{"id":1920,"date":"2012-02-23T19:33:26","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T23:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=1920"},"modified":"2012-02-24T10:17:57","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T14:17:57","slug":"kevin-carson-on-tin-foil-hats-and-godwins-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=1920","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Carson on Tin Foil Hats and Godwin’s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while I republish here in their entirety posts published over at the Center for a Stateless Society<\/a>. I do so because of this notice on the Center’s site:<\/p>\n

Take our content, please!<\/strong><\/p>\n

All content on this site is available for republishing under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We want<\/strong> you to copy and distribute this stuff as widely as possible. That’s what we’re here for!<\/p>\n

You don’t have to ask our permission. That’s what the Creative Commons licensing is for. Everybody has permission already. Just do it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you want to be nice, you can include a link back to us, but the only requirement is to provide attribution to the author and C4SS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, then, copied and pasted below, is Kevin Carson’s post there today titled Nazi Exceptionalism; or, How Godwin’s Law Gets It Backward<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Most participants in online debates are familiar with Godwin\u2019s Law: \u201cAs an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.\u201d The implicit corollary, of course, is that the first person to descend to such a comparison automatically forfeits the debate. Oddly enough, though, I don\u2019t remember electing anyone named Godwin to legislate for me. And more importantly, that corollary is \u2014 or can be \u2014 quite stupid.<\/p>\n

Godwin\u2019s Law, by treating Nazi Germany as some sort of unique, metaphysical evil in human history, essentially nullifies its practical lessons for people in other times and places. Although Nazi precedents are now used as symbols of ultimate evil \u2014 just look at Darth Vader \u2014 they didn\u2019t seem anywhere so dramatic to the German people at the time they were happening.<\/p>\n

Nazi repression came about incrementally, in the background, as people lived their ordinary daily lives.\u00a0 Each new upward ratcheting of the security state was justified as something not all that novel or unprecedented, just a common sense measure undertaken from practical concerns for \u201csecurity.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all, the bulk of Hitler\u2019s emergency powers were granted by the Reichstag after a terrorist attack (blamed at the time on communists), a fire which destroyed the seat of Germany\u2019s parliament. Any parallels to 9\/11 and USA PATRIOT are, of course, purely accidental. Each new security clampdown, after an initial flurry of discussion, was quickly accepted as normal because it didn\u2019t affect the daily lives of most ordinary people. And of course, those ordinary people had nothing to fear, because they\u2019d done nothing wrong!<\/p>\n

The \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism\u201d that people like Sarah Palin appeal to is just the converse of the Nazi Exceptionalism implied by Godwin\u2019s law. \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism\u201d is a stupid ideology. It demands from its adherents a belief that the American people \u2014 and the American government \u2014 represent some special race of creatures who couldn\u2019t possibly behave the same way normal, run-of-the-mill human beings have behaved throughout history.<\/p>\n

The American response to the post-9\/11 security state really isn\u2019t all that different from that of the German people in the 1930s. Every expansion of the surveillance state meets widespread responses like \u201cI have nothing to hide.\u201d The TSA\u2019s de facto internal passport system for air travel is defended by many people in these words: \u201cIf you don\u2019t like it, don\u2019t fly. If it saves one life, the inconvenience is worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A friend recently told me of being asked by a fairly \u201cliberal\u201d family member, in response to her complaints about the NDAA\u2019s provisions for indefinite detention of \u201cterror suspects\u201d without criminal charges: \u201cWhy should someone like me who\u2019s not doing anything wrong be afraid of it?\u201d The common response, just as with the Nazis, is to take the government\u2019s justifications at face value and accept that they mean well. Take off your tinfoil hat \u2014 after all, we were attacked!<\/p>\n

The American people, like the Germans, generally also take at face value the \u201cdefensive\u201d nature of the American state\u2019s foreign policy. I remember seeing a Democratic Congressman on C-SPAN, defending Clinton\u2019s Balkan adventures in the \u201990s, say \u201cI was taught in school that America has never gone to war for a square foot of land or a dollar of treasure.\u201d Using Chomsky\u2019s \u201cperson from Mars\u201d thought experiment \u2014 looking at the role of the United States in the world as an alien would, judging the actions of the United States by the same standards one would use to judge comparable actions by any other country \u2014 is labeled \u201cBlame America First.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tenor of CNN\u2019s coverage of Russia\u2019s \u201caggression\u201d against Georgia in August 2008 was hardly different from that of the German press in response to Poland\u2019s alleged aggression against ethnic Germans in Danzig in 1939. And if the United States attacks Iran based on a recycled version of the Iraqi WMD lies of nine years ago, you can be absolutely certain the major news networks will dust off the red-white-and-blue bunting and the Wall of Heroes, reporting America\u2019s \u201cdefensive\u201d action against the \u201cIranian threat\u201d as straight news. After all, things like the Diem overthrow and the Tonkin Gulf Incident have nothing at all in common with the SS black flag operation in Danzig.<\/p>\n

People are people, and the lessons of history apply to all of us. If you kid yourself otherwise, you\u2019re setting yourself up for a fall.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while I republish here in their entirety posts published over at the Center for a Stateless Society. I do so because of this notice on the Center’s site: Take our content, please! All content on this site is available for republishing under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. We want you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1920"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1927,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920\/revisions\/1927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}