I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but perhaps not here. I really don’t like glib comparisons of various annoyances to Hitler. Orac has his Hitler zombie, which graphically shows the lack of thought usually employed in the analogy by feasting on the writer’s brain. The lack of thought is a nuisance, but there’s something more which Pat Hayes mentioned recently, and I think he got exactly the right word when he said:
It’s not just the bad argumentation, it’s the fact that it reduces one of the darkest periods in human history to a trivial debating point that really sticks in the craw.
I don’t tend to write about the the holocaust of the second World War. It’s a difficult thing to write about sensibly. I could just state that around six million Jews died. Or I could write about the Polish perspective on the Holocaust. Six million Poles, half of whom were Jewish, died. Around a quarter of all Roma died. Deaths in the Balkans among Serbs and Bosniaks were probably higher than a million.
I’m not sure how you can meaningfully relate to those figures. I can imagine losing family, but by quoting figures you risk losing the enormity of the tragedy into a statistic. This is a popular game with Holocaust deniers who think that four million Jewish dead is, by the logic of mathematics, only 67% as horrific. The terror, the despair at bringing your children into such a world, the lack of hope, the omnipresence of evil – I struggle to connect it to the sheer scale of the atrocities committed.
When someone then argues that Dawkins, Dubya or whoever is Hitler then this truly is Godwin’s Law in effect. Usually it’s a signifier of a lack of thought in the person proposing the analogy. It’s usually easy to mock the person for not having a rational grip on what he’s arguing about. However, the point of Godwin’s Law, which Pat Hayes brought up isn’t only what it says about the topic being discussed. It also shows an erosion of understanding of history. It reveals a diminishment of the value of human life or the cost of human suffering. At best it demonstrates a lack of thought for fellow human beings and betrays an unfortunate failure in comprehension.
There are times when valid analogies can be made between the Nazi regime and other events. Someone writing a newspaper article you disagree with isn’t one of them. Not unless the message you want to send is that the systematic deaths of millions really is no worse than someone writing an annoying article. How would you explain to someone – without being sarcastic or patronising – that holocausts are non-trivial events?
Link omitted because I’d like to think the page that set me off was momentary thoughtlessness rather than malice. I’m sure you could find plenty yourself.
