"Godwin's law: As an online 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, especially fallacious arguments of the reductio ad Hitlerum form."--Wikipedia

Take a good look at the picture of Hitler--it's the last time you'll see or hear of him on my blog. I have long grown weary of Nazi analogies from blog commenters--we've had 750 different ones in the past year, according to my blog software.

I am banning the word "Nazi," "feminazi," and the name "Hitler." There are several reason for this:

1) The analogies are almost always spurious and often silly.

2) Reflecting the weakness of the American educational system and America's insularity, the individual involved usually does not know anything about the Nazis themselves, but simply doesn't know of any other tyrant to substitute, or thinks that other readers won't know of any. Usually "Nazi" is simply a way of saying "evil," with no particular reason to cite the Nazis in particular.

3) My family came from the town of Bialystok, once in Russia and now in eastern Poland. It was one of the first cities hit when Hitler invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, and the city was completely leveled. Between that and the Holocaust, most of my family was wiped out. When I visited Bialystok in 1984, I had my family's old address and other information, but the city had been so leveled and rebuilt that the information I had made no sense to anybody. Comparisons between this and anything happening to anybody in the United States today are beyond ludicrous.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under History, Glenn's Blog. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.