Are You Ready For Some Hitler?

Hisler.

So true.  And all this demagodwinery is making me nervous, too. 

Two things: First, the nit-picker in me feels the need to clarify what Godwin's law is and is not. Just like Moore's law, it is often misapplied even by those who know full well what it is. Godwin's law doesn't say Hitler references are invalid (which is how almost everyone here is using it, and how I've often used it myself, while knowing it was an imprecise usage), it merely states that the probability of Hitler reference showing up in an online conversation approaches 1 as the number of comments approaches infinity.

Now, for the implied statement that all Hitler references are invalid, or at least facile. Hitler references are almost always implicitly (or explicitly) analogies. Almost always, when someone makes an analogy, they're focusing on how that analogy makes their point and how two things are similar, while knowing that those two things aren't the same. Hitler analogies are not unique in that they are often misapplied, but because of the extreme nature of Hitler's crimes, Hitler analogies are special (although not unique) in that they are far more likely to be misapplied than applied correctly. Another member of that group is the "ticking time bomb" analogy. ("Let's say that there's a ticking time bomb in the city, and the only way you can find out where it is/how to defuse it is by torturing a suspect...") I'll defer addressing your specific usage, as I've forgotten their details and don't really want to wade back into it. 

Hi LULU.  Thanks for addressing the serious point of the piece, which, though placed in the first paragraph, isn't as much fun in the thread as all the Hitlerity hilarity over mocking the overuse of this trope.

I don't think it's correct to say that I ignore context in my general dislike for Hitler metaphors.  What I have observed is that, tres sloppily, on teh Internets, every malign inaction is Neville Chamberlain and every malign action is Hitler. 

You are citing, I think, the al-Awlaki thread in which you cited 14 points asserted to represent the movement of the U.S. government toward what the author describes as fascism.  You had a link about that, and under that another commenter mentions Hitler, and makes express the argument (apparently from) your link that in Nazi Germany there was a gradual distancing of people from the levers of governance, and that people weren't let to know why putative emergencies happened, so, bam, our government is compared to Nazi Germany, apparently over killing Anwar al-Awlaki.

Yes, I meant to include that within the scope of reductive and horribly incorrect Hitler analogies, though I was just more mocking their prevalence than critiquing them point by point.  But you took the time, so I will likewise w/r/t the comment at issue.

1.  People and the government are not being pried apart from each other as the quote suggests at all.  There are snap polls about al-Awlaki (43-32 for the killing, I saw), and about weariness over the war in Afghanistan (more against than for, I've seen), and these polls inflect what our leaders do.  We have more direct democracy in this sense than we did 80 years ago, and more than any nation did then.  Whether our particular decisions are right or wrong, we simply do, descriptively speaking.  So I find this element of the critique from the link, as the other commenter unpacked it, wrong.

2.  Killing one guy abroad who the government thinks helps launch terrorist attacks against it on American soil is something that I think people can reasonably have a difference of opinion about, as to whether a war paradigm or a domestic criminal law paradigm, should control.  While I understand the argument that it should not, and I don't think that argument is stupid, I disagree with it for reasons I tried to state pretty carefully in the OP back there, and I don't think the mere fact of two schools of thought on this means that anyone is Hitler for the fact of disagreeing.  I don't think either argument is so overwhelming in force that the answer is so self-evident, that the people on the other side stand for Hitlerism. 

3.  I also don't think we teeter toward totalitarianism in a world where you and I can have that argument in a stable democracy.  Bush won the 2004 election by 2.4% after Abu Ghraib, and after that, Obama won arguing that we should close Guantanamo and that it was a terrorist recruiting tool.  McCain said the same thing.  So I don't think that in our representative democracy we are unable to have public discussions critical of our antiterrorism policy, or that the government has so withheld information that we can't have discussions about the withholding of information.  Consider the 6-3 decision by which the Supreme Court held that the government could constitutionally restrict assistance even of an ostensibly peaceful nature to groups designated as terrorist groups.  One can disagree with that decision, as the liberals on the Court (other than Stevens) did.  Our political and judicial institutions are not impaired as they are in a totalitarian state, and remain in place as checks against a descent into literal fascism, even if they reach political outcomes or judgments you disagree with, or I disagree with.

4.  I also think, all of the above aside, that arguments for the war paradigm killing of one guy (given the facts that I set out in my very detailed and fact-laden OP) cannot possibly be fairly met with a claim that such advocacy is morally equivalent to Nazi Germany.  (And wasn't FDR's interment of so many Japanese a lot more Hitlery than killing AAA?  It was a whole national-origin group, which is totally and creepily Hitlery, they weren't even accused of anything, which is way more Hitlery, and they did it in camps, totally totally Hitlery.)  First, as to AAA, it's one freaking guy.  Second, I think of the quote, they came for the Jews, then they came for the Catholics, etc.  There is no parallel construction, first they came for Osama bin Laden, then they came for other jihadists who conspired to commit terrorist acts, then they came for me.  The government isn't coming to attack you or anyone on this blog, or Occupy, or whatever, in a progression from drone attacking al-Awlaki.  I don't see killing him, even if you disagree with it, as propagating drone attacks on Green Party enclaves in Northampton or Santa Fe.  If that sounds mocking, it's not.  I'm saying that's the kind of progression that would be necessary for invocation of the Holocaust and the march toward fascism in Germany over drone-attacking al-Awlaki to make any sense.  (You could pivot and talk about some information gathering about citizens instead, which is a major subject change.  That's a valid subject of serious critique, but do you really need to pull the Hitler baseball bat out to do that?  Can we talk about FISA without invoking, say, Hitler?  Can't the government do bad things without it being Hitlery?  I find his invocation to be so over-the-top as to shut down conversation.)

The use of Hitler in the quote is a metaphor for badness.  And there are better and more resonant ways to say that something is bad, even really, really, really bad without reaching for the addictive (and meaningless through overinvocation) Hitler analogies.  This is not an attempt at shutting down critique.  It is a critique of critique.  A suggestion that refining it makes it stronger and better.

So it is possible to overinvoke Godwin's Law (really a limiting principle that stands against rote cries of "Hitler!")?  I suppose.  But all Godwin's Law is, as I invoke it, is a call to chill on all this Hitler.  If people could wait until a eugenics-driven, totalitarian state that wants to exterminate whole racial and religious groups so its fanatical leader can establish a one-race, one-party world empire to bring up Hitler, I'm totally down with the program.  Til then, sorry to Hank Jr. and all his rowdy friends, I am not ready for some Hitler.  Or to use the cheesy hipster locution, I don't want me some Hitler.

You'll be happy to know that Glenn Beck agrees with you. (Is there a Godwin analogue for Beck?)

In all seriousness, read what Articleman and I wrote above, especially what Articleman wrote. He explains fairly well why Hitler analogies are almost always a bad idea. And, yes, "references" are almost always meant to be analogies, unless they're just meant to be statements of fact with absolutely no relevance to the rest of the point being made. The same thing goes for "illustrating" something. If you can't do it without a Hitler reference, then it's probably because you're being lazy. If you're being lazy, you're probably missing some crucial points. It's not 100%, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.

I actually went very far out of my way not to make the post about you.  You are the prime Hitler-analogizer at dagblog, no question, since you bring you into it, but I highlighted one in the OP that Genghis did, and linked to others that other folks did.  I intended no discourtesy, and certainly not to single you out.  (I do think when you used one of my Godwin references to retort with "pompous prick" or such that it was friendly of me to let it go at that.)  This post does explain seriously why I think there are better arguments for almost any position than rote invocation of Hitler, as you can see. 

As to your own commenting, you could throw in a Mussolini reference, maybe a Pol Pot here or there, or maybe even throw in a rare African despot reference, like Idi Amin.  Why should one's imagination be limited to Hitler?  There's a whole world of exaggeration in the palette.  :)  It is but for us to paint. 

I thought the exchanges were pretty remarkable, too.  I've visited a lot of blog sites and I've never seen one like Dagblog.  It's one of the best on the internet, IMO, thanks to the writers who come here to blog and to comment.  But it's G and A who set the tone and it's great of you to acknowledge their efforts.  Thanks.

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