The Other N-word

Dusting off Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and setting it back ten years (equivalent to a couple of eons in Internet Time), we'd find Mike Godwin, legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noting the axiom "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." This became known as Godwin's Law. And, according to Wikipedia:

There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

Oddly, that tradition seems to hold over into the real world of public discourse as well. That is, unless you are a Republican.

Senator Dick Durbin's remarks that the conditions at Gitmo would call to mind Nazi camps and Soviet-style gulags, brought the ire of the Right to bear upon him. No matter that the conditions are indeed terrible (Durbin himself was reading from a declassified FBI memo), because someone went so far as to invoke Godwin's Law, they loose. Suddenly now we can rest assured that because we are not as heiniously evil as Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, we're doing nothing wrong at all.

Recall how Senator Robert Byrd was similarly denounced for citing the comparison of how the GOP was altering the rules of the Senate to the manner in which Hitler legally consolidated his power. But here's something you may not recall of another Senator invoking nazism: "It's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city? It's mine.' ". Such were the words of Pennsylvania's Republican senator Rick Santorum speaking of the Democrats' opposition to ending the filibuster. How much press time was spent on that Godwin goof?

Ask any Right-winger about MoveOn.org and they'll tell you "that's the group that compared W to Hitler" when, in fact, it was two contest entries from the public that did so and were promptly removed from the cite when the content was discovered. Rush Limbaugh-tomy routinely makes references to "femi-nazis" and Bill O'Reilly has compared Air America's Al Franken to Josef Goebbels. But that's OK, right? And who is it that always claims the role of "victim" to the PC thought police?

Puh-leeze!

It all serves as a distraction, the smoke and flames of the Mighty Oz to keep us away from the real issues behind the curtain. There were (and perhaps still are?) prisoner abuses commited by those representing this country, the very country that purports to be the standard bearer of the moral high ground. As future president and current junior senator from Illinois Barack Obama says, "This administration has made a habit of diverting attention of its failures by criticizing the messenger."