Nazi analogies have no place in political discourse

In 1990, veteran information technology attorney Mike Godwin made the observation that "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." This adage has become known as Godwin's Law, and it holds true. Follow any heated discussion on the web long enough and you'll find, sure enough, someone ends up calling someone a Nazi.

The Internet is generally understood to be a broadly diverse spectrum of the entirety of humankind. Unfortunately this includes on the lower end, which is sadly more populous it seems, darker elements of the human presence who clearly have no desire to be decent people. The anonymity of web, and the statistical improbability of being punched in the face by some guy you pissed off hundreds of miles away, likely contributed to this condition. It's well understood that if you're not encountering assholes on the web on a regular basis, you probably forgot to pay your DSL bill.

Outside the web it used to be different. Television and radio talk show hosts seemed to have higher standards. Sure, every now and then a fringie might have blurted out a Nazi comparison in an interview, but the host would quickly cut them off and, rightly, label them as a loon. They certainly never encouraged that sort of thing, nor promoted it as they seem to be doing now.

As Leonard Pitts Jr. writes in an editorial published in the Detroit Free Press: "it seems obvious the Nazis have invaded American political rhetoric in a big way. As in Rush Limbaugh declaring health-care reform 'a Hitler-like policy,' swastikas popping up at protest rallies, a poster depicting Obama with Hitler's moustache and a pamphlet that says: 'Act Now to Stop Obama's Nazi Health Plan!'"

Dutifully listeners are repeating in step, Nazis, Nazis, Nazis.

So what's the big deal? It's just political rhetoric after all, a little slanting of the historical facts, a little colorization to give a speech more impact. Just words. Obama's evil anyway, right?

The big deal is that it's absurd. It's absurd and it profanes real human tragedy, the nearly 6 million people who died at the hands of real Nazis, real human ugliness.

Pitts reminds us of the real Nazis: "It was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy's throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see how many of those 'little Jews' could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women's uteruses to see what would happen, who stomped a pregnant woman to death, who once snatched a woman's baby from her arms and, in the words of a witness, 'tore him as one would tear a rag.'"

Nazi analogies have no place in political discourse because nothing in modern America compares to the above.

There are real places in the real world where human atrocities continue, where genocide is policy, where the ideology of Nazism may possibly apply, but it's not here. We don't suffer nearly enough.