Godwin’s law explained
“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin’s Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin’s Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
Remember this, then read the following paragraphs from a post David Neiwert wrote on Orcinus:
As Patrick Nielsen Hayden has suggested, virtually the entirety of the RN&F series has been in gross violation of Godwin’s Law. It’s pretty hard not to mention Nazis and Hitler, at least by implication, when one’s focus is a clearer understanding of fascism and how its essence remains alive in American society.
However, I haven’t been posting out of ignorance so much as impatience with these kinds of protocols. As someone whose reportage on many occasions has been on the subject of very real neo-Nazis, the idea that I’d lose an argument just by writing factually about the undercurrents they represent is nonsensical.
For that matter, I’ve always viewed Godwin’s Law as symptomatic of the larger problem I hoped to confront with this series: Namely, an almost frightened refusal by most Americans to come to grips with the meaning of fascism, and how that blind spot renders us vulnerable to it.
Like so many people, David misunderstands Godwin’s Law: it doesn’t mean you cannot talk about Hitler, nazism or fascism. It means that in the heated atmosphere of many Usenet discussions comparisons of your opponent with Hitler or fascism are easily made. It’s like the overuse of “fascist” for anyone you don’t like and is the slightest bit autoritarian. Factual discussions of Hitler and co have never been subject to Godwin’s Law. I suspect that Patrick Nielsen Hayden was somewhat tongue in cheek when he described David’s series on “Rush, newspeak and fascism” as a “Godwin’s Law violation”.