Tag: Godwin’s Law

Mein Kampf 100th Anniversary: Has the World Learned Anything?

On July 18, 1925, Adolph Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published. Written while he was in Landsberg prison, where he was serving a relatively relaxing sentence for the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch coup, Hitler made very clear what he would do if the German people put him and the leftist National Socialist Party in power.

Mein Kampf is in two volumes. Part 1 has stories about Hitler’s life, including serving as a soldier in World War I. The book sold a paltry 9,473 copies in its first year. At the time, few people cared what a short man with a funny moustache thought.

Part 2 was published in 1927. Unlike many politicians who hide their true goals, Hitler put it all in his book for the entire world to read. He was very clear about his antisemitic views and what he would do to make Germany Judenfrei if he gained power and could implement his Third Reich agenda.

Image created using public domain images.

Sales of the two volumes continued to be slow as many Germans viewed Hitler as more of a comic (funny moustache, short, feminine speaking mannerisms, etc.). At first, they didn’t take him or his left-wing National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) seriously. In “Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy—and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show,” Tom Phillips writes about how many viewed Hitler as a fool:

In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became Chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.

In Hitlerland, Andrew Nagorski discusses the American media’s early impressions of Hitler and the Third Reich:

Yet you had Americans meeting Hitler and saying, ‘This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.’ And a lot of them went through this whole litany about how even if Hitler got into a position of power, other German politicians would somehow be able to control him. A lot of German politicians believed this themselves.

Surprisingly, German Jews also did not take Hitler seriously during his early years. In 1925, only a few German Jewish newspapers even bothered to review Mein Kampf. As Raphael Ahren wrote in The Times of Israel article “Why Jews Didn’t Blink an Eye When Mein Kampf First Came Out”:

When Mein Kampf came out for the first time, German Jews hardly noticed it. They certainly did not view it as a threat to their existence, or even as a harbinger of a changing political climate in the Fatherland.

Rahel Straus, a physician who grew up in Karlsruhe, Germany, and emigrated to Palestine in 1933, wrote in her memoirs:

We passed by the boxes of the Volkisher Beobachter (the official organ of the Nazi Party), read the incendiary articles and indignantly continued working. We didn’t realize that this Volkisher Beobachter was one of the most read newspapers in Germany at the time. We saw Hitler’s Mein Kampf on display in every bookstore; none of us bought it, none of us read it.

Slowly, that short man with the funny moustache and his leftist Nazi Party chiseled away at the Weimar Republic. The worldwide depression that started in October 1929 gave them a growing audience of supporters. By 1932, the Nazi Party had become the largest political party in the Reichstag (the German parliament).

One year later, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the aging President Paul von Hindenburg. When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler announced that the office of president and chancellor would merge under the title of Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor). Those who disagreed were free to discuss the matter at the end of a gun barrel or while laboring in Dachau.

Suddenly, sales of Mein Kampf rose to more than 1 million copies. In 1935, the Franz, Eher, Nacht publishing house suggested to Hitler that a special Mein Kampf version should be given to every newlywed couple on the day of their wedding.

The western world, still reeling from the horrors of World War I, watched what was happening in Germany and worried that another massive worldwide conflict was on the horizon. Meanwhile, Germany was ignoring the Treaty of Versailles while the Allies embraced appeasement.

After signing the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, between Great Britain and Germany, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew back to London believing he had prevented a second European war. When Chamberlain, whose name would become synonymous with appeasement, reached the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, he read a prepared statement:

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time….

British Prime Minister Chamberlain and, to a lesser degree, President Franklin Roosevelt bent like pretzels to avoid a second colossal world war. In the meantime, Winston Churchill, who in 1935 had read the unedited English version of Mein Kampf, was repeatedly telling anyone who would listen that it would be better to stop Hitler now before he rebuilt Germany’s army and arsenal.

Few were listening to Churchill.

By May 10, 1940, when Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, Mein Kampf had been in the public square for nearly 15 years and was a best seller in Germany and the occupied Nazi nations. Chamberlain’s years of appeasement had resulted in:

  • March 7, 1936: Germany invaded and remilitarized the Rhineland.
  • March 12-13, 1938: Germany annexed Austria (Anschluss).
  • March 15, 1939: Germany invaded the Czechoslovakia via the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia.
  • September 1, 1939: Germany invaded Poland.
  • September 3, 1939: Great Britain declared war on Germany.

Keep all this in mind when laughing at memes mocking intelligence-challenged politicians such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, or New York’s Communist-Democrat mayoral candidate Zohan Mamdani.

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Shooting Themselves In the Foot – Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett Goes Too Far, Makes ‘Enemy’ Claim Against Trump

Prominent Democrats lack at least five essential qualities: intelligence, wisdom, basic decency, a filter, and recognition of their own interests.

No one personifies those gargantuan deficiencies more than Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas.

In an interview Sunday with MSNBC’s Alex Witt, host of “Alex Witt Reports,” Crockett put all of those deficiencies on display when she labeled President Donald Trump “an enemy to the United States.”

“Unfortunately, we have someone that is occupying the White House,” Crockett said in a clip posted to the social media platform X.

Note her use of the word “occupying” to denote a duly elected president.

Then came Crockett’s most reckless, reprehensible, and unhinged comment to-date.

“And as far as I’m concerned he is an enemy to the United States,” she said.

To remove the possibility of a metaphorical interpretation, the congresswoman continued in that same vein.

“He swore an oath just like the rest of us,” she said. “But right now, when you are literally putting us at risk all ’cause of what — because you want to convince your followers that you should be a dictator, too, that you should never leave the White House, because you don’t believe that elections should take place. I don’t really understand what is going on, and I don’t know what it’s gonna take to get people to wake up.”

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They already failed and lost on the Hitler crap, but yet they persist.

This Is Rich, Clinton Calling Someone Else Hitler

Controversy erupted after former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton seemingly compared former President Donald Trump to Hitler on Twitter on the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

Clinton’s remarks on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, which compared the fight against Nazi Germany to voting against former President Donald Trump, have sparked controversy. Clinton used this historical milestone to emphasize the importance of voting in the context of protecting democracy. She equated the efforts of those who voted against Trump to the actions of the soldiers who participated in the Normandy landings, a pivotal event in World War II.

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Better not say anything, people commit a lot of suicides around her

Didn’t We Already Go Through This In 1930? Now Have Real Nazi’s Again, Not The Trite Political Name Calling Kind….Link Around Of Posts

In 2015 saw a Fake Book post by Tim Charlino, a guy I used to ride bikes with that we’d elected Hitler when Trump won. It’s the new Godwin’s Law. It shows people don’t know history as well as they know name calling. Politicians routinely call each other Nazi’s to the point that it doesn’t even have any value.

Hitler killed 6 million Jews, took away their land, property, businesses, lives and dignity. That is the real Nazism.

Hamas attacked Israel on October the 7th and beheaded babies, put them in ovens, raped women and sucker punched over a 1000 people to death. They did it out of hate for Jews. That’s a lot closer to Hitler and Nazism than electing an Alpha Male from New York.

We are going through this antisemitism with Nazi like passion lead by the Muslims. Let’s call a spade a spade.

Sorry Tim, Trump isn’t Hitler, but Hamas is doing their best to carry out Hitler’s dreams.

Here’s a link around of the actions that are eerily like Germany in the ’30’s

The facts of Islam:

What is Islam, Hate.
The UK hates Jews and calls for Hitler type action

Today in London, and more on Islamic-leftist demonstrations here and there in the West: Links 1 for November 11th, 2023

More UK hate, I guess they switched from Allies to Axis Power

“What Hitler did to you was a walk in the park” – Palestinian ‘Rosa Parks’ arrested by IDF for inciting terrorism against Jews

“Our message to the sheeple of the settlers: We are awaiting you in all the cities of the West Bank from Hebron to Jenin. We will slaughter you and thou shall say afterwards what Hitler did to you was a walk in the park. We will drink your blood and we will eat your skulls. Come forward, we are awaiting you.”

“Beat that f–king Jew!”

MIT along with most of the Ivy League schools are the biggest antisemitic institutions.

Video goes viral of pro-Hamas student interrupting an MIT class, but the admin’s response is what’s truly offensive

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was one of the highest institutes of higher learning in America. It’s where Matt Damon went in a janitor and came out a really smart masshole. Sadly, as we see with other once-respected schools, it’s nothing more than another woke antisemitism factory. And the viral video of a math class being interrupted isn’t the worst of it.

$250,000 so your math class can be interrupted by a pro-Hamas advocate screaming nonsense comes with the territory of going to an “elite” university. MIT alumni tried to warn about the woke mind virus. No one listened. This is what you get.

New York, home to more Jews than most places is also a palace of hate:

The Standard Routine Perpetual “Palestinian” Funding Cycle Illustrated

 Islam is Not a Religion

‘We Will Drink Your Blood and Eat Your Skull’: A Legacy of Islamic Savagery

Children in NYC yell ‘f*ck the Jews’ and ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they ditch school for anti-Israel walkout

“Beat that f–king Jew!”

“What Hitler did to you was a walk in the park” – Palestinian ‘Rosa Parks’ arrested by IDF for inciting terrorism against Jews

They are the new Nazi’s, not the political speak that is a throwaway. We are repeating history

How I Know Covid Is Over

Sooner or later, Fauci has run out of excuses. No one cares about Covid except North Korea. They are 2 years behind the world anyway and like shooting off rockets to get attention, they finally have Covid.

Like the demise of Godwin’s Law, when you run out of facts then it is racist/you are Hitler. Fauci played that card signaling the end of facts, science or anything else he used to prop up getting rich and playing straw king. His minutes of fame are over.

Here’s an excerpt, but it’s the same thing we hear about everything. Once everything is racist, nothing is.

Fauci said it’s still possible that transmission and hospitalization levels could again reach the crisis levels they had in much of 2020 and 2021 and why the disease still has a more devastating impact in the Black community than among whites or the population at large.

“The rate of hospitalization and the death rate among 100,000 population is clearly higher greater in brown and Black populations in the United States compared to the general population and compared to whites,” he said, citing the prevalence of underlying risk factors like diabetes and high blood pressure that already existed.

“So for the country as a whole, the pandemic has been extremely tragic, but for Black people, they’ve suffered disproportionately.”

Fauci also expressed concern that comments he recently made about the state of the pandemic sent the wrong message to the public at a time when cases of Covid-19 are steadily increasing. On April 26, he said the country was “out of the pandemic phase,” in an interview on PBS NewsHour. Those comments were widely repeated and, along with relaxed restrictions on masking and vaccines in many places, taken to mean that the danger from Covid-19 had largely been mitigated.

I call BS of course because everyone was in the mix for the last 2 years, yes including blacks. The only thing different was that most blacks I had conversations with were on the same page as me. If they could kill people like they did at Tuskegee, or give diseases to kids like the Gates Foundation did, they would try to kill me. I didn’t and don’t trust anyone who has been in charge of anything to do with Covid.

I’ve droned on endlessly about the clot shot for the kung flu (I put that in to piss off the censors at Google who have cut my traffic back on posts like this). If you go to the tag cloud on the right you can see the documentation over time of the lies and obvious ways we have been let down by those seeking power and money, as usual.

How Racism and White Supremacy Are The New Godwin’s Law

Authors Note: I have a tendency to notice patterns in both a macro and micro universes. I’ve been watching this one brew for a while now.

FIRST, WHAT IS GODWIN’S LAW?

Reformulated in the Net.Legends FAQs “Usenet Rule #4”:

“Any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis will cause the thread it is mentioned in to come to an irrelevant and off-topic end very soon; every thread on Usenet has a constantly-increasing probability to contain such a mention.”

It is generally accepted that whoever is the first to play the “Hitler card” has lost the argument as well as any trace of respect, as having to resort to comparing your adversary to the most infamous mass-murdering dictator in history generally means you’ve run out of better arguments. Thus, once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin’s law.

Disclaimer: This blog post does not take a position on racism, it’s prevalence, who is or isn’t or might be racist and my position on this subject. Aristotle noted that the mark of an educated mind is to entertain a thought without accepting it.  Therefore I am observing a speech and behavioral pattern of the public.  In other words it’s on them, not me.

It is also noted that a trait of people with a higher IQ is that you can argue from multiple perspectives (unfortunately so can lawyers and politicians who may or may not be of higher intelligence – especially politicians and especially millennial politicians).

The original Godwin’s Law has lost its’ sting since everyone is now Hitler, so the new talking point is racism or white supremacy. Rather than argue on the merits of the position of the person (political candidates mostly since they dominate the news) the go to is now calling the other person one of these two pejorative names.  This constant overuse has devalued the meaning of the words and rendered them ineffective at worst and boring at best.

Here is a quick search that shows views from multiple points doing just this:

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=IXpRXZrPHOqH_Qa9hbr4AQ&q=examples+of+politicians+being+called+racist&oq=examples+of+politicians+being+called+racist&gs_l=psy-ab.3…2240.2240..3652…0.0..0.186.324.0j2……0….2j1..gws-wiz.aEnMfNpKcHc&ved=0ahUKEwja48Tux_3jAhXqQ98KHb2CDh8Q4dUDCAc&uact=5

This is in direct conflict with Martin Luther King’s evocative phrase: “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”  Now, it is common to hear you are a racist or white supremacist because you don’t agree with me.  It greatly devalues MLK’s position.

A General Definition of racism

1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race, racial prejudice or discrimination.

While I could list any or all of the comments that have been made in public themselves could be racist in tone, one could make the case for or against whether the accused are really racist. Calling someone a racist is easy but proving most of these ad hominem attacks is harder.

One would need to know what is inside the person making the statements to know if it were really true or just talking points. I won’t and am not even sure if I can make that value judgement. These attacks are easy enough to find (see the media below).

This is not the point of this post. I am not here to call someone a racist or White supremacist (or Hitler), rather to point out a trend.

In the department of redundancy department, this discussion is that the replacement for Godwin’s Law is that you are not Hitler, instead you are racist for whatever reason or whatever you say.

Why is this the case? The overuse of Godwin’s Law has made it impotent in political circles, the media and on social media platforms. Hitler stands with few others in history, perhaps Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot as true villains. Nobody really believes that the other person is like Hitler, they are just trying to make the worst case as they flush their argument down the toilet due to lack of substance.

HOW TO WIN YOUR POLITICAL RACE OR PUT YOUR OPPONENT ON THE DEFENSIVE WITHOUT TAKING A POSITION

What most of the accusers are doing is described in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals numbers 7-13 as follows:

  • “Keep the pressure on.”
  • “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
  • “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
  • “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.”
  • “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”

Rather than argue on a platform, beliefs and issues, it is far easier to make your opponent defend themselves, and put them off their talking points.

Example: Candidate 1) If elected, I’ll lower taxes if elected (insert any issue here because it’s about to be destroyed).

Candidate 2) my opponent is Hitler and molests collies.

Press coverage: Candidate 1 is a well known collie molester. How long has this person been molesting Collies? The first question in the next debate; Candidate 1, are you still molesting Collies?

Now insert the word racist or white supremacist for molesting collies and you get the point of why this is effective.

  • “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

HOW THE PRESS BECOMES AN ENABLER

A common adage is that sex sells, as do murders, rapes, political embarrassments and anything not good news. Guess what they will print (hint: collie molester)?

A not so recent trend is that there is a common thread where a preponderance of reporters has similar talking points concurrently. There is a groupthink that causes the media to focus on a particular phrase, word or subject. Like piranha on carcass, they hammer it home. https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+news+anchors+say+the+same+thing&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim9dyQxv3jAhWFB80KHeyQAE0Q1QIoAHoECAsQAQ&biw=1440&bih=825

Since the new go to in Godwin’s Law is you are a racist and/or white supremacist, it makes for headlines that sell advertising. I can also be taken as ideological.  This is the de-facto statement now to the point that it has lost effectiveness.

Having spent decades working with (and against) all forms of media, they have a tendency to take the position of them being right, even if proven wrong. A correction is meaningless as once a statement is printed, it is still in the minds of the reader. Almost no one reads the corrections.

Most are journalists who write about a topic because it is assigned to them.  In the case of social media everyone thinks they have the moral high ground.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I’m not going to spend much time here, because most people have gotten into an Internet argument. Nobody wins unless the motive of one of the combatants is to piss off the other. It won’t matter how factual your argument is because it is just Internet road rage.

If you go to the above link, you see the outcome and great advice on how to handle this.

So the net result of overusing this theme is the same thing that happens with all overuse. Godwin’s Law is becoming meaningless. The definition of what racism really is and when the word should be used to protect the oppressed has been damaged. Even Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals suffers from overuse and tediousness.

The political landscape is a train wreck of who can sling the most mud. Watch the ratings nosedive for upcoming debates.

Stay out of it on Social Media except to observe who isn’t smart enough to stay out of this pool. With each use of the attack, the meaning becomes less valid and meaningful.

I thought about calling someone a racist instead of Hitler the Simonds Law, since I haven’t found this discussion fully hashed out, but I’d rather be associated with something more positive.

Everyone is a loser who engages in this behavior. My advice is grow up or be better educated to discuss your position better than: you are Hitler/racist/white supremacist and whatever the next insult is.

It used to be that to call someone Hitler was the ultimate insult, albeit the indication that the argument is lost.  Has calling them a racist and/or a white supremacist suffered the same fate?