Challenging Godwin’s Law

By Brian Webber

"Don't ever be so arrogant to believe it the Holocaust can't happen again; to do so is the first step to the death camps." - Halina Birenbaum, Holocaust survivor, poet, writer.

Godwin's Law is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1 (i.e. certainty).“ 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.

This is a good tradition in theory, especially since you have people from all sides of the political spectrum comparing everyone from animal rights activists, to pacifists, even some Jews (particularly the far-Right Wing Likud party of Israel) to Hitler and/or the Nazis.

There is an argument to be made that by completely taking Adolf Hitler's foreign and domestic policies off the table for discussion, it raises the bar for "evil" so incredibly high that at a certain point, someone not being "as bad" as Hitler becomes a legitimate defense for any sort of act. Strictly following the tradition that arose from Godwin’s Law causes us to ignore threats to our freedom that are right under our noses.

Many times in debates about George W. Bush, I have heard people say without a trace of irony, that you shouldn't engage in what are perfectly legitimate comparisons between his administration and that of Adolf Hitler prior to the outbreak of World War II because he's "not as bad as Hitler." Generally speaking I would agree with that, but such statements can’t be considered a defense.
Now, let's ignore the verbal gaff (or is it a Freudian slip?) where the words "as bad" get used for a moment and go back to my comment about the proverbial bar. To say that George W. Bush is a good leader, merely because during his term in office he hasn't condoned or silently ordered the mass executions of Jews, Mormons, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Communists, Liberals, and other groups that many people today don't even know about isn‘t good enough.
What astonishes me most about this argument is, while true, it's disturbing that this is for many the automatic first response to any comparisons between Bush and Hitler, legitimate and ridiculous alike.

For starters, “bad” is too subjective a word.

Secondly, as Michael Moore puts it in his book Stupid White Men, and I'm paraphrasing here, "This is a kid's game! You put any two people together and ask which one is 'worse,' people will usually choose the bigger jerk. Hitler was worse than Mussolini. A Ford is worse than a Chevy. I am definitely worse than my wife."
I won't dispute that Bush is not "as bad" as Hitler by just about any standard by which the two leaders can be measured, but to assume that lets the man off the hook for lying about war, ordering the deaths of as many as six-hundred thousand innocent Iraqis and then denying that it even happened in the face of a peer-reviewed scientific study from a respected American institution (Johns Hopkins University), among other atrocious policies both foreign and domestic is disgusting and demeaning.

It is entirely possible that we are experiencing a cosmic deja-vu, wherein America of 2006 is eerily similar to Germany of 1936, but how can we know if we’re not allowed to have the discussion? That’s the long term effect of Godwin‘s Law, which I doubt many people even consider.

I know I'm going to anger a lot of people of all political stripes with this thesis, but like the old cliché goes, those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Even with everything we've all learned about the Nazis from our history classes in school, there are many things we either forgot, or never knew in the first place. It's those things the collective American consciousness doesn't know that make Godwin’s Law so dangerous.

I’m not talking about discussing their personalities, and I am certainly not talking about the trivial similarities that any two randomly selected peoples can share regardless of how diametrically opposite they are. I mean the discussion should be open, without brining Godwin into it, about the similarities between their policies and actions in similar circumstances.

There are many more examples of course. There are tales of Holocaust survivors moving back to Germany at the ages of 80 and higher because things seems frighteningly familiar. It is not my place to make the case that Bush is indeed truly an “evil man” in the way Hitler and other elected leaders who grabbed too much power were however. That is not what this is about.

This is about the need to have that discussion. The rest is up to the scholars, the survivors, the veterans; people who are more wizened on this subject than I could ever hope to be.