It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?"

I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.

Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" -- something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.

Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.

Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."

Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"

No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.

Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species - not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.

More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."

It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to - oh, I don't know - Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.

One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:

"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."

Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."

Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.

Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book -- "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.

In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by - guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?

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.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently took a trip to Brown University to give a speech about environmentalism. Or so he thought. Instead, he got a pie in the face from a couple of members of the "Revolutionary Communist Party, USA." And sure, Friedman seems like a victim here, but don't a mustache, neatly combed hair with a part, and violent clashes with Communists sound eerily familiar?

The Shocking Truth Revealed

The disturbing parallels don't stop there. President George W. Bush appointed a John Bolton to be US ambassador to the UN under the Führerprinzip, without congressional approval. Why? Because Bolton is one of the principle exponents and demagogues in the movement to break apart the liberal international order and replace it with an anarchic Darwinian international war of all against all, on the mystical quasi-religious belief that the inherent virtues of his Heimat will lead her to triumph over her internal and external enemies, and claim the mastery of the world she is due. Plus, sources in the know report that Bolton, a Yale man, is tied to Bush's mysterious Skull and Bones society, which everybody who's got the real news knows is where the Nazi movement began. Small wonder Bolton is a posterboy of the fringe über-nationalistic right wing. And that 'stache! Any guesses just what the poster will look like?

Bolton demands Lebensraum

Recently I discovered a relatively new food blog called Hezbollah Tofu. As the face of a self-described "Bourdain Veganizing Collective," the site got me thinking a bit more deeply about chef, author, and travel show host Anthony Bourdain. In the past, I'd written him off as annoying but relatively harmless: Narcissistic, yes, and prone to angrily shit-talking those who disagree with him (and sometimes even those who don't), but generally not someone to worry about.

I took his anti-vegetarian and vegan rantings with a big grain of kosher salt. In his book Kitchen Confidential, he writes:

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn...Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold."

Sticks and stones, right? Wrong. Though it had never occurred to me before, today everything became kristallnacht clear: Who else stereotyped minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit"? Who else saw minority groups as "an affront to all he stood for" and typecast them as physically weaker? Hint:

Toasting The End of The Vegans

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Some mania is propelling millions of Americans to vote for a man who offers them nothing but cheap, soothing platitudes about some coming golden age of national unity while scapegoating unnamed foreigners and greedy rapacious capitalists for their troubles, and building up a frightening cult of personality around himself. Most of his friends seem to be anti-Semites, and those that aren't Jew-haters seek the violent overthrow of the government and the imposition of a new totalitarian order based on the leadership of some "Worker's Party."

We've seen this movie before, haven't we? Domestic terrorists attempt to set off a revolution in their country's "Second City"; are foiled but not vanquished; and bide their time. People, wake up. First they'll come for the capital gains --- and if you don't speak out because you're not a capital gain, who will speak out for you?

You know who else was for unity?

Last week, Fareed Zakaria pointed out that John McCain's recent major foreign policy address "contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed. In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries...It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war."

Well sure, but Zakaria doesn't have the courage to go where the facts should lead him. In McCain's own lifetime, there was another world leader who saw politics as a break in between wars and sought to impose his country's values on the rest of world. That leader saw confrontation with Russia, specifically, as his world-historical destiny, and embarked on an unprovoked attack on the Great Bear that led not only to his own downfall, but to the utter destruction of his state and its political order. That leader's name? Do I even need to spell it out?

Also would have thrown Russia out of the G8

Photographic evidence: Santa gives the Nazi saluteI know it’s almost May, and Christmas isn’t exactly around the corner, but I’d just like to go on the record and say how fed up I am with Santa Claus. I saw someone yesterday in a Santa suit (I didn’t ask why) and it got me thinking about how completely perilous Santa is and always has been.

When you think about it, Santa’s a lot like Hitler.

• He lives far away and so doesn't really seem like a direct threat.
• He keeps slaves of a lower caste to do the labor he needs.
  
• He steals into people’s houses late at night when they're least expecting it.
  
• He discriminates, makes lists (and apparently checks them twice), and has some eerie way of knowing who’s naughty (Jews, ahem) and nice (informers, possibly?)
• He wears a strange uniform.
  
• He has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb.
  
• Oh yeah, and he saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Does anyone else think this might be dangerous? And don’t give me any crap about him having anything to do with Christmas—show me where it says Santa in the New Testament. Show me the nonsense about cookies and milk and Rudolf. Give me chapter and verse and we can chat. Until then, keep Santa away. Santa is an anagram of Satan, and as far as I’m concerned, Santa-themed sweaters might as well have big black swastikas on them. Mark my words: One of these days "Heil Santa" will catch on as a holiday greeting. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hillary Clinton has come out in favor of a summertime gas tax holiday, because, she claims, she wants to lend a hand to consumers hard hit by rising fuel costs. What's more, she's using the proposal to bash her Democratic primary opponent as an out of touch elitist. One could criticize the plan by pointing out that it will save consumers maybe $30 --- or, if the supply of gas is inelastic (it is), the cut won't save consumers anything. Or one could point out that a candidate ostensibly in favor of curbing greenhouse gas emissions has no business promoting a government-backed splurge in fossil fuel consumption. Or one could point out that Clinton's proposed 18.4 cent/gallon cut in gas prices is more than offset by the 35 cent hike in gas prices her cap-and-trade plan will entail.

But really, that's missing the big picture. What other monomaniacal politician propelled himself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate? What other politician railed against plutocrats and fed voters' suspicions that they were victims of an elaborate conspiracy of financiers? What other politician attacked his political opponents as out of touch elitists who were vaguely but suspiciously alien to his country and its culture, and was friends with Leni Riefenstahl?

I think you know the answer:

Didn't like international corporations, either

Speaking of zaftig: Beyonce looks good in greenAs someone whose occasional bouts of self-loathing have nothing to do with my relatively normal-shaped body, I didn’t think I’d be susceptible to the pull of the weight-loss-obsessed website Elastic Waist, but watching their video on the derivation of the word “zaftig” really did make me a little bit bulimic.

Zaftig, the host explains, is Yiddish for “juicy,” a phenomenon about which we feel profoundly ambivalent these days—just ask poor Jennifer Love Hewitt, who was roundly trashed in the tabloids this week when shocking photos revealed that her bottom half is as jiggly as her top. Helpfully, the Elastic Waist video goes on to offer a handy guide for how to react when someone calls you zaftig. Apparently it’s a “fat euphemism” (so it’s an insult) which describes the kind of body you’d see on a Greek statue (so it’s attractive); it translates roughly to “pleasantly plump” (so it’s bad) and can be used in sentences such as “Pamela Anderson is quite zaftig after being injected with all that silicone” (so it’s good, or at least it’s considered attractive enough that people pay money to emulate it and also to look at it naked in old issues of Playboy.)

All of this could, I suppose, leave a girl unsure whether she needs to go buy some Snackwells or a push-up bra—or, duh, both—but the video derails these consumer urges with a sharp right turn into total insanity. Meet Frau Zaftigheimer, “the world’s zaftig expert.” She’s a Teutonic dominatrix, she’s built like a brick house, and for her, being zaftig is “a global movement” aimed at combating “the bony-ass models, anorexic celebrities and the media.” Frau Zaftigheimer explains all this while whipping her “2 o’clock” (because fat activism alone doesn’t pay the bills). Then she turns to the camera, and, as the Wagner swells on the soundtrack, says the following: “We shall create a master race of zaftig!”

Targeted by eyepatch–wearing German dominatrixes: Keira KnightlyGot that? If, like Frau Zaftigheimer, you’re a little worried about the way the media—like, oh god I don’t know, random example here, maybe websites about weight-loss?—perpetuates unhealthy body images among women, then maybe, like Frau Zaftigheimer, you are a Nazi. It’s rare for women-aimed publications to prove out Godwin’s Law (the rule that as discussions get longer and crazier, someone will invoke Hitler) but then again, they’re only just starting to take hold on the Internet. I’m sure that as publishers figure out how to make money off of women online, we’ll get used to hearing all sorts of fashion- and body-related stances being conflated with Nazism all the time.

What makes this really mind-blowing, though, is that ostensibly the whole thing is a Hanukkah-themed video, Yiddish being the language of all those Hanukkah-celebrants who were systematically murdered by the same kind of Wagner-loving fat activists who tried to take over the world in order to rid it of Keira Knightly and her ilk. (Typing that sentence made my head throb.) Um, and a chag sameach to you too, guys!