Godwin's Law and Jonah's Book - Democratic Underground

Pamela Troy

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Thu Dec-20-07 08:47 PM
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Godwin's Law and Jonah's Book

Edited on Thu Dec-20-07 08:55 PM by Pamela Troy

In Stella Gibbons’ 1932 comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, there’s a moment when the story’s heroine, Flora, learns about a male acquaintance who is working on a book that posits Bramwell Bronte as the actual author of Wuthering Heights:

“Ha! a life of Bramwell Bronte,” thought Flora. “I might have known it. There has been increasing discontent among the male intellectuals for some time at the thought that a woman wrote Wuthering Heights. I thought one of them would produce something of this kind sooner or later.”

A similar sense of resignation settles over me every time I hear about Jonah Goldberg’s upcoming book, Liberal Fascism. To paraphrase Flora Poste, there has been increasing discontent among conservatives for some time at the thought that Hitler was a right-winger. I thought one of them would produce something of this kind sooner or later, and now, inevitably, someone has. Godwin’s Law, that modern debating affectation which presumes that the best way to venerate the millions of victims of the Holocaust is to ignore exactly how the numbers got to the millions in the first place, has at last borne fruit.

Some readers may consider it unfair that my gut reaction is to dropkick Godwin’s Law so hard my metal-toed work boot leaves a dent in it. Yes, I understand it was originally all about Internet discussion threads that had gone on too long. The idea was that if a thread had begun as a discussion of socks getting lost in the dryer, by the time the subject got around to the Nazis it was time to end the thread.

But Godwin’s Law degenerated into a mindless form of “etiquette” in which any analogy to the Nazis, no matter how valid, was dismissed as disrespectful to the victims of Nazism. As a result, apologists for everything from racial eugenics to torture to concentration camps could burble merrily along without fear of anyone making awkward comparisons. If someone had the temerity to bring up the fact that such policies and tactics had already been tried out in the Third Reich, the reaction from the White supremacist/Eugenicist/torture apologist was likely to be something along the lines of “BZZZZZZZT! Godwin’s Law! I win! I win!”

After over a decade of this, much of what my generation and my parents’ generation swore would never, never be forgotten about the Nazis has been forgotten. Heck, facts we never imagined would be forgotten about the Nazis – like their place on the political spectrum and their opposition to liberalism – are now under attack from the right.

Some months ago I wrote at length about http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Pamela%20Troy/24">Conservapedia's attempt to sell the notion of Nazis being leftists. I have no advance copy of Goldberg’s book and no intention of paying Lucianne’s boy for the damned thing when it does hit the stores, but having examined in some detail other attempts at this form of holocaust revisionism -- and yes, that’s precisely what all this “Hitler-was-a-leftist” garbage is -- I am curious about whether he uses the same arguments to justify his claims. Sadly No has been kind enough to post a few excerpts, and from what I’ve seen there, Liberal Fascism is just a more verbose version of the crap that’s been posted online by right wing crackpots since this trend first began cropping up in the ‘90s.

Much of it falls under “Betcha Didn’t Know!” approach to history. Betcha didn’t know that Hitler “CLAIMED TO BE A DEDICATED VEGETARIAN!” Betcha didn’t know that Himmler was “A CERTIFIED ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVIST!” Betcha didn’t know about THE NAZI PARTY PLATFORM! The answer from most people who’ve done even casual reading about the Third Reich is likely to come in two parts: “you’d lose” and “so what?”

It’s not like this trivia about Hitler hating meat and Himmler loving bunnies and the meaningless socialist planks in the party platform were secrets, carefully covered up by conniving historians and diarists. Even left-of-center writers like William Shirer trusted readers to grasp that the Nazis use of the word “Socialism” was not what made Hitler’s name a curse in the mouth of any humane person in the second half of the 20th century. The most chilling scenes in films like Cabaret, or the 1978 TV miniseries Holocaust do not involve a protagonist arguing with a fellow lodger’s belief that eating meat causes cancer or being confronted after the war by the moral nihilism of participation in a government program providing needed medical care to Reich citizens. Niemoller did not begin his famous statement with, “First they came for the smokers.”

We live in an era where the right wing defends torture and secret detention in mainstream venues. McCarthyism and the politics of paranoia are returning in an especially virulent and dangerous form. Violence against liberals is obliquely and sometimes directly advocated by nationally broadcast pundits like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. The precise words “stab in the back” are not yet on the lips of Bush apologists but accusing liberals and Democrats and other war critics of disloyalty and “America hating” is pretty much routine these days. And the language often being used against Moslems – they’re murderous, unchristian money-grubbers who can’t be trusted and should be driven from public life – is disturbingly similar to language once used against Jews in a certain Western European country back in the ‘30s.

In such an environment, Godwin’s Rule becomes more and more obviously a ridiculous cop-out. In such an environment, nobody should be surprised that a book is now coming out that seeks to tie the evil of the Nazis, not to virulent intolerance of dissent, racism, physical intimidation and anti-intellectualism, but to vegetarianism, animal rights, and the word “socialist” in the Nazi party name.

It’s hard to say whether or not this revisionist approach to the history of Nazism, nurtured for years in the online community, will fly once it’s released onto the offline world. The reception given Goldberg’s book after it hits the shelves is going to be interesting. Let’s just hope it’s not “interesting” in the sense of that old Irish Curse.