At some point, in a sudden and unfair about-face, it became a smug liberal-intellectual game to declare an argument over (and overheated) the moment a Nazi analogy appears, as Mike Godwin has noted one inevitably does eventually. Well, that’s fine when you’re trying to stop a teenager from declaring his high school’s anti-nudity policy “fascist,” but I think this anti-analogy push has now reached the point that liberals think you can’t even use the Nazis in real cases of strong historical parallelism.
Don’t be surprised, for instance, if you find yourself saying, cautiously and without venom, something like, “I think the mass-murderers in that totalitarian country could have imagined themselves to be justified, though that’s mind-boggling, but then, even the Nazis relied upon a sense of victimhood, the ‘stab in the back,’ to rationalize their subsequent — ” and suddenly having some pinhead leap in and say, “Sorry, but you have totally invalidated your own argument by mentioning the Nazis! Mike Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies!! Godwin’s rule! Godwin’s rule! I win! Gold star for me! Gold star and a free trip to camp! Duuuhhh…”
And then they drool. Yes, they actually drool. I’ve seen it happen, though I’m not saying the drooling per se invalidates their point. I would not be that petty.
Where’s the good Godwin — by which I mean authority-hating original anarchist writer William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley) — when you need him? Fighting fascism on all sides if he were alive today, I’ll bet. So there.
2 comments:
Socialism/communism is when the government owns businesses.
Fascism/Nazism is when the government runs them (when they maybe in private hands).
(Still, it’s fun to remind certain people that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and that he detested smoking.)
I’m not surprised that leftists* feel this way now that they have used the Nazis own methods to elect a President. (Specifics: 1. Taking advantage of a panic to make voters afraid; 2. Employing a deniable gang of street toughs to intimidate potential opponents into leaving and others into donating; 3. Repeated use of hate speech and the Big Lie, including smearing their opponents with accusations of the same techniques.)
* I won’t call them “liberals” because I want to reclaim that word for its original meaning, the adjective of liberty.
I realize the leftists enjoy fooling the gullible by conflating any comparison with the Nazis with an accusation of mass murder. Nevertheless, there are serious and ominous parallels between ACORN and the “brownshirts” (SA), as well as between many of the policies and even the cabinet members of the Obama and Hindenburg administrations. The longer Americans ignore this lesson of history, the more closely we will be forced to repeat it.
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