 |
I Seem To Be A Verb: 18 Years of Godwin's Law |
|
 by Mike Godwin, April 30, 2008 |
||
TAGS:
Hitler Is Dead: Godwin's Law lives onThe anniversary of Hitler's death—just ten days after the anniversary of his birthday (which reminds me that he celebrated his final birthday in a bunker in Berlin)—is as good an occasion as any other for me to reflect once more about Godwin's Law. This one-off creation of mine, like the Energizer Bunny, keeps on going and going. If Godwin's Law had been a child, this year it would be old enough to vote.
I can't say I anticipated that Godwin's Law, which states that, "As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1," would last this long or that it would propagate into popular culture to the extent that it has. But I'm mostly gratified that it has done so. Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust.
The genesis of the idea came from my reading Primo Levi's books in the 1980s. I had grown up with a pop-culture knowledge of World War II, and I had even seen many of the photos of the death camps, with their emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood and the haunted, piercing eyes of the skeletal inmates who survived. But Levi's writings brought the experience home to me—they helped me understand better what the experience must have been like for prisoners. In their accounts of the behavior of those who operated the camps and conducted the mass murders, I had a glimmer of insight into the psyches of the Nazis and their henchmen as well. Their consistent pattern of humiliating and dehumanizing Jews and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state—both before sending them to the camps and after they arrived—told me that, on some level, they recognized that what they were doing was a crime against humanity. Hence their psychological need to make their victims seem less human before exterminating them.
It was difficult, after attempting a greater psychological understanding of why the Holocaust happened and how it was conducted, to tolerate the glib comparisons I encountered on the Internet (Usenet in those days). My sense of moral outrage at this phenomenon found an outlet after I read an article in in the Whole Earth Review about memes—viral ideas—that inspired me to create a kind of counter-measure. And so I created Godwin's Law and began to repeat it in online forums whenever I encountered a silly comparison of someone or something to Hitler or to the Nazis. As the handy Wikipedia entry on Godwin's Law (crafted by someone else long before I ever came to work for the Wikimedia Foundation) points out, this was a deliberate experiment in memetics. In other words, I was trying to jumpstart Godwin's Law into becoming a self-propagating idea. By all accounts, I succeeded.
The Law turned out to be more successful at propagating itself than I could ever have predicted. Far more people have heard about "Godwin's Law" than have heard about me, although Wikipedia handily links us together nowadays (another link that predates my arrival at Wikipedia as a hobbyist editor and later as an employee). That's fine by me.
Still, I sometimes have some ambivalence about the Law, which is far beyond my control these days. Like most parents, I'm frequently startled by the unexpected turn my 18-year-old offspring takes. (I'm happy to say that my 15-year-old offspring—my daughter, Ariel Godwin—surprises me at least as often, although invariably in happier ways.) When I saw the photographs from Abu Ghraib, for example, I understood instantly the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmates—but I am the one person in the world least able to draw attention to that valid comparison.
Overall, though, I'm content that the Law has as much popcult traction as it does. My feeling is that "Never Again" loses its meaning if we don't regularly remind ourselves of the terrible inflection point marked in human culture by the Holocaust. Sure, there has been genocide before that point and genocide after it, but to see an advanced, highly civilized nation warp itself into something capable of creating such a horror—well, I think Nazi Germany does count as a first in that regard.
And to a great extent, our challenge as human beings who live in the period after that inflection point is that we no longer can be passive about history—we have a moral obligation to do what we can to prevent such events from ever happening again. Key to that obligation is remembering, which is what Godwin's Law is all about.
 |
Mike Godwin is general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia as well as many other collaborative free-culture projects. He's the author of More... |
The candidate talks about Israel, Iran and Philip Roth
Discussing God's word--and food--with Breadhead Garry Torres
What the Maccabees and Al Qaeda have in common
How to do the low-carb holiday in a post-Heston world
Amy Sohn and Shmuley Boteach on the duties of modern parenting
| Dev Blog | Privacy | Submissions | Contact | |  | | Comment Policy | About Us | FAQ | Masthead |
| Hosting provided by Tilted Planet | ||
Andy Hume
Brilliant, Mike. And, in a
David Kelsey
Amazing
Thank you for sharing...it is great to meet the Jewish mind behind Godwin's Law. Truly brilliant set-up by Jewcy as well.
Mike Godwin
Thanks for the compliment, although ...
... truth in advertising requires that I reveal myself to have been raised in the Church of England.
Mateo
thanks, but
Thanks, Mr. Godwin. I appreciate most of what you wrote, but you lost me with the Abu Ghraib reference (unless you were referring to Abu Ghraib under Saddam Huseein, which I doubt).
You say "the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmate" makes for a "valid" comparison, but come on now - the people imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka suffered far, far, far worse (starvation, mutilation, extermination) than anything endured at Abu Ghraib under U.S. control. I realize that you Godwinned yourself intentionally, but the suggestion in this case it's "valid" is wrong.
Mike Godwin
I worried about that comparison, but ...
... to me the need to *humiliate* in order to *dehumanize* is the relevant connection. I certainly don't dispute that Holocaust victims suffered more, and worse, for longer. But my point was that the impulse to dehumanize an entire people, individually and collectively, in order to victimize them is itself something the Holocaust taught us to recognize properly and forced us to confront. The OED dates the origin of the term "genocide" to Raphael Lemkin's essay from the WWII era. The first international recognition and prohibition of genocide came a few years later.
It's not that genocide had never occurred before -- it's that the specifics of what Germany did forced us to think harder about it. And the lessons we learn from history teach us plenty about the impulses behind dehumanization as it manifests itself today and in the future.
David Strauss
Hi Mike!
Hi Mike!
Mike Godwin
Hi, David!
Nice to see you here.
Dr. Bhaskar Dasgupta
brilliant
I just love this law to bits and its an honour to finally meet the creator. Very very impressed, Mike, nice to see the man who I refer to at least once a week! :)
sra
get the word out
Hey Mike!
Great to see this topic revisited by the progenitor. I reference Godwin's Law more often than I'd like.
I'd love to see this piece get some broader circulation in the Internet
community-at-large. Can we hope to see it published in some geek
circles?!
Anonymous
Use of the word exterminate
Good article, with one edit suggested: I have learned through MRH that 'exterminate' is a poor verb, as one typically exterminates vermin, not human beings. Use of that word unintentionally reinforces Nazi view of Jews as vermin........
JewcyCraig
Get the word out
Steve
Never again?
"Sure, there has been genocide before that point and genocide after it, but to see an advanced, highly civilized nation warp itself into something capable of creating such a horror"
Is the Iraq war not a genocide? Millions of dead civilians.."collateral damage" as Rumsfeld says. Like their lives mean nothing. What about the genocide US forces did in Afghanistan? Or do their people not count because they're brown skinned.
"we have a moral obligation to do what we can to prevent such events from ever happening again."
I agree. Yet such events are indeed happening right now as you read this. It's happening in Iraq. "Operation Iraqi Liberation." Iraqis view what the US administration is doing to their people & their country the same way Jews view what Hitler did to theirs. Yet our "moral obligations" conveniently turn a blind eye to the reality because it doesn't directly effect us, our race or religion. Over 1.5 million Iraq civilians massacred as result of the administrations illegal war. A 'pre-emptive' war upon a nation that had no proven WMD, no connections to 9/11, no proven threat to "our freedoms and way of life" it was all lies. Why are US forces still there? Why are innocent people, men, women & children being tortured? 7 years after 9-11, no end in sight. An entire nation going bankrupt from war fraud. An entire nation forced into horrific war on lies, massive fraud & fabricated "evidence". Iraqi's are having their own 'holocaust" as we turn a blind eye to the mass slaughter taking place under the phony guise of liberation and freedom. What are those with this so called "moral obligation" doing to stop the war? Nothing. But if it happened to our own people....
Mike Godwin
The verb "exterminate"
Anonymous, I worried about using that word -- "exterminating" -- too, but I had been reading Nicholson Baker's HUMAN SMOKE and was coming across the use of the word by the Nazis and others, and it seemed appropriate to use it to reflect the Nazi mindset. (You'll notice that Mateo above uses "extermination" as well.)
Steve, I too am appalled by most of the actions of our government with regard to Iraq. I wouldn't equate it with the Holocaust, however.
O'Neill
Genocide
A genocide has a very specific legal definition. For the same reason you developed Godwin's law, I think it is important to be very disciplined when using this term. To not be cheapens the word. Something can be awful, criminal, and even inhuman and still not be genocide. The key to genocide is intent, and anything short of that must not be put in the category.
Dennis Wallace
Future comparisons
Do you see in the future that there might be a law, just like yours,
that discussions online that grow longer will inevitably lead to a
comparison with Bush (for they had done to Iraq and Afghanistan)?
I am sure when Internet gets popular in their areas such a comparison would definitely crop up.
Your views?
Pete Smith
Like many laws, yours is in need of corollaries
Like many laws, yours is in need of corollaries, and I would suggest two:
Corollary 1: As an online discussion continues, the probability of someone saying, "Godwin's law only applies to non-jews," approaches 1. I have lost count the number of instances where people feel hurling such invectives is acceptable if one is jewish or defending Israeli policies.
Corollary 2: As an online discussion continues, the probability of a jewish critic of Israel being called a "self-hating jew" approaches 1. Equal to the first corollary, I have lost count the number of jewish people inside and outside Israel who are labelled "self hating jew" simply for not agreeing with the policies and tactics of Israel's various governments, as if seeking alternate solutions for peace was tantamount to suicide.
Some will try to claim the first statement is "anti-semetic", but the second shows that accusation to be stupidity and gainsaying. There is a certain level of rationalized hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of "Never Again" and who is considered a victim (e.g. Israeli politicians' refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide of 1910).
Post new comment