Godwin’s Law and the health care reform debate

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Godwin's law aka Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies states: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." Mike Godwin, creator of the law, has argued that the overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact. (see below)

Godwin's Law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Hitler or Nazis or their actions. (This is not limited to adherents of any one political persuasion, it has unfortunately been abused by all).

The GOP Astroturf campaign against health care reforms skipped right over the usual digression of argument and immediately settled upon the inappropriate, inordinate and hyperbolic comparisons of President Obama to Hitler, and health care reforms to Nazi atrocities (ethnic genocide).

In this video clip, a woman holding a poster of President Obama defaced to resemble Hitler asks Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who is Jewish, "why do you continue to support a Nazi policy?" The extreme offensiveness of this woman received the appropriate response she deserved. But as Rep. Frank noted, "it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this type of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated" (in America).

At one point, Frank asked the crowd: "Which one of you wants to yell next?" Rep. Frank at town hall: 'Who wants to yell next?'

As Leonard Pitts, Jr. observed in his column this week, Obama critics should respect 6 million dead:

Google "Obama + Nazis" and you get almost 7 million hits. Nor is the phenomenon new. Substitute President Bush's name and you get nearly 2.8 million.

Even granting that many of those hits are benign, it seems obvious the Nazis have invaded American political rhetoric in a big way. As in Rush Limbaugh declaring health-care reform "a Hitler-like policy," swastikas popping up at protest rallies, a poster depicting Obama with Hitler's mustache and a pamphlet that says: "Act Now To Stop Obama's Nazi Health Plan!"

It's important to remember that the Nazis are passing out of living memory; U.S. soldiers of that era are said to be dying at the rate of 1,200 a day. Which makes it too easy, I think, for a nation of notorious historical illiteracy to remake the Nazis as some kind of all-purpose boogeymen for slandering political enemies and scoring cheap rhetorical points.

So I thought it would be good to make you sick, i.e., to spend a few minutes reminding some and teaching others what you invoke when you invoke the Nazi regime.

For the record, then: it was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy's throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see how many of those "little Jews" could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women's uteruses to see what would happen, who stomped a pregnant woman to death, who once snatched a woman's baby from her arms and, in the words of a witness, "tore him as one would tear a rag."

That's who the Nazis were, ladies and gentlemen — those obscenities plus 6 million more. They were the triumph of ideology over reason and even over humanity, the demonization of racial, religious and political difference, the objectification of the vulnerable other. And the authors of a mass murder that staggers imagination, still.

You would think, then, that where they are invoked to draw a parallel or make a point, it would be done with a respect for the incalculable evil the Nazis represent. You would think people would tread carefully, not because of the potential insult to a given politician (they are big boys and girls) but because to do otherwise profanes the profound and renders trivial that which ought to be held sacred by anyone who regards himself as a truly human being.

* * *

We have a Constitution, after all, and it says we can say whatever we want. It doesn't say it has to be intelligent.

And yes, you are even protected if you liken Obama or Bush to Hitler. Yet every time I hear that, it makes me cringe for what it says about our collective propensity for historical amnesia and our retarded capacity for reverence. Once upon a lifetime ago, 6 million people with DNA, names and faces just like you and I, were butchered with gleeful sadism and mechanistic dispatch. "Six million people."

You and I may no longer respect one another, but is it asking too much that we still respect them?

Amen, Leonard. Reverence and respect for the dead is the least we should expect from one another.