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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (55218)	10/28/2002 3:14:14 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Look's like it is time to update the "Godwin" Hitler Constant that Win is so fond of. From Reason. And balanced, as usual. This one on CampusWatch is fairly good. The only problem with it is he failed to deal with the problem of the dossiers. The website, the book, etc., is a standard freedom to publish, freedom of press issue. We could then argue the positions that Pipes and Kramer take. The unacceptable portion of it is targeting specific faculty members. That brings out the crazies which populate both sides of the political spectrum. And, also unmentioned in that article, is the fact the Pipes website was put up in the wake of the killings of abortion providers whose names were put on such lists. Makes for chilling stuff.

To: LindyBill who wrote (55218)	10/28/2002 3:34:56 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Godwin's Hitler Constant? I think Cavanaugh just made up that peculiar phraseology. google.com turns up 0 hits. On the other hand, google.com turns up "about 3930" Never trust a Web editor who doesn't use google.

To: LindyBill who wrote (55218)	10/28/2002 7:58:14 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Look's like it is time to update the "Godwin" Hitler Constant that Win is so fond of I am reminded of something my late father, who was a literature professor, told me of his young students -- that for them, "evil" was a box with only one thing in it, Hitler and the Third Reich. If he asked them, "who is evil?", the answer "Hitler" came back automatically. If he asked "anybody else?", he would get blank stares. They had been taught that it was not justified to use the word elsewhere. Which explains why Godwin's Law is a law. If the word "Hitler" is the only synonym for "evil", then obviously references to the Third Reich can only be used for demonizing; they can never be appropriately used as analogies, not even if well-informed. If only Hitler=evil, there can never be an appropriate use of such an analogy, because nobody alive today can possibly be a Hitler. This attitude extends to anybody who dealt with the Third Reich; the period seems to be regarded as sui generis, outside of history. Thus, Win's cry of "Godwin's Law" when I compared Jimmy Carter to Neville Chamberlain. My point was not to demonize but to illuminate a difference: Chamberlain was fooled by Hitler, but recognized after Hitler broke his word that he had been fooled. Carter, on the other hand, remains wedded to a policy of "engagement" even after the dictator reneges. IMO, this is not a foreign policy, but a faith. I don't think that a reference to Chamberlain demonizes; I think that Chamberlain had good excuses for making the disasterous decisions he made. Hitler was a genius during the Thirties; he had the democracies' number and he told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Chamberlain was a very decent man trying to avoid a war that both he and the British people were utterly opposed to, and were in no shape to fight anyway. The whole conventional wisdom of Britain was behind Chamberlain; Churchill was a lone voice, more remote from the British administration than the neocon hawks were from the Clinton administration in 1994. On any scale of gullibility, Chamberlain is far from a supreme example. I do believe that useful and appropriate parallels can be found between the democracies reactions to the rising Soviet and Nazi totalitarian regimes and today's democracies' reactions to the rising threat of Islamism. Obviously the conventional threat is not the same, but the whole point of 9/11 was to show that it doesn't need to be. But we can only discuss these parallels if the Third Reich is a period of history, not something sui generis and outside of history. Of course, I do not deny that Third Reich references can be used to demonize, and often are; my point is only that they can be used in a historically appropriate manner also.