Online discussions aren’t famed for their reasonableness or politeness, but there is a kind of elegance to be found in the way that certain ideas and analogies recur throughout the medium. Of all these, Godwin’s law describes one of the oldest and most persistent: the likening of those who disagree with you to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies, as it’s sometimes more formally known, was first formulated by American author and attorney Mike Godwin in 1990 to describe a trend he had observed on Usenet discussion forums: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” In other words, any online discussion that continues for long enough will inexorably end up invoking Nazis or Hitler.135
Godwin’s point was that, once a discussion reached this state, it had self-evidently ceased to be a proper discussion, and therefore the only sensible option was to abandon it (one unintended corollary of which being that someone wanting a discussion to be abandoned might intentionally invoke Hitler).
Over time, Godwin’s law has come to stand as a handy indictment of any form of argument online that resorts to labeling one’s opponents as the worst thing imaginable: an accusation anticipated in 1951 by the philosopher Leo Strauss when he coined the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum as a variation on the reductio ad absurdum (the Latin for “reduction to absurdity”) form of false argument.
At the heart of Godwin’s observation lies not an assault on false arguments, but rather an attempt to highlight how thoughtless comparisons can help trivialize even appalling things. It’s a trivialization that’s fully in evidence in a host of other contemporary idioms, some of which manage to be sufficiently charming or absurd to defy their subject matter.
One of the more successful viral videos of recent years involves various titles beginning “Hitler finds out that . . .” followed by a section of the German film Downfall, in which a German-language scene imagining Hitler’s deluded fury during his last hours in his bunker is provided with comic subtitles (in a typical version, he might be commenting on the results of a football match, or discovering that his favorite surfboard won’t be ready for a forthcoming trip).
Perhaps the final word should go to Godwin himself, reflecting in Wired magazine on the success of what he termed his “counter-meme”—that is, his attempt to oppose a common, unreflecting mode of argument with a neatly embodied counter-argument. “If it’s possible to generate effective counter-memes,” he asked, “is there any moral imperative to do so? . . . Do we have an obligation to improve our informational environment? Our social environment?”136 In an information-saturated age, it’s perhaps one of the more important questions we can ask.