{"id":5111,"date":"2017-02-24T14:38:29","date_gmt":"2017-02-24T19:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5111"},"modified":"2017-02-24T14:38:29","modified_gmt":"2017-02-24T19:38:29","slug":"season-of-the-godwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5111","title":{"rendered":"Season of the Godwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Godwin’s Law<\/a> is, roughly, that as a political discussion proceeds, the likelihood of an analogy to Hitler increases.\u00c2\u00a0 Long discussions have it as a relative certainty that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Mussolini references will not only happen but perhaps multiply. (We’ve done a number of bits on Godwining here at the NS.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve tried a reconstruction of the argument form here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Enter our favorite Orange Furher-analogue and the variety of ways folks have made the argument.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s the nationalism, the militarism, the authoritarian style, threatening the free press, the racism.\u00c2\u00a0 And there’s the fact that even his supporters holler out ‘Heil Trump<\/a>.’\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 So much to work with!<\/p>\n

It’s worth paying attention to a small difference in argument criticism here — you can criticize an argument against some claim or individual without really defending the claim or person.\u00c2\u00a0 That is, you don’t have to be a Trump sympathizer to think that some analogies between him and Hitler are off base.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve just got to think that this<\/em> analogy isn’t quite right.\u00c2\u00a0 (See John’s older post<\/a> about how to evade in these lights.)<\/p>\n

David Harsanyi at NRO<\/a> has a bit of argument criticism with the wide phenomenon Godwining\/Ad Hitlering with our Great Orange Leader.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 He has one line of argument that there are bad consequences to the overuse of Ad Hitlerum<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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Comparing everything to 1933 is now a big part of our national discourse, not only that of angry partisans but also that of people who should know better than to habitually make these correlations. This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Mel Brooks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Springtime for Hitler. Whether you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a fan or a detractor of Trump, these gross false equivalencies belittle the memory of millions who died in unimaginably horrifying ways<\/strong>. Moreover, exaggeration and historical illiteracy undermine the very cause these people claim to care about, unless that cause is desensitizing people to the terror of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, we have to note that the argument here depends on the analogies being false<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 So the main line of argument, then, depends on the case that there are relevant dissimiliarities between Trump and Hitler.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s how Harsanyi breaks the analogies when they come to deportation:<\/p>\n

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[E]ven if the authorities . . . were to start deporting illegal immigrants, not one of those unfortunate people would ever be sent to anything resembling the ovens of Treblinka and Auschwitz.<\/strong> Not their children. Not anyone else in this country. Most often, in fact, deported illegal immigrants, who have broken the law, are going back to their home in Mexico, where they can often apply for legal entry into the United States.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Two things.\u00c2\u00a0 First, the Jews weren’t sent straight to the ovens.\u00c2\u00a0 They were sent to internment camps, which were billed to the rest of Germany is pretty nice places.\u00c2\u00a0 Second, given the way the laws were sold to the public, they don’t sound like matters of targeting illegal immigration, but are more matters of ethnic or religious identity.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s that part that merits the Hitler analogies, not whether the consequences<\/em> are nicer or not.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 That the policies could be worse<\/em> (as in exactly like Hitler’s policies) is a very weak defense.\u00c2\u00a0 And, again, as we’ve said many times: analogies are not identities<\/a>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Godwin’s Law is, roughly, that as a political discussion proceeds, the likelihood of an analogy to Hitler increases.\u00c2\u00a0 Long discussions have it as a relative certainty that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Mussolini references will not only happen but perhaps multiply. (We’ve done a number of bits on Godwining here at the NS.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve tried a … Continue reading Season of the Godwin<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,23],"tags":[1783,740,743,1847,741,2061,2104],"class_list":["post-5111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-specious-allegations-of-fallacy","category-weak-analogy","tag-ad-hitlerem","tag-ad-hitlerium","tag-ad-hitlerum","tag-godwin","tag-godwins-law","tag-trump","tag-trumpism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5113,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111\/revisions\/5113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}