Don't fall to trappings of Godwin's Law

By: Bill Bradford

Posted: 10/29/08

In the beginning, Barack Obama was accused of being a Muslim in disguise. Then he was accused of "palling around with terrorists." Most recently, he was accused of being a socialist.

Now, thanks to Barometer columnists Wozich and Druckenmiller, Obama is accused of being…a Nazi?

Yes, my friends, Godwin's Law is alive and well.

One doesn't expect to see a flame war leap from the dregs of cyberspace onto a legitimate newspaper. Then again, six years ago no one thought acute respiratory disease would make the leap from Asian chickens to humans.

In October of 2008, Godwin's Law made the viral leap from online discussions to the Barometer Forum pages.

I dislike criticizing fellow Barometer columnists, but Wozich and Druckenmiller deserve it. In fact, I'm not just calling them out, but demanding they have their GOP American flag lapel pins removed and placed in safekeeping until they can prove they are capable of avoiding Godwin's Law.

What is Godwin's Law?

Mike Godwin, a computer geek and a columnist for Jewcy.com, an online magazine for Jewish hipsters, coined the term in the early 90's. According to Godwin:

"As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1."

Or, to put it another way, in the days of USENET (the pre-historic period before web browsers) when an argument reached a level of extreme hyperbole, all one had to do was invoke Hitler or the Nazis, and the discussion was over. It was often used in debates about gays and abortion. The October 16, 2007 issue of the Economist put it perfectly declaring, "a good rule in most discussions is that the first person to call the other a Nazi automatically loses the argument."

By this standard, both Wozich and Druckenmiller lost it. Both making references to Nazis and Hitler when they tried to rail against Obama.

Wozich, in his Forum column on Oct. 10, warned that Obama's followers were guilty of possessing a "sheep-like" mentality, beguiled by his charismatic oratory skills. Wozich wrote:

"I have heard this argument from many of my Obama-loving schoolmates. While I agree that the man cuts a graceful figure on stage and on camera, I do not believe that these are qualities that automatically make a great leader."

For example, Adolf Hitler was quite the public speaker in his day. He even convinced the German people that it was socially acceptable to massacre six million Jews as well as countless Polish Catholics, gypsies, retardates, homosexuals and political dissidents.

"Vladimir Lenin moved thousands of Russians with his speeches against the Imperial Czarist regime in the early 1900s ... If charisma and eloquence are the most important characteristics of a leader, then we might as well elect our presidents from the ranks of Hollywood actors."

Ironically, Wozich is a history major, which begs the questions: How about a certain Hollywood actor named Ronald Regan? What about other inspiring personalities such as John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, FDR or Martin Luther King Jr.? Charisma, combined with decency, makes a great leader.

On a side note, I found myself pondering the word "retardate." After Googling the term, what I got from Merriam-Webster's online dictionary was, "Often offensive: a mentally retarded person." As a person with a disability, and as one who advocates for physically and mentally challenged adults, I was taken aback by its usage in Wozich's column. Sure, the Nazis may have used it in their day, but do we have to use it now?

As disappointing as Wozich's column was, Druckenmiller's was more troubling.

In the Oct. 22 Forum, Drunkenmiller railed against Obama's plan to give a tax break to 95 percent of Americans, calling it a "redistribution of wealth" and "class warfare." He claims that since 32 percent of Americans don't make enough money to pay income tax, giving them a rebate check is tantamount to welfare. I won't go into great detail about the logical fallacy of this line of reasoning (hint: people pay more than just payroll taxes, such as property tax, gas tax and sales tax). Suffice to say, Druckenmiller lifted his argument right off the McCain website. A pint glass serving of NeoCon Kool-Aid.

But then he went a step further, once again invoking Godwin's Law:

Martin Niemöller once said, "When they came for me, there were none left to speak out." He was referring to the Nazi's ideology of selecting one group to persecute, and laid out the Nazi progression from Communists to Jews and finally to himself. The same logic should be employed when examining the class warfare of Obama and Biden: if we allow any to be exploited (wealthy or not), then we are allowing all to be exploited.

Whoa. Comparing the Obama tax plan to Nazi persecution is not only a very bad analogy, it is blatantly offensive to every Jew and Holocaust survivor. The very complaint Godwin makes against such analogies ("Reductio ad Hitlerium," he calls it), is that it trivializes the most despicable act in human history.

Plus, the class warfare analogy itself is entirely misleading. The conservatives launched class warfare against the liberals in the 1960s. Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich revived it in the 1990s under the new moniker of "The Culture Wars." Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly kept it alive into this decade, and Sarah Palin put lipstick on it during the Republican National Convention.

Recently it has been seen in John McCain's hysteria over The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Republicans claim to be saving democracy from voter fraud. Actually, what ACORN is doing (if anything) is voter-registration fraud. Registering multiple times is not against the law; only your most recent registration is counted.

Here's a prime example. In Ohio, conservatives used the same hysteria, in part, to suppress or revoke the votes of nearly 200,000 low-income people of color in 2004. According to Representative Dennis Kucinich, "Dirty tricks occurred across the state, including phony letters from Boards of Elections telling people that their registration through some Democratic activist groups were invalid. "

From my perspective, it would appear that McCain is the one engaging in class warfare, reminiscent of 1933, when Joseph Goebbels...

Oh crap! Now I've invoked Godwin's Law! Actually, it is like a virus.

I beg of you, my fellow Baro writers, readers and pundits, cease invoking Godwin's Law. Go ahead and mischaracterize Obama as a "socialist" or a "friend of terrorists," if it turns your crank. But let's avoid the Nazi talk and Hitler analogies. It's bad form, and it weakens any cogent point you are trying to make.

Bill Bradford is a graduate student at OSU. The opinions expressed in his columns do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily Barometer staff. Bradford can be reached at forum@dailybarometer.com.