Eugenics is a classic example, an idea which some imagine was discredited with Hitler’s association with it, but which in fact persisted in some western countries for decades after Hitler’s death. I remember discussing with a care worker at my school some idea which had a whiff of eugenics about it, and he said “it sounds a bit Hitleresque to me”. People thinking they can command nature, thinking they can dictate who has children and who doesn’t, that they can use genes to work out what people might be able to do or what it’s worth trying to teach them. It’s not genocide, but it’s a use of science against people that people with which people would feel distinctly uncomfortable.
Of course, when it just happens that Hitler wanted to ban fox-hunting, as the sport’s defenders claim, that’s not an argument they can really use to justify continuing it. But that doesn’t mean the defenders have lost the argument, as the tradition surrounding the law dictates. Hitler simply looms so large in the recent history of western civilisation that discussions on political issues are likely to drag him in at some point or another. I’ve personally been the victim of an attempt to invoke this rule during a discussion on Usenet in the past, when I offered Hitler and Mussolini as an example of how terror and violence wasn’t the preserve of the left, these not being figures traditionally associated with the left. The dogma that someone has just lost the argument by mentioning HItler is a made-up dogma, and nothing more. It’s not an article of faith on IJB.
