A twist on Godwin

There's a little known rule for debating. It should probably be called a "theory", because I don't know how to prove a "law" for political discussions. But it's proven itself time and time again for me, so I call it a law. That and "theory" sounds kind of whimpy. Who's going to obey the "theory" of gravity? We'd have anarchists floating all over the place.

Its called "Stratt's Law" and it's pretty simple. It goes something like this: you can gauge the depth of a debater's argument by how quickly they resort to calling their opponent a "nazi". (I always spell nazi with a lower case "n". Take that you nazis!)

There are two points of consideration to this law. First is the term "nazi" is not required. You can easily substitute Hitler, Goebbles, brown shirts, jack-booted thugs, Gestapo, etc. You get the picture. The second is that this does not apply if they are debating an actual nazi.

Keep this in mind next time you hear a political debate, or read a political essay, or even letters to the editor of your favorite newspaper - or even recently, on the Senate floor. See how often, and how soon the dreaded "n" word shows up. Its easy to see why. If western civilization can agree on one thing its that the nazis were bad. More than bad, they were down right evil. More than down right evil, they were evil incarnate. So what better way to make your point than to simply point out to your audience that your opponent is evil incarnate? End of discussion. No need to continue (though you know they will). After all, if they are against nazis (and you being a sane person, are of course too, against nazis), then what more needs discussing?

First off, lets look deeper. What is a nazi? I'd love to put that to a focus group, but the only available bodies at the moment are my wife and child, and I won't even entertain the hazard of interrupting their afternoon ice cream time. So that would leave my two dogs and one cat. And they just lay around looking happy at me (I usually feed them). So I'll have to do without the focus group.

I grew up in the 1960's and 1970's. Yes, that makes me a tail end member of that most dreaded of demographics, the baby-boomers. Please don't hold that against me. I grew up on Hogan's Heroes, Gomer Pyle, Rat Patrol, G.I Joe's and John Wayne movies. At one time, in my teenage years I could have recited a litany of WWII aircraft for America, Britain and Germany (1/3 of them were hanging from my bedroom ceiling at 1/32 scale). Quite simply, a nazi is a German soldier during WWII (or as Archie Bunker used to say "the big one.")

While that being true, not all Germans or even all German soldiers were in fact nazis. Pope Benedict XVI grew up in WWII Germany. His family had to leave their ancestral home town because his father's outspoken criticism of, and opposition to the nazis was getting his family closer and closer to a one way ticket to Auschwitz. Benedict was forced to join the Hitler Youth, and later was drafted into the Third Reich. Eventually he deserted. At some later point he was picked up by the US army and put in a prisoner of war camp. Eventually he was told to stop being a nazi and just go home. Pope Benedict XVI was not a nazi.

Dr. Josef Mengele, a.k.a. the "Angel of Auschwitz" was a physician who was given the admirable responsibility of implementing Hitler's final solution to Europe's "Jewish problem." In this noble endeavor, he over saw the importation of millions of undesirables to Auschwitz. Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Homosexuals, and to a lesser extent Catholics and any one else who dared question Hitler's attempt to destroy the world and remake it into what he saw as the ultimate image - Aryan.

While Mengele was busy incinerating undesirables at a clip that would make a nazi proud (see note 2, paragraph 3, above), he also saw the opportunity to further medical science, which he no doubt believed, was to the benefit of mankind. In order to more properly equip the nazi war machine, he pulled a few condemned souls from the lines marching toward gas chambers and ran some tests. How much cold could the human body tolerate? How much heat? Important information when designing uniforms. How good did gas masks have to be? That depends upon how much poison gas the human body can tolerate. As any one who's taken a college level science course can attest, you need multiple cases studies in order to verify your data. No matter, just go to the lines and grab another dozen.

Mengele was, if nothing else, a renaissance man. Not only was he interested in the practical knowledge afforded by his experiments, he also was interested in a wide range of other subjects. One of them was genetics. Especially twins. They afforded the best test subjects. They come with a built in control group. Perform your experiments on one, and then you can compare the results to the test subject's exact duplicate. The preferred method for "neutralizing" their test subjects for dissection, a shot of chlorine directly in the heart. They came to be known as Mengele's children. He gathered some 3,000 of them. By the time he fled like the cowardly dog that he was, skulking off into the dark to save his own worthless, miserable, putrid hide from the invading Soviets, only some 240 remained alive. Dr. Josef Menegle was a nazi.

Notice the difference?

There is a difference between people you don't like and nazis. There is a difference between people you despise and nazis. There is a difference between people you hate and nazis. There is a difference between your opponent (usually, again, see above) and a nazi. The word nazi is reserved not for the people you find most contemptuous, its reserved for, well, nazis. And the list is long. Took a lot of man power to round up and slaughter six million people. That's right, 6,000,000. They kept records that would, well, make a nazi proud. By the time civilization finally flushed these pieces of crap down the toilet, 50,000,000 people around the world were dead. And not just killed, horribly, horribly, horribly killed. Hundreds of millions more were injured, both mentally and physically. Most of Europe lay in ruins. And I don't mean just more pot holes than you can stand - I mean ruins. I mean real ruins. Picture little one armed kids, five, six, seven years old searching through bombed out cities for some small scrap of maggot infested food to feed their sick, younger siblings. That was Europe after WWII. After the nazis.

Now keep that image fresh in your mind, we'll need it later. If you're from my age group, give or take a few years, you can probably still recite the litany of grotesque evil. Adolf Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler. These, my friends, were nazis. Notice the past tense of the last sentence. They are no more. And not because evolution, in all its infinite wisdom, removed them from the human gene pool. They are gone because humanity was repulsed by the horror of their presence in their lifetime. So we humans, we decent humans, put down our papers, our shovels, our plows, our books, and went to war to rid ourselves once and for all from this stain on humanity. And you know what? Humanity is the better for it.

Now lets get back to Stratt's Law. The shallowness of an argument can be determined by how quickly a debater resorts to calling their opponents a nazi. Don't like your opponent's position on Social Security reform? They're nazis. (Here's where you need to recall that image I asked you to keep fresh, I told you you'd need it). Don't like your opponent's political party? They are a nazi. Don't like the way your opponent speaks? They are nazis. I say its time to apply Stratt's Law to all public debates. If the best argument a debater can come up with is to compare their opponents to the most lowly dregs civilization has ever known, then they obviously haven't done their homework. Instead they are so filled with righteous indignation that they can't even be bothered to learn what a nazi truly is. And that's too bad. Before anyone picks up that debater's banner and runs with it, they should stop and take the time to learn just what a nazi actually is. There is a difference. History should preserve the unspeakable horrors of what that word truly means. Because the more its applied to other groups, the less power and horror and repulsion it holds. And let me tell you, the horror of World War II should never, ever, ever be forgotten. I don't want to even think about testing the old adage, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.