Godwin's Law

Mike Godwin.

Illustration (in English) of the moment when a discussion passes a certain level of confrontation, which inevitably generates a point of non-return, often easily recognizable.

Godwin's law or Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies is technically a statement (although it was popularized as a law) of social interaction proposed by Mike Godwin in 1990.

Set the following:

As an online discussion elongates, the likelihood of a comparison in which Hitler or the Nazis are mentioned tends to be one.

There is a general tradition in many Usenet newsgroups: as soon as a certain comparison similar to the one described in the statement is mentioned, the thread is closed and whoever used it loses the discussion. Thus, Godwin's law provides a limit to threads on Usenet and other groups. In fact, this is how many participants know the law.

Origin

The self-described law is eponymous for its ideologue, Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and became popular in the early 1990s. Richard Sexton claims it is a formalization of an October 16, 1989 message sent by him.

It can be deduced that a discussion on Usenet expires when one of the participants mentions Hitler or the Nazis.

By saying expiration it refers in those spaces to two related facts:

1. The topic would have deviated enough from the original matter, so the conductor thread and the developed ideas are distorted.
2. The thread could be closed (and no longer allow more comments) and pass the discussion to another thread.

So the term expiration implies one or both of them, expiration of the title-subject relationship and expiration of the web server's ability to accept more text input.

Deeming the Nazi comparisons meme on Usenet illogical and offensive, Godwin established the law as a "counter-meme" in 1994 in an article about his law. The memetic function of the utterance is to warn participants about the implications of diverting a topic so far as to "compare with the Nazis."

Many extended it to establish that whoever mentions them as an argumentative tactic outside the context of world warfare or the Holocaust immediately loses the discussion. The underlying idea is the bad taste of comparing trivialities with genocide.

Objections and Counterarguments

A common objection is that, on certain occasions, mentioning Hitler or the Nazis is an entirely appropriate way of arguing a point of view. For example, if you are discussing the relative merits of a particular leader, and someone says something like "he's a good leader, look how the economy has improved", you could say that "the simple Just because you improve the economy doesn't mean you're a good leader. Even Hitler improved the economy». Some would see this as a valid comparison, since Hitler is used because he is a leader everyone knows and therefore the example does not need to be explained (despite the obvious Reductio ad Hitlerum ).

Others would say, to the contrary, that Godwin's Law is especially applicable to the situation described, since the mere mention of Hitler is an inevitable appeal to the emotions and an unspoken attack ad hominem to the leader being compared, both inadmissible. Hitler, at the level of semiotics, has too many negative connotations to be used as a comparison to anything else except other despotic dictators. Thus, and according to this last argument, Godwin's law remains true and applicable.

Godwin's typical response to this objection is to note that Godwin's law does not question whether or not a particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis would be appropriate, but rather, precisely because such a reference may sometimes be justified, the use of the Hitler/Nazi comparison as hyperbole should be avoided. Avoiding such hyperbole, he states, is one way to ensure that valid comparisons have the appropriate semantic impact.

The law tries to avoid a conversational abuse, because many times they are mentioned simply to evoke evil and a possible objective confrontation of facts becomes a subjective discussion about good and evil that concludes it. This approach is expressed quite clearly by the statement “Something is bad, because Hitler did it” or “Something is not a virtue, because Hitler had it”. However, sometimes it is mentioned outside of connotations.