from Wikipedia:
Godwin’s Law (also known as Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies1) is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:
“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
Godwin’s Law is often cited in online discussions as a caution against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons, and is often conflated with fallacious arguments of the reductio ad Hitlerum form.
The rule does not make any statement whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that one arising is increasingly probable. It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact. Although in one of its early forms Godwin’s Law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion: electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, and more recently blog comment threads and wiki talk pages.
The maxim can also be applied to any political discussion in the public sphere. The phrase reductio ad Hitlerum, coined by Leo Strauss, is also referred to as “playing the Nazi card.” It is a variation of the argumentum ad hominem fallacy involving an additional “guilt by association” fallacy (e.g. Hitler was a vegetarian. Hitler was a bad man. Therefore, vegetarianism is wrong.).
It was with this in mind that I came across FoxAttacks.com’s two part video on Fox News’ smear campaign against Barack Obama. The “guilt by association” fallacy is taken to a ludicrous extreme: the minister of Obama’s church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was once affiliated with a magazine that later gave Louis Farrakhan an award– and therefore Obama endorses Farrakhan’s anti-White racism as well as his anti-Semitism (much like the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda; al Qaeda is an Islamic group opposed to the United States; Iraq is an Islamic state opposed to the US– therefore, Iraq was responsible for 9/11 syllogism).
Wikipedia’s entry on Godwin’s law goes on to state:
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. It does not apply to discussions directly addressing genocide, propaganda, or other mainstays of the Nazi regime. [italics mine]
While it has been popular among voices on the left to compare George Bush to Hitler (although comparisons to Cheney might be more apropos), a more valid parallel might be drawn between Fox News and Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, in that Fox News deliberately engages in a coordinated campaign of misinformation in order to promote highly dubious policies which only benefit those who are well-connected to the individuals setting those policies. Although it is a relatively simple task for a savvy, well-informed individual to disprove the threadbare lies of the Fox News propaganda machine, it still works because the lies are repeated incessantly (hence, the constant reference to “talking points”), until it all but obliterates any and all discourse which refutes these lies, and in fact becomes the reference point from which the truth is evaluated when it is able to break through the noise machine.
From Mike Godwin’s article in Wired Magazine, 1994:
A “meme”… is an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a “viral meme”) may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.
When a meme catches on, it may crystallize whole schools of thought. Take the “black hole” meme, for instance. As physicist Brandon Carter has commented in Stephen Hawkings’s A Brief History of Time: A Reader’s Companion: “Things changed dramatically when John Wheeler invented the term [black hole]…Everybody adopted it, and from then on, people around the world, in Moscow, in America, in England, and elsewhere, could know they were speaking about the same thing.” Once the “black hole” meme became commonplace, it became a handy source of metaphors for everything from illiteracy to the deficit.
1 see also Reductio ad Hitlerum
Filed under: Blogroll, culture, information, media, news, politics, propaganda, society, video | 8 Comments
Tags: al Qaeda, argumentum ad hominem, Barack Obama, fallacious arguments, Fox News, foxattacks.com, Godwin's Law, Iraq, media, memes, news, politics, propaganda, reductio ad Hitlerum, talking points, terrorism, The Big Lie, video
Excellent Blog. I’ve been reading along and just wanted to say hi. I will be reading more of your posts in the future.
- Jason.
Your point here is well taken and well presented. The problem is the masses. Not everyone has the forethought to analyze what is happening with what amounts to nothing more than an ad campaign.
They are perfectly happy to adopt what they hear repeated by media personalities. Personalities that they let into their homes each night and begining to trust as if they were their friends. Adopting those thoughts as their own.
I think Hitler has now become more of a reference since the hero’s of WWII have started to pass on. Baby boomers throw the word around because they were taught that he represented evil. Most still do not know how Hitler came to power, only that it was a bad thing.
When I was in the second grade, I made a Nazi flag and stood it up an saluted it. Just a childhood game to me.
My father not only spanked me, he gave me a lecture I will always remember. How he spent four years of his life fighting that flag and what it stood for. How his friends died in his arms. How he laid in the hospital for months and returned to do it again.
The emotion he delivered this speech to me with was one straight from the heart.
I know that the comparison to Hitler is one that should not be taken lightly. I also know that if you want to get someones attention, you “play the Hitler Card”.
It really doesn’t have to have anything to do with Hitler. Just the word has taken on it’s own meaning. Just like saying “Santa Clause” make everyone think of something jolly, saying “Hitler” makes you think of terrible injustice and evil.
Who owns FOX, anyway? Does anyone else think their “No Spin Zone” is halarious?
II.
Coal….
I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, colored
By who pays what for speaking.
Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated bood – buy and sign and tear apart –
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.
Love is a word another kind of open—As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.
Audre Lorde
New Black Voices: Poetry, pp. 291-292.
III.
Black Liberation Theology is to define oneself as a subject of history and not an object of it. Senator Obama must listen to all of the voices of Americans in order to bring the justice of the Constitution to the forefront and return this country to the one document that all Americans are subject to regardless of race, ethnicity and religion. I would like to remind all of you of the words of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I paraphrase that it is easy to love those who love you. What work is done by loving somone who loves you? It is work to hear and listen to those that hate you. How can you say you love me when you haven’t seen me but hate your neighbor whom you see every day?
It is as true today as when Reverend Wright spoke them: Hillary is not an African-American. She can never know what that feels like. Hillary has never been called a ‘_igger. This is true. There is no hatespeech here. I feel Reverend Wright was chastising African-Americans because he knew that Barack Obama would not be perceived as a viable presidential candidate and more – a nominee. I can see him interjecting those words into his speech as a wakeup call to his congregation. Can you hear him?
He said in December 2007 that it came to him that the problem was that a president had to be white, rich and priviliged and Barack Obama did not fit that mold. Reverend Wright was talking to Black people about our inability to be hopeful and back Barack Obama. What audacity. What black future? What hope. The audacity of African-Americans to hope just one more time that this time things will be different? Reverend Wright wasn’t speaking with hatred but with passion and perhaps white America got a glimpse of the passion of Hope that white, rich, priviliged people lost a long time ago. Imperialism is M.A.D. and the old ways of thinking are words flung out to push back hope.
IV.
Whites are killing Barack Obama with kindness by calling him a concept. Blacks are killing him by calling him a traitor. Consider Kant’s explanation of concept:
“The logical acts of the understanding by which concepts are generated as to their form are: (1.) comparison, i.e., the likening of mental images to one another in relation to the unity of consciousness; (2.) reflection, i.e., the going back over different mental images, how they can be comprehended in one consciousness; and finally (3.) abstraction or the segregation of everything else by which the mental images differ. … In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare, reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves, and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree.” – Logic, §6 (Wikipedia).
Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama…..have what in common? Unless Barack Obama is an endangered species to be protected then he will not survive the hatchett and chainsaws and be cut down to size and put in his place. But even in a protected state his concept of the best tree places him among the treasured but rarely seen of his kind. As he is the concept of what is best about America he is neither black or white and he is both. And this rare but beautiful specimen will be studied for generations and somewhere in between is the past and the present and the future. What white America sees as a concept black America has collectively prayed into being!
V.
White America understands that Barack Obama is a free citizen of the USA. No descendants of slavery in his genealogy. No involuntary trans-Atlantic travel. If this opportunity is not held onto with the memories of the ancestors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, we will likely wait in vain for another free-man of color to vindicate Africa and heal America. You need to remember too that as Americans we will have the leadership we deserve. There is the audacity. How dare we think that a free African-American can lead us out of the wilderness? How dare he think he can do it? How dare some white Americans like the concept of Barack Obama? How dare some white Americans sabotage the nominating process? How dare we think the road will not have pitfalls to make him stumble? Audacity? Every thought relating to Barack Hussein Obama is audacious! It will be audacious if he wins or loses. It is not just the audacity of him that he is telling us to consider, it is our audacity to hope for this generation of Americans who have relationships with people liked regardless of race. The so-called adults of the democratic party will teach these children during the confirmation of the presidential nominee that fair is fair and wrong is wrong, any cross purposing language….well…like…seems….kind of….not exactly….almost….will may yea and nay worthless at any level of government and there shall be anarchy in its ranks. There will be no trust between democrats and the next president will do nothing but put out fires for four years. Will American be ready then after it will likely have imploded? Are we tearing down what we must in order to build what we need? America must represent the voices of all of its children– even those who disagree – even those stepchildren who may or may not have red hair.
Before there was Amerika there were natives Indians whose land ownership was bartered and bargained into meaningless treaties by the white man. These indigenous people do not recognize Washington as the father of their country. Most African-Americans regard Abraham Lincoln – not Washington, as the father of this land. The son who was not one man but an entire people who lost their mother, Africans. The holy spirit is nothing less than the truth that we were not the firstborn son but by the Constitution we certainly are a son with the same legal rights as any son. Our legacy will be hardfought and won but until we as African-Americans refuse to be defined by our brother and until our brother rejects the old definitions, the chasm between what blacks and whites regard as patriotism when votes are made from one election day to the next will remain as wide as the Atlantic Ocean from Chesapeake, VA to Sao Tome and Principe. Remember this Sean Hannity and FOX News and anyone else who thinks that African-Americans are free: We are not free because you tell us what to think about ourselves. We are free because we can tell you what is wrong with the way you think about us. Freedom is not what you tell us we can have it is about what we can create with or without your consent.
An excellent point which bears (heh!) repeating! “What I tell you three times is true,” Lewis Carroll said, and there’s reason to think he was right.