Godwin's Law

[Wallenstein]

There was an interesting article in the Guardian newspaper today concerning Godwin’s Law…

Columnist Mathew Engel offered this information:

Nazi watch: many habitués of internet talk boards have pointed out to me the existence of Godwin’s Law, which covers the overuse of the second world war analogy in political arguments. The original wording seems a bit clumsy but is now freely translated as “the first person to mention the Nazis loses”, which is not a bad rule.

The most interesting response on this subject came from Craig Collinson, who is just completing his PhD on “how the late Gallo-Roman rhetoricians used early Roman military history as an ideological resource” - a subject I would have undoubtedly tackled myself had he not nabbed it first.

“If you swapped Hitler for Hannibal and Churchill for Scipio or Fabius Maximus,” he writes, “you will find striking similarities in many of the late Gallo-Roman texts… The use of the military past is strikingly similar; it seems to originate in a need to articulate the present in the language of the past.”

Not sure if this is an MPSIMS or a GQ or GD but I was wondering whether anyone had come across similar varients of “Godwin’s Law” in debates from other periods of history…?

Would be interesting to know whether nineteenth century Germans used the “You’re no better than Napoleon” technique to extricate themselves when they were on the losing side of a discussion…