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MosesPresley
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http://www.reason.com/hod/dw071405.shtml
Hands Off Hitler!
It's time to repeal Godwin's Law
David Weigel
A month after the fact, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is still getting kicked around for his speech on the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The speech itself was nothing new for the anti-war Durbin; the shellacking started when he read from an FBI agent's e-mail alleging ugly prisoner abuses, and said that if anyone had read this e-mail out of context, they'd "most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings."
It was downhill from there, as every war-supporter with a microphone or blog howled for Durbin's blood. His crime: invoking the Nazis. Though the Durbin story calmed down after the Senator's craven apology, other sets of loose lips—on the anti-war left and in totally unrelated areas—have kept the flame war hot. In the last four months, Sens. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) and Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) had tried to mix Third Reich metaphors in with speeches on the judicial filibuster, and both had been smacked down hard by political enemies and the Anti-Defamation League.
Durbin's thoughts about Gitmo weren't extreme—even some Republicans have worried about abuses—but his political pantsing should raise a question about our public discourse. Why are Nazi metaphors always out of bounds?
It wasn't always thus. Nazis were fair game in World War II. Red-blooded slanderers could slap the Nazi label on public figures like Father Charles Coughlin, and movie houses ran hilarious (and Oscar-winning) cartoons lampooning the Third Reich, including "Herr Meets Hare" and "Der Fuhrer's Face."
In the 1960s, members of Young Americans for Freedom protested with black umbrellas to mock people who were soft on the Soviet Union, a reference to Nazi-enabler Neville Chamberlain. Throughout that decade, while the generation of Americans with direct experience of the Nazi regime held all the power positions in politics and media, Hitler allusions flowed like lager in a Munich beer garden. "I was killing fascists when you punks were in diapers," Alabama Governor George Wallace shot back when some hippies called him a Nazi. The big screen featured conscientious Nazis like Omar Sharif(!), playing a perplexed Wehrmacht detective in Night of the Generals, while the small screen kept Americans laughing at the antics of Sgt. Schultz and Col. Klink. Oddly, it was only with the passing of the Greatest Generation—the only group of Americans with a dog in this fight—that Nazis became sacrosanct.
Rules against the N-bomb in Internet debates were formalized after 1991, when the propensity for long arguments to end in Nazi analogies led Mike Godwin (now a Reason contributing editor) to post his famous law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Although "Godwin's Law" was initially conceived as a physical constant rather than a guide to good behavior, it was quickly adopted as a social rule, with general agreement that the guy who fell back on a Hitler analogy had lost the argument.
The rules of snippy online debates, though, are nothing compared to public discourse. The Anti-Defamation League has beaten the hell out of anyone who's dared use a Nazi analogy over the last decade. A Republican state senator got it for calling abortion a "holocaust." Wal-Mart got it for running a newspaper ad that showed a book burning. Critically, the ADL launched a complaint in 1997 when the Random House Webster's College Dictionary got hip to slang and expanded the definition of "nazi" to include a person who's "fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specified activity." ADL President Abe Foxman raged: "If someone can be a 'soup Nazi' or a 'traffic Nazi,' how bad could the real Nazis have been?"
Pretty bad. To recap, the Nazi party took over Germany via a violent rigged election, then banned all rival political parties. They systematically shut down all voices of opposition, killing journalists, creating Nazi churches, and exiling academics. While gearing up for a war of conquest, they introduced eugenics into their school system, took all rights away from Jews, and brutalized other non-Germans. For dessert they launched a six-year war that killed millions of people, enslaved millions more, and systematically exterminated entire ethnic groups before retreating to a bunker and demanding their citizens commit mass suicide.
You can't really downplay this stuff or cheapen it through overuse. Think about this another way: You can say your sandwich tastes like a urinal cake. This emphasizes that the sandwich is truly awful, and gives your listener an idea or image of exactly how awful. But you don't lose sight of how bad the urinal cake can be. It's a poisonous sanitary product, and nothing will ever change that.
Politicians understand this, and they get away with the N-Bomb in the one arena where it's allowed to go unchecked: bullshit saber-rattling. George H.W. Bush dubbed Saddam Hussein the "new Hitler" while building support for Desert Storm. Bill Clinton's national address on intervening in Bosnia included Murrow-esque passages on "skeletal prisoners caged behind barbed-wire fences, women and girls raped as a tool of war, defenseless men and boys shot down into mass graves, evoking visions of World War II concentration camps and endless lines of refugees marching toward a future of despair." Politicians and pro–Iraq war opinioneers repeatedly said letting Saddam Hussein remain in power would amount to a new Munich pact. The British Daily Telegraph editorialized that 1938 and 2002 were mirror images because "both Saddam and Hitler demonstrated a fondness for chemical weapons and saw Jews as part of the problem." Different chemicals, different quantity of Jews, but who's counting?
These Nazi analogies were baldly ridiculous, intended to dredge up the oomph of the Holocaust for conflicts with five-digit casualty numbers. But these uses of the N-Bomb are actually looked on favorably. In fact, the United Nations took heat when it hedged whether to call the slaughter in Sudan's Darfur region "genocide" or "crimes against humanity." They went for "crimes," because there wasn't actually a policy to exterminate an entire group of people—certainly the right call to make if you don't want to gloss over how bad the Nazis were.
But obviously, Nazi analogies in humanitarianism and foreign policy aren't intended to cheapen Nazism and the Holocaust. They're meant to put underreported, ugly stories into a frame that everyone immediately understands. It's the same thing with the workaday Nazi arguments, and with situations like Durbin's.
Thus, despite all efforts at regulation, the market has repeatedly decided in favor of the N-bomb. There simply isn't any other tableau, in history or fiction, that offers the same variety of evil and oppressive examples as the Third Reich. Why compare some propaganda to 1984 and some slaughter to Srebrenica when you can double down and link both of them to Nazism?
Rarely remarked is the way prohibition has inflated the N-bomb's value—not as an outrage (that would hardly be possible), but as an ironic, farting-in-church punchline. There can be little doubt that the unnacceptability of a Nazi costume led directly to Prince Harry's thinking it would be a sweet thing to wear to a 2004 Halloween party. You can't say something is out of bounds and not expect it to lose meaning or become ironic. We live in a time when, days after 9/11, citizens were directing Flash animations about killing Osama to the tune of "Day-O."
The Nazi taboo was flawed before the Durbin affair, and it's only deteriorated since. Recently, armchair general Victor Davis Hanson took to the Chicago Tribune to assert that the swarthy enemies of freedom grow bolder "each time a public official evokes Hitler to demonize the president." The chorus demanding Durbin's apology included Rick Santorum, who'd apologized just a month before for comparing Democrats' filibuster arguments to Nazi war plans. The effort of keeping up the ban has become more convoluted than Charlie Chaplin's last speech in The Great Dictator. We'll be better off rolling back Godwin's Law and admitting the all-purpose usefulness of Nazi analogies. It's exactly what the Germans wouldn't want.
David Weigel is an editorial assistant at USA Today. His blog can be read at davidweigel.blogspot.com.
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Ramo
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Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:37
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Except he wasn't comparing anything to mass-murder. He was saying that the abuse cited belongs to an authoritarian regime like Nazi Germany, rather than the US. He was comparing an individual abuse to an individual abuse. Knee-jerk whining about Godwin's law certainly doesn't advance the debate, rather it stifles debate.
Last edited by Ramo on 15-07-2005 at 22:02
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MrFun
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of Iowa
Nov 2000
time: 23:37
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quote:
Originally posted by lord of the mark
yeah, cause Nazi comparisons are just so illuminating, and lead to reasoned discussion, especially when the comparison doesnt involve mass murder. I mean the use of the Nazi comparison in regard to Gitmo, abortion, excessive use of force by Israel on the West Bank, parlour antisemitism in Britain, Palestinian rejectionism etc (there, is that balanced enough?) have done SO MUCH to really help us understand those issues.
Not. |
The Holocaust is the most obvious historical aspect of Nazi Germany but there are other ways to make comparisons with Nazi Germany -- repression of free speech, forced labor camps, street bully politics, misuse of law enforcement, and so forth.
Again, your making unreasonable restrictions.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Ramo
Except he wasn't comparing anything to mass-murder. He was saying that the abuse cited belongs to an authoritarian regime like Nazi Germany, rather than the US. He was comparing an individual abuse to an individual abuse. Knee-jerk whining about Godwin's law certainly doesn't advance the debate, rather it stifles debate. |
so why not compare the abuse to the French in Algeria, say, which is actually a more apt comparison? Cause he wants to get the benefit of the shock value of the word Nazi. Well you cant have it both ways - with the shock value, comes the distraction from your actual point. Which is the point of Godwins law.
"when a Likud politician compares Palestinian terrorists to Nazis, hes NOT comparing anything to mass murder. Hes saying the killing of Jews cited belongs to a totalitarian (not authoritarian) regime like Nazi Germany, rather than an aspiring democratic nationalist movement"
Do you buy that? Cause I dont. The Palestinians, even the terrorists, are NOT Nazis, and calling them that tends to A. Confuse the issue, and lead to poor policy approaches and B. Trivialize the holocaust - which is implicated in every such reference to Nazis, though some may regret it. The same applies to the use of the term re Gitmo. Just as you cant understand Palestinian terrorists by thinking about Nazis, and cant formulate a correct way to end Pal terrrorism, so you cant understand US actions at Gitmo and elsewhere by thinking about Nazis, nor can you formulate correct ways to end those.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Last Conformist
And all Soviet comparisons bring in connotations of the Great Purges and the Gulags, all Khmer Rouge ones of the Fields of Death, all Australian ones of sheep molestation. Your point? |
WRT to the Khmer rouge, youre spot on, it holds just as strongly. As for the USSR, its a tad more complex, as that regime lasted 70 years, and mass murder was a tad less central to its history. And calling someone a commie, or even a Stalinist, doesnt have the same connotations at least in English, as calling someone a Nazi. But id say, yes, calling something Stalinist, when its not, tends to kill discussion. See Amnesty and their Gulag reference.
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:37
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Hitler Is Dead
New Republic ^ | 05.16.02 | Leon Wieseltier
Has history ever toyed so wantonly with a people as history toyed with the Jews in the 1940s? It was a decade of ashes and honey; a decade so battering and so emboldening that it tested the capacity of those who experienced it to hold a stable view of the world, to hold a belief in the world. When the light finally shone from Zion, it illuminated also a smoldering national ruin; and after such darkness, pessimism must have seemed like common sense, and a holy anger like the merest inference from life. But it was in the midst of that turbulence, in 1948, that the scholar and man of letters Simon Rawidowicz published a great retort to pessimism, a wise and learned essay called "Am Ha-Holekh Va-Met," "The Ever-Dying People." "The world has many images of Israel," Rawidowicz instructed, "but Israel has only one image of itself: that of an expiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be.... He who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel's chain. Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up.... Often it seems as if the overwhelming majority of our people go about driven by the panic of being the last."
In its apocalyptic season, such an observation was out of season. In recent weeks I have thought often of Rawidowicz's mordant attempt to calm his brethren, to ease them, affectionately and by the improvement of their historical sense, out of their tradition of panic. For there is a Jewish panic now. The savagery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Arab world, the rise in anti-Jewish words and deeds in Europe: All this has left many Jews speculating morbidly about being the last Jews. And the Jews of the United States significantly exceed the Jews of Israel in this morbidity. The community is sunk in excitability, in the imagination of disaster. There is a loss of intellectual control. Death is at every Jewish door. Fear is wild. Reason is derailed. Anxiety is the supreme proof of authenticity. Imprecise and inflammatory analogies abound. Holocaust imagery is everywhere.
In the discussion of the atrocities that the Palestinians have committed against the Israelis, the subject is Hitler. "I am convinced that we are facing a threat as great, if not greater, to the safety and security of the Jewish people than we faced in the '30s," the head of a national Jewish organization announced in February. In the New York Observer in April, Ron Rosenbaum warned of "the Second Holocaust": "It's a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate." Indeed, "there's likely to be a second Holocaust. Not because the Israelis are acting without restraint, but because they are, so far, acting with restraint despite the massacres making their country uninhabitable." George F. Will admiringly cited Rosenbaum in a column that he called "`Final Solution,' Phase 2." "Here in Washington, D.C., a few blocks away, is the Holocaust Museum," William Bennett told the rally in support of Israel at the Capitol on April 15. "What we are seeing today, what Israel is feeling today, was not supposed to happen again." On the same occasion Benjamin Netanyahu compared Arafat to Hitler, and also to Stalin. ("We don't have to be afraid that the international community doesn't see eye to eye with us," he proclaimed at the Likud Party conference this week. "Did the international community see the danger of the Holocaust?") "THE NEW KRISTALLNACHT," screamed the headline of a Jewish paper in New York about the Passover massacre in Netanya. "This is Kristallnacht transposed to Israel," wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. And doves are as unnerved as hawks. "As I've said before," Nat Hentoff told New York magazine, "if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, 'All Jews gather in Times Square,' it could never surprise me."
Call me a simple soul, but it could surprise me. The Jews that I see gathered in Times Square are howling at Nazis in Mel Brooks's kick lines. Hentoff's fantasy is grotesque: There is nothing, nothing, in the politics, the society, or the culture of the United States that can support such a ghastly premonition. His insecurity is purely recreational. But the conflation of the Palestinians with the Nazis is only slightly less grotesque. The murder of 28 Jews in Netanya was a crime that fully warranted the Israeli destruction of the terrorist base in the refugee camp at Jenin, but it was not in any deep way like Kristallnacht. Solidarity must not come at the cost of clarity. Only a fool could believe that the Passover massacre was a prelude to the extermination of the Jews of Israel; a fool, or a person with a particular point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you think that the Passover massacre was like Kristallnacht, then you must also think that there cannot be a political solution to the conflict, and that the Palestinians have no legitimate rights or legitimate claims upon any part of the land, and that there must never be a Palestinian state, and that force is all that will ever avail Israel. You might also think that Jordan is the Palestinian state and that the Palestinians should find their wretched way there. After all, a "peace process" with the Third Reich was impossible. (Even if Chaim Weizmann once declared, about his willingness to enter into negotiations with Nazi officials, that he would negotiate with the devil if it would save Jews.) So the analogy between the Passover massacre and Kristallnacht is not really a historical argument. It is a political argument disguised as a historical argument. It is designed to paralyze thought and to paralyze diplomacy.
All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war. This typological thinking defined the historical outlook of the Jews for many centuries. It begins, of course, with the Amalekites, the nomadic tribe in the Sinai desert that attacked the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt. "The Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.... Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it." From generation to generation: An adversarial role, a diabolical role, was created in perpetuity. And so Amalek became Haman (who actually was an Amalekite), who became the Romans, who became the Crusaders, who became Chmielnicki, who became Petlura, who became Hitler, who became Arafat. The mythifying habit is ubiquitous in the literature of the Jews. In some instances, it must not have seemed like mythifying at all. "A tale that began with Amalek," wrote the Yiddish poet Yitzhak Katznelson in the concluding lines of "The Song of the Murdered Jewish People" in 1944, not long before he died at Auschwitz, "and ended with the crueler Germans...."
But it is mythifying, and the habit is back; and so a number of things need to be said about Amalek, and about the Amalekization of the present enemy. For a start, the prescription of an eternal war with Amalek was a prescription for the Jews to be cruel. Here is Rashi's brutal gloss, in the eleventh century in France, on the commandment to "blot out the remembrance": "Every man and every woman, every babe and every suckling, every ox and every sheep. The memory of Amalek cannot be said to survive even in an animal, such that someone could say, `This animal once belonged to an Amalekite.'" This extreme of heartlessness was responsible for the most chilling sentence uttered by an Israelite in the Bible: "What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" That was what Samuel furiously demanded to know of the poignantly human Saul, the king who could not bring himself to slaughter his enemy completely. So if Amalek is waging a war of extermination against the Jews, the Jews are waging a war of extermination against Amalek. It was perhaps this pitilessness against which some (but certainly not all) medieval and early modern Jewish intellectuals revolted, when they wondered about the precise identity of Amalek in their own day, and proposed various kinds of symbolic action that would allow Jews to acquit themselves of the law about the erasure of the enemy, and deferred the application of the law to the messianic age. I wish also to record an extraordinary comment by Isaac Abarbanel, the thinker and statesman who failed to persuade the king and the queen of Spain to revoke the edict of expulsion in 1492 and promptly fled to Naples. The sin of the Amalekites, he explained, was that their aggression against the Israelites was groundless: "Amalek attacked them without reason.... For the Israelites possessed no land that the Amalekites coveted." It would appear that there is no place for Abarbanel in the Likud. For his implication is decidedly a moderate one. If the Israelites had possessed land that the Amalekites coveted, then this would not have been a war to the end of time. It would have been an ordinary war, a war that can be terminated in a peace.
But the real problem with typological thinking about history is that it is not historical thinking at all. It is ahistorical thinking. It obscures and obliterates all the differences between historical circumstances in favor of a gross, immutable, edifying similarity. It is an insufficiently worldly way to judge the world. For this reason, such thinking was overthrown in the modern period by Jews who decided that their myths would not ameliorate their misery; that there was not only one question and only one answer; that the entire universe was not their enemy and their enemy was not the entire universe; that the historical differences mattered as much as the historical similarities, because a change in history, progress, normality, tranquillity, was possible; that historical agency required historical thinking, that is, concrete thinking, empirical thinking, practical thinking, secular thinking. All these notions amounted to a revolution in the Jewish spirit, without which the Jewish national movement and the Jewish state could not have been brought into being. A historiosophy is not a strategy. The Jews taught themselves to attend not only to their fates, but also to their interests. That is to say, they taught themselves no longer to regard themselves as the last Jews. The lesson was called Zionism. The last Jews have nothing to do but fight or die; but Zionism has more to do. Israel was not created to destroy Amalek. Israel was created to deny Amalek.
Is Hamas Amalek? I have no idea. Also I do not care. It is bad enough that Hamas is Hamas. (Was Hitler Amalek? No, he was worse.) Anyway, Amalek is not all that justifies the use of force. But the important point is that Amalek justifies nothing but the use of force. There is no other solution to the Amalek problem. And that is why all this pessimism is not only intellectually sloppy, it is also operationally superfluous. It is a view of history that provides no foundation for Israeli restraint, and sometimes restraint is the intelligent policy. Consider this week's calamity. If Netanya was Kristallnacht, then Rishon Letzion was Kristallnacht. The villain in Netanya came from Jenin, and Israel turned its might on Jenin. The villain in Rishon Letzion came from Gaza, but Israel is not turning its might on Gaza. Why not? The logic is the same. The answer, of course, is that this is not the logic of statecraft. If, as the Israeli press is reporting, there may be signs of flexibility on the Palestinian side, it is the duty of the Israeli government to stay its hand and have a look. These signs may be false; but too many people have perished not to take their measure. The exploration of opportunities for accommodation and understanding is a matter of both prudence and principle. It may be that Ariel Sharon, of all people, has comprehended this. As long as the prime minister of Israel continues to speak of the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, Kristallnacht is over. (For Netanyahu, by contrast, every Nacht is Kristallnacht.)
The Jewish genius for worry has served the Jews well, but Hitler is dead. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is harsh and long, but it is theology (or politics) to insist that it is a conflict like no other, or that it is the end. The first requirement of security is to see clearly. The facts, the facts, the facts; and then the feelings. Arafat is small and mendacious, the political culture of the Palestinians is fevered and uncompromising, the regimes in Riyadh and Cairo and Baghdad pander to their populations with anti-Semitic and anti-American poisons, the American government is leaderless and inconstant; but Israel remembers direr days. Pessimism is an injustice that we do to ourselves. Nobody ever rescued themselves with despair. "An ever-dying people is an ever-living people," Rawidowicz sagely remarked. "A nation always on the verge of ceasing to be is a nation that never ceases to be." It is one of the lessons that we can learn from the last Jews who came before us.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of TNR.
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15-07-2005 08:51
. Godwin's Law has become a crutch so that the first person to invoke the law is the one who has usually lost the argument (in contrast to how traditionally been seen).
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