Reductio ad Hitlerum

You know who else wanted the government to control health care? You know who else was a vegetarian? You know who else appreciated the arts, wore pants, liked King Kong, endorsed the Volkswagen? HITLER HITLER HITLER!!!!

There's an actual term in rhetoric known as Godwin's Law, aka Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies, which essentially states that the minute someone on any side of any debate invokes the Hitler comparison, any chance of rational discussion comes to an end.

I wish I could find the study I came across a few years back. It was a formal study conducted by several rhetoricians of online chat rooms in the U.S. and Europe. Basically, the study found that the length of time the online discussion continued was directly proportional to the likelihood of someone invoking a comparison with Hitler. In other words, the longer it goes on, the greater the chance of Hitler popping up.

But this was true ONLY for American chat rooms. The researchers found that the European chats continued much, much longer before anybody brought up the Hitler comparison, and even then it was extremely rare, almost always in the context of specific discussions of war and genocide. Europeans, they concluded, are VERY reluctant go into such dark territory so lightly - you do not pull out Hitler, the Third Reich, or the Final Solution simply to win some stupid point about smoking or the arts or public policy reform, etc. This seemed to be much less true for Americans, perhaps because the horrors of Hitler are for them more distant and abstract.

Europeans are, however, quite ready in online arguments to compare one another to Stalin, far less so than Americans. He seems to be the European bugaboo of choice. I told my class this, and their response was, "Who's Stalin?"

Sigh.

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