Administrative notice
The next person to make a non-ironic and in-all-seriousness comparison between the Nazis and anybody else in the comments on this blog is banned for all eternity from making any other contribution.
It’s not clever. It’s not satirical. It’s rhetorically empty and it makes you look like a tit. That is all.
Posted on June 6th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
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• Filed under A few administrative notices, Miscellaneous misanthropy |
• 15 Comments |
Probably not the best time to mention that my dad was in the Hitler Youth then?
I’ll get me coat…
Well, fer fuxake, if you can’t nazify your metaphors, what the Thatcher can you nazify?
(free speech, lefty, socialism, national socialism, strike out word which do not aply)
Philip’s latest blog post… Unsinkably Buoyant
Yep, that’s fair.
We shall all be better off when bloggers start thinking instead of trying to be “contwoversial”.
BenSix’s latest blog post… Actions Speak Louder Than Words…
I think I’d ban anybody who thought that it was clever to use terms like “wadical” or the above, rather than unoriginal and stupid.
ejh’s latest blog post… Aspirations
Switch your irony detector back on.
It’s on, thanks. As is my knobhead detector.
So this is your final solution?
(etc.)
Schweinhund!
[...] see that Justin has been getting all shirty about folk who draw comparisons between Hitler’s National Socialists and [...]
As Canute to the Ocean, so the Chicken to Godwin. Do I get the Order of the Iron Cross for that?
Whatever that means.
Wali wa Nazi (wali, cooked rice; nazi, coconut) is a Swahili dish popular on Africa’s Indian ocean coast, particularly in Swahili areas like Zanzibar, Lamu, Malindi, and Mombasa. It is a creamy, rich accompaniment to any meat, chicken, fish, or curry.
Nazi = Coconut
I thought about writing a wee bit about this over at my place, but couldn’t stay on topic. Perhaps I’ll do better here.
I understand the point you’re making. But I think there’s a distinction that needs to be made (and it hasn’t been. Unless I’ve missed it, which is always possible.)
On the one hand, if you’re superimposing swastikas on a Labour logo in order to make the point that “Labour are Nazis!” then you’re guilty of either grossly overestimating the crimes of Blair, or grossly underestimating the crimes of Hitler.
No argument with that. And there does indeed seem to have been a lot of it going on of late.
But if, on the other hand, you’re using the same image to make the point that “it can happen here”, then I think you’re probably on quite legitimate ground. Because one of the true horrors of what happened in Germany in the 30s and 40s was that it can’t be seen as some bizarre historical anomaly that will never be repeated; a measuring rod against which the crimes of the present will graciously and forever come up short.
This is why I sometimes get a little tired of the cries of “Godwin!” whenever Hitler or the Nazis are mentioned. In one sense they are a powerful, and recent-enough to still be relevant, reminder of what can lurk beneath the surface of modern industrial society should the wrong series of events come to pass.
For example, and here I risk the wrath of the mob, my own analysis of the Israeli / Palestine situation rather worryingly suggests that there may well be similar drives emerging within the Israeli people as a collective, as emerged (and got so ruthlessly manipulated) within the German people in the 20s and 30s.
Now, when I make that suggestion it’s honestly not as some crass insulting comparison between modern Israel and Nazi Germany. It’s as a reminder that the very reason we should remember the Holocaust is so we can guard against it ever happening again. That when groups of people begin to objectify one another, nasty things start to happen. And when one of them has the power of a modern state on their side, then the truly horrible can occur.
Of course we need to keep things in perspective. To suggest that a government is as bad as the Nazis is to suggest that they’ve commit a crime on the same level as enslaving, working to starvation and finally exterminating six million people based largely upon their ethnicity. It’s beyond absurd to suggest that the British labour party is responsible for anything like that.
On the other hand though, they did engage in a war of aggression based largely upon a desire to expand their sphere of influence (even if only by proxy). Which, when all’s said and done, is not trivial on anyone’s scale. You can hang a person a dozen times, but only the first one counts.
When the spectre of the Nazis is used as a stick to beat a country or a government with, it’s almost always unjustified. But as a cautionary example, a warning, I find it’s uncomfortably legitimate at times.
Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… The title
If Hitler could have banned people from Internet forums for making tenuous comparisons with the Nazis he totally would have done so!
Antipholus Papps’s latest blog post… Let’s Take The Piss!