Zoe, when the government starts telling specific groups of people where to live, make them wear a mark indentifying them, herding them like cattle into trains, using them as slave labor, and murdering them en masse, I’ll accept that your comparison is valid. Otherwise, I think it’s safe to say that comparing the current administration to the Nazis is completely unwarranted and absolutely insane.
When, to pluck one of many examples out of the air, a certain administration cages people in Cuba for two years without trial, their fascist mindset is betrayed.
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Well no, not really.
Someone with a sense of history and a less overheated brain could make comparisons to U.S. policy in previous times of perceived threat - for instance the activities of the government against war protesters and socialists/communists under Attorney General Palmer. Or cite the conviction and imprisonment of people in England during World War II for nothing more than suggesting that Hitler was a better man than Churchill. A good point could be made about the tendency of many nations to wrongly suspend civil liberties in times of danger without making grotesque allusions to Nazi Germany.
That’s the problem. Nazi-shouting been overdone so much, and in reference to comparatively minor controversies, that calling someone a Nazi tends to provoke either yawns or disgust.
It does tend to diminish perception of the actual horrors committed in the name of fascism, which is what makes criticizing and lampooning those who falsely invoke Nazi comparisons worthwhile.
I repeat myself.
Analogies do not need to be perfect in every fact about the two things being compared, for the analogy to be valid.
No, but it doesn’t hurt for them to be reasonably close.
By your standards I can compare anything to anything as long as they have the vaguest similarities to each other.
Not wishing to be snotty but isn’t the stupidity of invoking Godwin contained within this post. Unless I am mistaken the poster is making a comparison between the Bush administration and the actions of the Nazis to mock a previous post.
When will people realise that Godwin was making a joke.
As long as they are similar in the SUBJECT IN QUESTION, then YES!
Did you even try to read this thread before posting?
Yeah, actually.
Appaerntly I’m not seeing something. Oh well. I go away now.
Well, how about comparing this administration to Mussolini and his black-shirts?
(from this site).
Substitute “anti-terrorism” for “anti-Communism.”
Yeah, I know, the analogy fails on some key points, like Italian Fascism’s degree of government control over private industry, but in this administration, it seems like a few large private industries are controlling the government, so the net effect may be much the same.
Oh, well, this is all a hijack. Sorry about that!
(Stop me before I hijack again!)
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think the Bush/Mussolini analogy works pretty well! Let’s see, now…
[ul][li]Embracing the trappings of the military (Bush in the flight suit, Mussolini in uniform, despite never having risen above corporal in the Italian army, though he was wounded)[]Bully-boy posturing (“Bring it on!”)[]Invading another country for completely bogus reasons (Ethiopia/Iraq)The inability of world bodies to prevent the aggression (U.N./League of Nations)[/ul][/li]It’s looking better and better.
Yeah that does seem to happen. I remember one thread where I caught another poster dead to rights. He claimed that because had I used the “roll-eyes” smiley he had won the debate and promptly disappeared from the thread.
As far as comparing the current U.S. government to the Nazis, it does seem like a bit of a stretch. But I’m willing to cut those folks a little slack (not the Nazis, silly) because the memory of the Nazis, and peoples’ willingness to pounce on Nazi-ish policies helps keep the government in check. And government abuse is a danger even in the 21st century in the English-speaking world. IMHO of course.
Well, let’s see how wonderfully well the analogy works.
“While failing to outline a coherent program”…
Yeah, probably true…though hardly unique to GWB and crew.
…it evolved into new political and economic system that combined corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-Communism in a state designed to bind all classes together under a capitalist system…"
Seems to anyone that’s been paying attention, dominance of “what’s good for corporations is good for America” has been going on in the U.S. for decades. Eisenhower warned about the influence of the ‘military-industrial complex’, family farms have been vanishing in favor of large corporate farming enterprises, mergers have been preceding apace under numerous administrations. The apogee of heedless corporate excess could be argued to have occurred under Clinton (Enron, the high-tech bubble).
Totalitarianism? Really? Individual liberties have completely vanished under the evil GWB? Wow, I really gotta watch CNN more. (If it hasn’t been replaced by Ann Coulter leading Physical Jerks)*.
As for nationalism - I must also have missed those mass parades of the party faithful in their stirring black uniforms, the direct appeals to our glorious imperial past, the commands to seek new territories and lebensraum, directly reversing the course of past Administrations where we never, ever, ventured onto the territory of another nation in furtherance of some perceived national good.
Anti-Communism? Nah. This Administration has been getting even more deeply into bed with the Chinese and shushing up people who keep inconveniently wanting to bring up human rights violations, saber-rattling towards Taiwan etc. We don’t want to upset the Russians either, since they have all those nukes that they can either keep track of or not, for one thing.
Anti-terrorism? That’s not an activity associated with Fascism. Sorry, you can’t remake the definition to suit your views.
Lots of people are far more likely to respond positively to an analysis of why some U.S. policy is wrongheaded if it is thoughtfully presented and well-documented. On the other hand, I can’t recall any time where a poster invoked Nazism and had an opponent respond, "Well, gosh, now that you mention it, that is just like the Nazis! I’ll go out in the streets and join the protest right now!!
*obligatory 1984 reference.
And you know, she’d be really good at it, too. 
Oh, that’s right…the Russkies ain’t Communists no more neither. Sorry, forgot.
Substitute Cuba. I guess we’re really turning up the heat on Castro under GWB.
Or not.
If I believed in hell, I’d think there was a special part of it reserved for needless Godwin screamers. I can still remember another board I was on where I just had to give up and leave after Godwin’s law was invoked on me during a discussion in which I was comparing and contrasting Pinochet and Hitler. And I didn’t even bring it up, it was someone else’s thread about whether fascism hadn’t vanished after WWII. But lo, the AOL morons did blacken the digital sky as locusts, and they didst follow me around from thread to thread screaming about Godwin any time I posted anything.
I never even got the whole appeal of Godwin’s law.
“But Godwin says that if you say…”
“Oh, he does? And who is this Godwin? Cause since you’re on such good terms with him, you can tell him he’s a moronic asshat who simply tries to curtail rational discussion by arbitrarily declaring which subjects are and aren’t available.”
“But Godwin says that if you say…”
I’ve also noticed that the people who rush to scream Godwin anytime Nazis are even tangentially mentioned are generally the ones for whom the comparisons are most apt. In the aforementioned thread, the idiot who started the Godwin screaming did so because I refused to accept his depiction of Pinochet as a hero who valiantly slaughtered the evil forces of the World Socialist Agenda. It seems like the bigots, warmongers, sociopaths, and skinheads all get a pamphlet on Godwin at the meetings or something.
Almost 60 years later and we still keep talking about Hitler and Nazis every day. Anyone ever heard of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge?
The SDMB can’t handle all the threads pertaining either to Hitler or nazi, limiting results to 500. Khmer rouge will net you 64 hits, and we’re are talking about a more recent period here.
Enough with Hitler I say.
Why does everyone think that a comparison to the ideals of the Nazi party must necessarily be a comparison to them at the height of their deranged power? Yes, given that there has never been a systematic genocide on a mass scale using industrial execution methods, it would be hard to find a good comparison. Why must we always extend an analogy to the Nazis at their very worst?
Looking over a timeline of Hitler’s ascension to power, I see nothing there that exactly matches anything in American history—after all, we have never been disarmed by treaty. I can see there might be some valid points to make about the seizure of power, or the forcible diminishment of opposing viewpoints, the reduction in education spending or the increased importance of military might: perhaps not in this country, but surely in others.
I say again, when someone invokes the Nazis in a debate and they are clearly foolish or mistaken, shouting “Godwin’s law, Godwin’s law!” dispels no ignorance; neither does saying, “your analogy is invalid because it does not make reference to the systematic industrial slaughter of a race.” It would be like invalidating a comparison to the U.S. because nobody else has a Statue of Liberty or a White House.
Surely there must be a more educational way of debunking a Nazi comparison than bringing up gas chambers of which everyone is at least remotely aware. By pretending comparisons to Nazis can’t exist, aren’t we creating a world in which they might? Would we only see a comparison to the Nazis after our analogues begin wholesale slaughter?
“Oh, oops, you were right, sorry, now your comparison is valid, I guess they’re starting to slaughter people at this point, maybe we should re-think those old arrrrrgh.”
Agreed; analogies are illustrative and nothing more. The problem is that, by definition, analogies are an imperfect comparison and what nearly always happens in a debate is that your opponent nitpicks at the aspects of the analogy that are not parallel to the situation in hand. I know this to my cost, as I over-use analogy myself (it just happens that a considerable part of the way I think operates that way).
In my experience, analogy only works well as an explanatory tool for a receptive audience - anyone else is looking for a flaw or discrepancy in your argument and all analogies contain at least one.
Apparently not.
If a poster or administration advocates genocide, the references to Pol Pot, Stalin, Rwanda and a certain mid-20th century dictator from Central Europe are apt.
If the a poster or administration advocates curtailment of civil liberties, then perhaps words like “tyrannical”, or even “totalitarian” would fit.
A word on analogies. Gee, why use the rough Nazi comparison, when Mussolini, the Soviet Union or umpteen other dictators are perfectly decent models for those advocating the erosion of civil liberties?
Using the Nazi regime as an example of one that doesn’t respect civil liberties sort of misses the point, n’est pas? It’s accurate, but perhaps more than a wee bit understated.