On Godwin's Law

On Godwin's Law

In one of the more chuckle-worthy of Family Guy’s occasionally tedious cut scenes, Cookie Monster, bed-ridden in cookie rehab, is discovered to be hoarding cookies. After attempting to pin blame on ‘Derek’, Cookie Monster makes a dart for the contraband. Restrained on his bed by doctors, he screams in distress: “You guys are Nazis, man. You’re fricking Nazis.”

Unwittingly, Cookie Monster has added further weight to an endlessly cited internet chat room phenomenon: Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law holds that

“as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Devised by Jewish-American lawyer and author Mike Godwin in 1990, the Law has sprung into wide usage, transcending its original application to internet discussions. As Godwin himself has written, “this one off creation of mine, like the Energizer bunny, keeps on going and going.” The logical and widely quoted extrapolation of the Law is that, in any argument or discussion, the party that first brings up the Nazis, Hitler, the Holocaust, or any other Third Reich comparison has automatically lost.

Cookie Monster is thus not the only one losing arguments these days. Nazi references seem to be increasingly common in politics and the media. Predictably, the best example is Glenn Beck, whose Fox News show contains more references to the Fuhrer than a toothbrush-moustache convention at Eagle’s Nest. “So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research...eugenics”, Beck ranted in 2009. “In case you don't know what eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race!” The President isn’t the only one being daubed with Beck’s swastika-brush either. A figure as removed from politics as Brian Urlacher, the burly Chicago Bears linebacker, has been on the receiving end: branded a Nazi by Beck for seemingly nothing more than having broad shoulders, blue eyes, and a Germanic name. Daily Show funny man Lewis Black recently joked that Beck has “Nazi Tourettes.” And he isn’t the only one. Last month, the Democratic nominee for California governor, Jerry Brown, proved his political classiness by declaring his opponent, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, to be “like Goebbels.” Brits aren’t immune either. In 2008, the Conservative MEP for South East England, Daniel Hannan, angered by the extension of the EU President’s parliamentary powers, declared that he was “almost tempted to compare [the powers] to the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz - the Enabling Act of 1933.” According to Godwin’s Law, all of these guys – Beck, Brown, Hannan – have lost.

Godwin states that his opposition to Nazi comparisons is based upon “a sense of moral outrage” elicited by people flinging about Hitler and the Holocaust without properly understanding the horrors of Nazism. Such comparisons belittle the suffering of millions, he argues.

I have two problems with this.

First, our modern obsession with Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust is a symptom of a much larger problem in western society: the lack of genuine evil. The world, since Adolf’s demise in 1945, has become more relativist and uncertain. The West has, in the modern era, waged war on (amongst others) Koreans, the Viet Cong, Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, Saddam Hussein (twice), and Islamic fundamentalists. It also engaged in a four decade-long Cold War with the Soviet Union and communism more generally.

However, none of these ‘bad guys’ offer the same moral absolute that the Nazis do. I am not in any way trying to defend the atrocities carried out in the name of Milosevic, Saddam, or any of the communist regimes, but culturally their ‘evil’ is tempered. The Viet Cong were ‘freedom fighters’, celebrated by counter-cultural elements in the West; communist revolutionaries have been deified by many; the Taliban are – it seems – terrible, but the very fact that they operate in the name of Islam leaves western commentators unwilling to hold them up as an example of genuine evil. In addition, the wars fought by the West since 1945 have been largely unpopular, thus shifting the ‘evil’ tag away from the ‘enemy’ and onto our own leaders.

In short, thanks to the rise of moral relativism, there has been no individual or regime over the last half-century that could universally be considered evil. Thus, when commentators reach for the N-bomb, it is usually not in order to make historically sound comparisons to Nazism, but rather to liken the target of their ire to the only manifestation of true, absolute, unquestionable evil that exists on our cultural horizon. Thus, Beck et al aren’t belittling Nazi atrocities but are reinforcing our condemnation of them.

This brings me to my second defence of Nazi comparers. Engraved on the wall inside the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. are the words spoken by President Clinton at the museum’s Dedication Ceremony:

“This museum will touch the life of everyone who enters and leave everyone forever changed – a place of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope; an ally of education against ignorance, of humility against arrogance, an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead. If this museum can mobilize morality, then those who have perished will thereby gain a measure of immortality.”

The United States Holocaust Museum is brilliant and its message – to learn from the mistakes of the past in order to ensure that nothing resembling the Holocaust can ever occur again – is pitched perfectly. When the millions of tourists who visit Holocaust museums the world over read the memoirs of survivors, watch video footage of emaciated inmates, or gaze at the piles of shoes left by the murdered, their morality is indeed mobilized.

It is, however, a universal truism that when people need a museum to remember something, it is probably already in the process of being forgotten. Plus, only a limited percentage of the world’s population can visit such a museum every year.

Yet, every time Glenn Beck makes an ill-judged and foundationless comparison between his political opponents and Hitler; every time a commentator likens an event to the Holocaust; and every time the Nazis get an airing in popular culture, we are forced to observe the subliminal equation: Nazis/Holocaust/Hitler = EVIL. The more often Godwin’s Law is obeyed and discussions are ‘lost’ because of it, the more profoundly this equation – and the conviction that the world should never see another Bergen-Belsen – is embedded into our psyche. More than any museum, Nazi comparisons help us remember that the like of Hitler et al should not be tolerated in the 21^st century.

So I’m all for Nazi comparisons. Far from belittling the suffering of millions, they are a constant cultural reminder of it, ensuring that such suffering is avoided in the future.