It's time to repeal Godwin's Law

[tinyp3nis]

Wrong question.
That 'law' has always been stupid and useless.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
I was kind of agreeing with him till the last line. Does he think that annoying Germans is a priori desirable or what?

Ditto. I found that last sentence to be horribly offensive. Way to blow an otherwise good point.

[GePap]

We should invent the Apolyton Law about invoking Godwin's law. Cause we can always use more laws.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


yeah, cause Nazi comparisons are just so illuminating, and lead to reasoned discussion, especially when the comparison doesnt involve mass murder. I mean the use of the Nazi comparison in regard to Gitmo, abortion, excessive use of force by Israel on the West Bank, parlour antisemitism in Britain, Palestinian rejectionism etc (there, is that balanced enough?) have done SO MUCH to really help us understand those issues.


Not.

The Holocaust is the most obvious historical aspect of Nazi Germany but there are other ways to make comparisons with Nazi Germany -- repression of free speech, forced labor camps, street bully politics, misuse of law enforcement, and so forth.

Again, your making unreasonable restrictions.

[Q Classic]

So, now we have two N-words? Jeebus, how will those N-words ever know which N-word we're calling them?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by MrFun


The Holocaust is the most obvious historical aspect of Nazi Germany but there are other ways to make comparisons with Nazi Germany -- repression of free speech, forced labor camps, street bully politics, misuse of law enforcement, and so forth.

Again, your making unreasonable restrictions.

but there are other regimes that had repression of free speech, forced labor camps, street bully politics, etc, etc. When you refer to Nazis you necessarily bring in connotations of the holocaust.

[Q Classic]

It's obvious that comparing things to Nazis is a very Eurocentric and white thing to do.

Henceforth, all my comparisons will be to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, rather than my former comparison target of the Nazis.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


but there are other regimes that had repression of free speech, forced labor camps, street bully politics, etc, etc. When you refer to Nazis you necessarily bring in connotations of the holocaust.

And all Soviet comparisons bring in connotations of the Great Purges and the Gulags, all Khmer Rouge ones of the Fields of Death, all Australian ones of sheep molestation. Your point?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ramo
Except he wasn't comparing anything to mass-murder. He was saying that the abuse cited belongs to an authoritarian regime like Nazi Germany, rather than the US. He was comparing an individual abuse to an individual abuse. Knee-jerk whining about Godwin's law certainly doesn't advance the debate, rather it stifles debate.

so why not compare the abuse to the French in Algeria, say, which is actually a more apt comparison? Cause he wants to get the benefit of the shock value of the word Nazi. Well you cant have it both ways - with the shock value, comes the distraction from your actual point. Which is the point of Godwins law.

"when a Likud politician compares Palestinian terrorists to Nazis, hes NOT comparing anything to mass murder. Hes saying the killing of Jews cited belongs to a totalitarian (not authoritarian) regime like Nazi Germany, rather than an aspiring democratic nationalist movement"

Do you buy that? Cause I dont. The Palestinians, even the terrorists, are NOT Nazis, and calling them that tends to A. Confuse the issue, and lead to poor policy approaches and B. Trivialize the holocaust - which is implicated in every such reference to Nazis, though some may regret it. The same applies to the use of the term re Gitmo. Just as you cant understand Palestinian terrorists by thinking about Nazis, and cant formulate a correct way to end Pal terrrorism, so you cant understand US actions at Gitmo and elsewhere by thinking about Nazis, nor can you formulate correct ways to end those.

[Boris Godunov]

Like it or not, the Nazis have become the archetypical Big Bad when it comes to evil regimes in the world. Honestly, how could they not? So if one makes such a comparison, one is most likely going to use the Nazis, since a much larger audience is going to understand the implications of that comparison.

Go up to the person on the street and say "Nazis!" and they'll know you mean an evil, repressive regime of bad guys. Say "Khmer Rouge," you'll get head-scratching.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
And all Soviet comparisons bring in connotations of the Great Purges and the Gulags, all Khmer Rouge ones of the Fields of Death, all Australian ones of sheep molestation. Your point?

WRT to the Khmer rouge, youre spot on, it holds just as strongly. As for the USSR, its a tad more complex, as that regime lasted 70 years, and mass murder was a tad less central to its history. And calling someone a commie, or even a Stalinist, doesnt have the same connotations at least in English, as calling someone a Nazi. But id say, yes, calling something Stalinist, when its not, tends to kill discussion. See Amnesty and their Gulag reference.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Like it or not, the Nazis have become the archetypical Big Bad when it comes to evil regimes in the world. Honestly, how could they not? So if one makes such a comparison, one is most likely going to use the Nazis, since a much larger audience is going to understand the implications of that comparison.

Go up to the person on the street and say "Nazis!" and they'll know you mean an evil, repressive regime of bad guys. Say "Khmer Rouge," you'll get head-scratching.

That's because of the strongly Eurocentric bent of history education in these United States.

[lord of the mark]

Hitler Is Dead
New Republic ^ | 05.16.02 | Leon Wieseltier


Has history ever toyed so wantonly with a people as history toyed with the Jews in the 1940s? It was a decade of ashes and honey; a decade so battering and so emboldening that it tested the capacity of those who experienced it to hold a stable view of the world, to hold a belief in the world. When the light finally shone from Zion, it illuminated also a smoldering national ruin; and after such darkness, pessimism must have seemed like common sense, and a holy anger like the merest inference from life. But it was in the midst of that turbulence, in 1948, that the scholar and man of letters Simon Rawidowicz published a great retort to pessimism, a wise and learned essay called "Am Ha-Holekh Va-Met," "The Ever-Dying People." "The world has many images of Israel," Rawidowicz instructed, "but Israel has only one image of itself: that of an expiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be.... He who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel's chain. Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up.... Often it seems as if the overwhelming majority of our people go about driven by the panic of being the last."

In its apocalyptic season, such an observation was out of season. In recent weeks I have thought often of Rawidowicz's mordant attempt to calm his brethren, to ease them, affectionately and by the improvement of their historical sense, out of their tradition of panic. For there is a Jewish panic now. The savagery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Arab world, the rise in anti-Jewish words and deeds in Europe: All this has left many Jews speculating morbidly about being the last Jews. And the Jews of the United States significantly exceed the Jews of Israel in this morbidity. The community is sunk in excitability, in the imagination of disaster. There is a loss of intellectual control. Death is at every Jewish door. Fear is wild. Reason is derailed. Anxiety is the supreme proof of authenticity. Imprecise and inflammatory analogies abound. Holocaust imagery is everywhere.

In the discussion of the atrocities that the Palestinians have committed against the Israelis, the subject is Hitler. "I am convinced that we are facing a threat as great, if not greater, to the safety and security of the Jewish people than we faced in the '30s," the head of a national Jewish organization announced in February. In the New York Observer in April, Ron Rosenbaum warned of "the Second Holocaust": "It's a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate." Indeed, "there's likely to be a second Holocaust. Not because the Israelis are acting without restraint, but because they are, so far, acting with restraint despite the massacres making their country uninhabitable." George F. Will admiringly cited Rosenbaum in a column that he called "`Final Solution,' Phase 2." "Here in Washington, D.C., a few blocks away, is the Holocaust Museum," William Bennett told the rally in support of Israel at the Capitol on April 15. "What we are seeing today, what Israel is feeling today, was not supposed to happen again." On the same occasion Benjamin Netanyahu compared Arafat to Hitler, and also to Stalin. ("We don't have to be afraid that the international community doesn't see eye to eye with us," he proclaimed at the Likud Party conference this week. "Did the international community see the danger of the Holocaust?") "THE NEW KRISTALLNACHT," screamed the headline of a Jewish paper in New York about the Passover massacre in Netanya. "This is Kristallnacht transposed to Israel," wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. And doves are as unnerved as hawks. "As I've said before," Nat Hentoff told New York magazine, "if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, 'All Jews gather in Times Square,' it could never surprise me."



Call me a simple soul, but it could surprise me. The Jews that I see gathered in Times Square are howling at Nazis in Mel Brooks's kick lines. Hentoff's fantasy is grotesque: There is nothing, nothing, in the politics, the society, or the culture of the United States that can support such a ghastly premonition. His insecurity is purely recreational. But the conflation of the Palestinians with the Nazis is only slightly less grotesque. The murder of 28 Jews in Netanya was a crime that fully warranted the Israeli destruction of the terrorist base in the refugee camp at Jenin, but it was not in any deep way like Kristallnacht. Solidarity must not come at the cost of clarity. Only a fool could believe that the Passover massacre was a prelude to the extermination of the Jews of Israel; a fool, or a person with a particular point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you think that the Passover massacre was like Kristallnacht, then you must also think that there cannot be a political solution to the conflict, and that the Palestinians have no legitimate rights or legitimate claims upon any part of the land, and that there must never be a Palestinian state, and that force is all that will ever avail Israel. You might also think that Jordan is the Palestinian state and that the Palestinians should find their wretched way there. After all, a "peace process" with the Third Reich was impossible. (Even if Chaim Weizmann once declared, about his willingness to enter into negotiations with Nazi officials, that he would negotiate with the devil if it would save Jews.) So the analogy between the Passover massacre and Kristallnacht is not really a historical argument. It is a political argument disguised as a historical argument. It is designed to paralyze thought and to paralyze diplomacy.



All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war. This typological thinking defined the historical outlook of the Jews for many centuries. It begins, of course, with the Amalekites, the nomadic tribe in the Sinai desert that attacked the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt. "The Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.... Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it." From generation to generation: An adversarial role, a diabolical role, was created in perpetuity. And so Amalek became Haman (who actually was an Amalekite), who became the Romans, who became the Crusaders, who became Chmielnicki, who became Petlura, who became Hitler, who became Arafat. The mythifying habit is ubiquitous in the literature of the Jews. In some instances, it must not have seemed like mythifying at all. "A tale that began with Amalek," wrote the Yiddish poet Yitzhak Katznelson in the concluding lines of "The Song of the Murdered Jewish People" in 1944, not long before he died at Auschwitz, "and ended with the crueler Germans...."

But it is mythifying, and the habit is back; and so a number of things need to be said about Amalek, and about the Amalekization of the present enemy. For a start, the prescription of an eternal war with Amalek was a prescription for the Jews to be cruel. Here is Rashi's brutal gloss, in the eleventh century in France, on the commandment to "blot out the remembrance": "Every man and every woman, every babe and every suckling, every ox and every sheep. The memory of Amalek cannot be said to survive even in an animal, such that someone could say, `This animal once belonged to an Amalekite.'" This extreme of heartlessness was responsible for the most chilling sentence uttered by an Israelite in the Bible: "What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" That was what Samuel furiously demanded to know of the poignantly human Saul, the king who could not bring himself to slaughter his enemy completely. So if Amalek is waging a war of extermination against the Jews, the Jews are waging a war of extermination against Amalek. It was perhaps this pitilessness against which some (but certainly not all) medieval and early modern Jewish intellectuals revolted, when they wondered about the precise identity of Amalek in their own day, and proposed various kinds of symbolic action that would allow Jews to acquit themselves of the law about the erasure of the enemy, and deferred the application of the law to the messianic age. I wish also to record an extraordinary comment by Isaac Abarbanel, the thinker and statesman who failed to persuade the king and the queen of Spain to revoke the edict of expulsion in 1492 and promptly fled to Naples. The sin of the Amalekites, he explained, was that their aggression against the Israelites was groundless: "Amalek attacked them without reason.... For the Israelites possessed no land that the Amalekites coveted." It would appear that there is no place for Abarbanel in the Likud. For his implication is decidedly a moderate one. If the Israelites had possessed land that the Amalekites coveted, then this would not have been a war to the end of time. It would have been an ordinary war, a war that can be terminated in a peace.



But the real problem with typological thinking about history is that it is not historical thinking at all. It is ahistorical thinking. It obscures and obliterates all the differences between historical circumstances in favor of a gross, immutable, edifying similarity. It is an insufficiently worldly way to judge the world. For this reason, such thinking was overthrown in the modern period by Jews who decided that their myths would not ameliorate their misery; that there was not only one question and only one answer; that the entire universe was not their enemy and their enemy was not the entire universe; that the historical differences mattered as much as the historical similarities, because a change in history, progress, normality, tranquillity, was possible; that historical agency required historical thinking, that is, concrete thinking, empirical thinking, practical thinking, secular thinking. All these notions amounted to a revolution in the Jewish spirit, without which the Jewish national movement and the Jewish state could not have been brought into being. A historiosophy is not a strategy. The Jews taught themselves to attend not only to their fates, but also to their interests. That is to say, they taught themselves no longer to regard themselves as the last Jews. The lesson was called Zionism. The last Jews have nothing to do but fight or die; but Zionism has more to do. Israel was not created to destroy Amalek. Israel was created to deny Amalek.

Is Hamas Amalek? I have no idea. Also I do not care. It is bad enough that Hamas is Hamas. (Was Hitler Amalek? No, he was worse.) Anyway, Amalek is not all that justifies the use of force. But the important point is that Amalek justifies nothing but the use of force. There is no other solution to the Amalek problem. And that is why all this pessimism is not only intellectually sloppy, it is also operationally superfluous. It is a view of history that provides no foundation for Israeli restraint, and sometimes restraint is the intelligent policy. Consider this week's calamity. If Netanya was Kristallnacht, then Rishon Letzion was Kristallnacht. The villain in Netanya came from Jenin, and Israel turned its might on Jenin. The villain in Rishon Letzion came from Gaza, but Israel is not turning its might on Gaza. Why not? The logic is the same. The answer, of course, is that this is not the logic of statecraft. If, as the Israeli press is reporting, there may be signs of flexibility on the Palestinian side, it is the duty of the Israeli government to stay its hand and have a look. These signs may be false; but too many people have perished not to take their measure. The exploration of opportunities for accommodation and understanding is a matter of both prudence and principle. It may be that Ariel Sharon, of all people, has comprehended this. As long as the prime minister of Israel continues to speak of the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, Kristallnacht is over. (For Netanyahu, by contrast, every Nacht is Kristallnacht.)




The Jewish genius for worry has served the Jews well, but Hitler is dead. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is harsh and long, but it is theology (or politics) to insist that it is a conflict like no other, or that it is the end. The first requirement of security is to see clearly. The facts, the facts, the facts; and then the feelings. Arafat is small and mendacious, the political culture of the Palestinians is fevered and uncompromising, the regimes in Riyadh and Cairo and Baghdad pander to their populations with anti-Semitic and anti-American poisons, the American government is leaderless and inconstant; but Israel remembers direr days. Pessimism is an injustice that we do to ourselves. Nobody ever rescued themselves with despair. "An ever-dying people is an ever-living people," Rawidowicz sagely remarked. "A nation always on the verge of ceasing to be is a nation that never ceases to be." It is one of the lessons that we can learn from the last Jews who came before us.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of TNR.

[Last Conformist]

The real problem isn't Nazi comparisons per se, but the use of inapt but emotionally charged comparisons. Nazis, thanks to their iconic status, just happen to be the most popular comparator.

Case in point; comparing Hamas bombmen to Nazis is about as informative as comparing them to Tellytubbies. It's done solely for the emotional effect.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Like it or not, the Nazis have become the archetypical Big Bad when it comes to evil regimes in the world. Honestly, how could they not? So if one makes such a comparison, one is most likely going to use the Nazis, since a much larger audience is going to understand the implications of that comparison.

Go up to the person on the street and say "Nazis!" and they'll know you mean an evil, repressive regime of bad guys. Say "Khmer Rouge," you'll get head-scratching.

exactly