The leftist, or at least mainly leftist,
pseudo-intellectuals who infest certain portions of the Internet
have become very fond recently of invoking something they call
“Godwin’s Law.” This may be expressed more or less as follows:
“Whoever first brings an analogy about Hitler or Nazism into an
argument has lost that argument.”
In fact, this invocation of Godwin’s Law is rhetorical and
intellectual junk, generally used in an attempt to intimidate and
kill argument, and we would be a lot better off without it: try,
if you’re an Australian Federalist, to point out that one of
Hitler’s first acts on coming to power was to abolish the old
German states and replace them with centrally-controlled regions
under Nazi Party Gauleiters to make the national imposition of a
Police State both possible and easy. “Godwin’s Law!” is the
giggling reply.
Try mentioning to a euthanasia advocate that the Nazi
extermination program started off as an exercise in medical
euthanasia. And as for suggesting that Jews and Israel are in
danger of a second holocaust if Muslim extremists have their way,
just wait for: “Godwin’s Law!” “Godwin’s law!” repeated with a
kind of witless assumption of superiority reminiscent of school
playground chants.
It goes without saying that Nazi analogies can be, and are,
frequently misused, often in a disgustingly dishonest way:
“Climate-change denialism” is obviously intended by those who use
it to be linked to Holocaust denialism, and the term Holocaust
itself has been used tediously often to link Australian policies
toward Aborigines with Auschwitz, but this does not alter the
fact that there are occasions when such analogies are
appropriate.
Obviously, with the growth of Jew-hatred we are seeing
around the world today, references to Nazism are often not only
impossible to avoid but are really the only appropriate ones, by
way of either illustration or warning. Though I said above it is,
for some reason, mainly leftists who invoke Godwin’s Law, there
is also a ratbag anti-Semitic right, fortunately not very common
in this country now, to whom Nazi analogies are also
applicable.
However, there have been several instances recently of
British universities refusing to admit Jewish students or to
publish papers by Jews, citing as the reason opposition to
Israel’s policies. A British judge has prohibited British Jews
from sitting on a jury, in Malmö, Sweden, a surge in
anti-Semitism has led Jewish residents, who arrived there as
refugees before the war, to abandon the city and in Odense,
Denmark, superintendent Olav Nielsen announced last year that he
would no longer admit Jewish children to the local school. Other
statistics show an increase in anti-Jewish hate-crimes all over
Europe. How is one to talk of this kind of thing without Nazi
analogies coming into it?
I think, also, that we are going to hear a lot more soon
about a voluntary euthanasia program for the old in the
not-too-distant future. A law signed some years ago commenced:
“Full responsibility to enlarge the powers of certain specified
doctors in such a way that they can grant those who are by all
human standards incurably ill a merciful death after the most
critical assessment possible of their medical condition” — and I
would be breaking Godwin’s Law if I mentioned who signed
it.
Personally, I don’t intend to be intimidated by chants of
“Godwin’s Law” or any other infantile slogan, used to smother
debate in a way reminiscent of something from George Orwell or,
if you’ll excuse me saying so, a Nuremberg Rally. I have come up
against echoes of Nazi thought-patterns and arguments many times
and not only am I not going to be bullied into keeping silent
about this, I believe every civilized person has a positive duty
to speak up about it whenever appropriate. The same goes for
Stalinist communism and the predictable parrot-cries of
“McCarthyism!” or, more commonly in Australia today, “Reds under
the beds!” They are simply forms of intellectual bullying. At
best, they can smother the serious discussion of issues, at worst
they can be used to conceal and/or justify genuinely murderous
and totalitarian thought.
