Picard: The troubling Nazi-fication of COVID-19 discourse

2021/08/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

If you spend any amount of time on social media engaging about COVID-19, you will know discussions tend to get personal and ugly pretty fast.

Encourage vaccination of young people, and you’re labelled a pedophile.

Support masking in indoor settings? You’re a goose-stepping fascist.

Laud vaccination as a way out of the pandemic, and you are Joseph Goebbels and should brace yourself to be on trial for crimes against humanity at the fictional Nuremberg 2 tribunal.

Acknowledge that lockdowns are sometimes necessary to control the spread of a pandemic virus, and brace yourself for the onslaught of Hitler images.

These types of responses are predictable to a certain degree.

Godwin’s law (coined by U.S. lawyer Mike Godwin in 1990) holds that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler becomes more likely.

These days, debates go from zero to Hitler in about a nanosecond.

Some may want to dismiss this kind of over-the-top rhetoric as laughable, the work of a tiny minority of extremists and their bots.

But it’s obscene, and obscenely commonplace.

The Nazi-fication of public discourse is no longer the sole purview of pathetic man-boys holed up in their basements.

Enabled by social-media giants hiding behind freedom-of-speech arguments, trolls can now spread their misogynist, racist and anti-social views readily and mercilessly.

The goal here is to muddy the waters between fact and fiction, between truth and lies, and to undermine democratic institutions.

The grunts of a few can be turned into shouts that unfortunately have a growing audience, especially among the disgruntled and disenfranchised.

Playing the victim card appeals to them.

The ragtag collection of conspiracy theorists who gather at anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown rallies is fascinating – a stinking potpourri of grievances, with denunciations of everything from vaccines to “fake news,” to 5G, to the so-called “deep state.”

These rallies – which are getting bigger as pandemic frustrations grow – have more than their fair share of Hitler talk and imagery. They also include people wearing the yellow Star of David, implying that being told to wear a mask or get a jab is a level of persecution comparable to Jews who were rounded up and shipped in cattle cars to death camps.

Clearly some people have lost the plot.

Yet, they are being encouraged by politicians who embrace rhetoric suggesting that a position is invalid because the same view was held by Hitler.

A case in point is odious Ontario MPP Randy Hillier, who claims that lockdowns, mask rules and vaccine mandates are forms of Nazi-like tyranny.

His perverse version of freedom holds that individual rights are absolute, and that, for example, unvaccinated people have a God-given right to do as they please up to and including infecting others with the coronavirus.

Mr. Hillier and his acolytes have made a habit of casually tossing around Nazi analogies and Hitler images.

This mainstreaming of hateful images and thinly veiled hate speech should alarm us on a number of levels.

First of all, it betrays a profound ignorance of the Holocaust.

There can be no comparisons made between the state-sponsored mass murder of six million people and the temporary shutdown of the local mall.

Those who have the unmitigated gall to wear yellow stars to anti-mask rallies offend the memory of the victims of the Shoah and their descendants.

It is worth noting that Mr. Godwin, when he fashioned his adage, actually wanted people to think harder about the Holocaust and why Nazi comparisons should not be casually tossed into conversation.

Thinking is certainly not what’s happening here.

What we’re seeing is a lot of projection, the psychological impulse to project on other people what you’re actually feeling.

Former U.S. president Donald Trump, sometimes called the “Projection President,” was the embodiment of this phenomenon.

Mr. Trump, a chronic liar who wallowed in corruption, routinely attacked his opponents as corrupt liars. He also frequently described his opponents in a derogatory fashion, a lynchpin strategy of hate-mongers, and now a mainstay of social media.

Next time you hear the claims of Nazi-like tyranny and oppression, think about what is really being said.

Those who don’t want masks under any circumstances – those who not only want to refuse vaccines but prevent others from getting them – are actually the tyrants.

Their use of Hitler images and analogies are not a caution, but an embrace, one we should call out, not dismiss casually.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-troubling-nazi-fication-of-covid-19-discourse/

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Godwin’s Law: What the Creator Thinks of Hitler Comparisons | Time.com

2017/07/04 Leave a comment

Excerpt from an interview with Mike Godwin, the inventor of Godwin’s law (invoking Hitler means losing an argument):

It’s obvious you have a pulse on social media where the Hitler comparisons you predicted are rampant. You can’t just chalk that up to Trump right?
As far as I know, every President who has been President from the time I got on the internet has been compared by someone to Hitler. People compared President Obama to Hitler. People have forgotten there were pictures of Obama with a Hitler moustache. That talk was crazy.

I’m not going to tell people whether to compare Obama or Trump to Hitler. It’s the government of the United States, and that’s very hard to destroy with a cult of personality because we have a lot of institutional inertia by design.

Would you say Trump’s impact makes the comparisons to fascism online more frequent?
I think so. There’s always been a general upward trend, peaking at election times. I think President Trump’s campaign was so populist and so outside the political establishment that it inspired people to reach for the comparisons because we’ve never had a President like this come in as a media personality outsider.

Isn’t it lazy to go there?
Of course it is. If you want to say something more powerful than the last person who disagreed with you said, people volunteer the rhetorical comparisons because they haven’t thought hard about history and what’s different between now and Germany in the 1930s or Cambodia in the 1970s.

When do you believe it’s a fair shake?
I urge people to develop enough perspective to do it thoughtfully. If you think the comparison is valid, and you’ve given it some thought, do it. All I ask you to do is think about the human beings capable of acting very badly. We have to keep the magnitude of those events in mind, and not be glib. Our society needs to be more humane, more civilized and to grow up.

Any idea how to stop the glib references?
A lot of education reform. If I ran the world, I would strengthen both history and scientific education in the United States. If we fostered more self-criticism and self-skepticism, I think that would do much to prevent rhetorical meanness and mean spiritedness on the internet, of which Hitler comparisons are only a tiny part.

We are in mid-adolescence culturally. When you reach adolescence, you’re not fully socialized. If we’re more self-aware, we can use social media with newfound growth and muscles.

Source: Godwin’s Law: What the Creator Thinks of Hitler Comparisons | Time.com

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Justin Trudeau, Steven Blaney and Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies – From the author of Godwin’s Law

2015/03/16 Leave a comment

For those accusing Justin Trudeau and Minister Blaney of inappropriate Nazi and Hitler references, an interview with Mike Godwin, the coiner of Godwin’s law that whoever first invokes an (inappropriate) reference has lost the argument, to set the record straight:

Let’s start with Mr. Trudeau. Did you think what he said was appropriate? 

Yes I actually do I think that it’s served Canada well to remain aware that the singling out of people on the basis of their ethnic or religious background is not something that Canadians have totally been a stranger to. That in the run up to World War Two certainly Jews in Canada had that experience …. I think that Canada of this century is a better place and I think what Mr. Trudeau is saying is in line with what I think majority of Canadian values are today.

You are aware that some people did criticize him for that comparison perhaps unconsciously thinking of Godwin’s Law. 

I am aware of it and I think that the thing that I would say in defence of Mr. Trudeau is that he is not saying that anyone who is afraid of people of different cultures or people of different ethnic groups is inherently going to act like a Nazi or be like Hitler. I think what he’s saying is look, let’s be aware of history, we should remember our mistakes and not repeat them.

Let’s look at minister Blaney who seemed to draw a line between certain kinds of speech and the Holocaust. Do you think that that comparison was acceptable. 

…  I want to say, in defence of Mr. Blaney, that in fact bad ideas can lead to bad real world outcomes. That is certainly true and nobody can dispute that. But what free and open societies like Canada’s and like those of other developed nations really try to do is not attack the ideas by suppressing them.

For all the Canadian pundits, politicians and interest groups who condemned both, worth reading and reflecting upon, and appreciating the nuance in Trudeau’s remarks in contrast to the less sophisticated remarks of Blaney.

Justin Trudeau, Steven Blaney and Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies – Home | Day 6 | CBC Radio.

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Godwin’s Law

2014/03/13 Leave a comment

An old post, but continues unfortunately to be relevant, by Bernie Farber on the abuse of Hitler comparisons (Godwin’s Law):

http://m.huffpost.com/ca/entry/1875579

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