Mike Godwin might not have intended it, but his internet adage is being used to nullify warnings that Nazi Germany should teach us to be alert to. This undermines the whole purpose of studying history.
Outside of its interest and drama, history’s main use to us is that it provides us with lessons for the present and future. It helps us identify mistakes already made so that we need not make them again.
And yet, we tend to remain quite resistant to learning from our collective past.
Godwin’s law
Godwin’s law states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Godwin himself explained the reasoning behind framing this “rule,” nobly, to encourage people to think more deeply about the Holocaust and not glibly compare everything to Adolf Hitler.
This is not how it is wielded, of course. When a comparison is made to Hitler or Nazi Germany, whether valid or not, the comparer is accused of violating Godwin’s law.
Nazi Germany is a treasure trove of important lessons. Because of the sheer scale of what Nazi Germany did, it is crucial to understand its lessons and ensure that what happened then does not happen again.
But premature appeals to Godwin’s law prevent us from talking about, thinking about, or learning from, the Nazi period.
Lessons to learn
Not everyone is Hitler, of course.
But Hitler existed at the end of a totalitarian spectrum. The lesson we learned from Nazi Germany is that we must reject any and all “leaders” who, even very distantly, fall on the same spectrum that Hitler did.
And, of course, many do.
We identify these leaders by asking whether they treat the story of Nazi Germany as a guide on what to do, or what not to do. These are some of the lessons we should utilise:
Race policy
Conservative historian Niall Ferguson, in a recent podcast with Ben Shapiro, explains that one of the most important lessons from Nazi Germany is that responding to emergent multi-ethnic societies with racial policy is exactly the wrong way to respond, because it unavoidably opens the door to genocide (even if one does not step through the open door).
There are better and worse ways to address emerging social issues, like the phenomenon of migration. Responding with the overwhelming violence offered by the state is clearly of the latter category. This is a lesson to internalise, especially today, when it is precisely state rent-seeking polices in the first place that to a large degree incentivises so-called “mass” migration.
Nuremburg doctrine
For a jurist, perhaps the most important lesson from Nazi Germany – one we should have learned long before the rise of Hitler, in fact – is that appeals to authority, orders, or law, are insufficient to excuse grossly immoral conduct. Individuals are responsible, indeed required, to conduct themselves morally, independent of what some Act of Parliament, presidential edict, or instruction from the boss demands.
If the law requires you to act immorally, you must refuse to obey it.
The lesson is not limited to “if the law requires you to commit genocide, you must disobey it,” because genocide, too, exists on a spectrum. It does not materialise out of thin air. It is something always built up to.
It is something the Nazis certainly built up to. Hitler did not shout “gas the Jews!” from the podium of his acceptance speech in 1933 when he was first appointed German chancellor. It was a process, and at each step of this process the people around Hitler should have responded bluntly with “no.”
Disobeying immoral law starts – must start – long before the immoral law reaches its ultimate form. That is why opposing even “well-intentioned” race law today is imperative.
Law limits government – use it
One of the other lessons from Nazi Germany – again, in the field of jurisprudence – is the limiting nature of law.
As Herlinde Pauer-Stuber explains in her magnificent Justifying Injustice: Legal Theory in Nazi Germany, the Nazis were not “positivists” in the sense most commentators think. The regime was quite “naturalistic” in fact, preferring an “organic” approach to law that avoided having formally defined and written legislation. Many will be shocked to discover that the Nazis produced very little law, and that they did not even bother to change the formal constitution of Germany.
Virtually everything on their agenda was “in the act” rather than “in law,” with of course some notable exceptions.
Why?
Because once you write something down in the form of a binding law, even if that binding law is entirely self-serving, you have placed yourself in a straitjacket.
If the law says, “all Jews must be gassed,” then what about shooting the Jews? If the law says, “all Jews must be killed,” then what about Jewish slave labour? If the law says, “all Jews must be somehow undermined,” then what about the one or two favourites chosen by Nazi leaders to keep around?
The Nazis understood this nature of law well, and rejected it wholesale, arguing that “the law” is whatever happens to serve the interests of the regime in the moment, which the regime will define for itself in that moment and not one second earlier.
The law as an institution is necessarily allergic to totalitarianism, and as such makes it very difficult for itself to be used in pursuance of that end.
The lesson here is that formalising limitations on government power in writing is crucial (though by no means sufficient). This is the “lock-in” function that written constitutions serve. And it is why those concerned with the rule of law must always oppose open-ended allowances of authority granted by Parliament to regulators or ministers.
Us vs them
When someone accuses a politician of “being Hitler” just because they engage in “us vs them” politics, they are incorrect, but the grain of truth is that “us vs them” politics is part of the spectrum of totalitarianism. Carl Schmitt (a prominent Nazi ideologue), and later Mao Zedong, encouraged and perfected this brand of politicking.
“Us vs them” refers to contrived rivalries between population groups – natives vs immigrants, blacks vs whites, men vs women, employers vs employees – rather than the transcendent and actual rivalry that we must all, always focus on: the state versus the people.
Calling out “us vs them” politicking is the right thing to do, and is a lesson from Nazi Germany (and elsewhere) that must be taken to heart, because it almost always serves some political elite hell-bent on securing power for its own ends.
Preserve the toxicity of “racism”
Another, perhaps unexpected lesson that might initially seem to run against the thrust of my argument thus far, is that we need to reserve special terminology for special events rather than invoking it glibly.
When I was in Warsaw in December 2023, I picked up a copy of Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.
In one chapter, one of the authors describe the plans of the Nazi Party to exterminate the Jews of Europe as “racist.” I think this is the only instance of that word being used in this tome of a book.
In that one split-second of reading it, I remember thinking “that doesn’t make sense – racism is smiling at someone of a different race inappropriately, or a black kid wearing a ‘coolest monkey in the jumble’ hoodie, having disproportionate koeksister purchases by whites, or publicly disagreeing with someone of a different race.”
I was overcome by the sense that “racism” cannot be the right word to refer to genocide, because racism is petty, and effectively nothing of concern.
This is where someone else might say “we need a new word,” but I think we need to reclaim the old word and return it to in its venerated – toxic – status. We need to stop calling everything and everyone racist, otherwise that term loses its potency and people stop caring. And for as long as racism refers to phenomena of total insignificance, people should rightly not care when the R-word is invoked.
In his Ph.D. thesis, Joel Modiri recounts the suggestion by bell hooks (the pen name, stylised in lower case, of author Gloria Jean Watkins) that what the purveyors of Critical Race Theory understand by “racism” rather be replaced with the term “white supremacy.” And I think this is the first time I agreed with radical left-racialists about anything.
Hooks seems to have understood that using “racism” to refer to the ostensible power structures of whiteness was causing much unnecessary confusion. And while we might disagree with Modiri and hooks about what is and is not “white supremacy,” it would bring significant conceptual clarity to the discourse if they stopped invoking “racism” in ways that devalues its essence.
The lesson here, of course, is that for us to learn from a rich historical event like the Nazi era, we need to be able to speak clearly about it. We will lose our ability to understand the crimes of the Nazi regime if we continue to take words like “racism” and “genocide” and sap them of their potency.
Whether I am violating Godwin’s law or not, I have no interest in ceasing to utilise Nazi Germany as a point of reference for things happening in the present day. This comparison must always be made maturely and reasonably, but it must also always be in the back of our minds if we are to be alert to creeping tyranny.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Photo by Ed Wingate on Unsplash