The worst of Craig's rant is not quoted here, because I did not want his words on my blog. Did you know? Alan Craig is today's Churchill, the lone voice against the "Gaystopo".
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. For years Winston Churchill was a lone voice against the burgeoning darkness of Nazi ideology and intolerance. In the wilderness and with few public friends, he was marginalised and dismissed as belligerent and a war-monger. He was scorned as a political has-been, out of touch with the then-modern mainstream.We can only hope that Craig will suffer the same fate as Winston Churchill and be "marginalised and dismissed" for his nastiness, but without Churchill's comeback to a position of power.
Back to Alan Wilson:
I would defend, even on the beaches, the right of eccentrics to hold and publish their views, though I'd prefer them to read them first. May I modestly propose, however, that real debate would be served far better by ditching inflammatory second world war references, certainly those whose relevance cannot be established.Yes, please. Whatever point is being argued, let's leave Hitler and the Gestapo out as an analogy unless there is equivalency involving mass torture and killing? Honest. There really are ways to talk about injustices other than comparing them to to the Nazis in the WWII era. If you throw "Nazi" and "Gestapo" around casually, you lose the argument, so far as I am concerned. I follow Godwin's Law.
....
If we must bring Hitler into the story of the growth of gay rights, anyone who knows anything of the reality behind Craig's cheap imagery will tell you gay people were prime targets of the Nazi regime, who suffered and died at the hands of its real troops. This shouldn't be forgotten at remembrance tide.
But let's not bring Hitler into it. In the 1990s there was a whole wild west out on the internet, with usenet chatrooms in which no flame war was too hot, or opinion sacred. A general principle emerged that eventually prevailed, pretty well, down the line. In any debate, whatever the subject, the first person to bring Hitler or the Nazis into it automatically lost. Good idea.
Godwin has argued that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.Exactly. Thus endeth my mini-rant.
Thank you, Bishop Alan.
Image from Wikipedia.
Amen! Good rant!
ReplyDeleteI saw you posted something earlier today on this and I searched everywhere (including The Guardian) and couldn´t find it...thanks for reentering into the atmosphere...I can digest my lunch.
ReplyDeleteAbrazos,
Leonardo
Tim, thanks. I'm trying for your favorite blogger list.
ReplyDeleteLen, I hit 'publish' by mistake before I was finished. I hate when I do that, because the unfinished and unavailable post stays in Google Reader until I finally post the finished product.
Renz, I will defend on the beaches your right to respectfully disagree, even as I stand by what I said.
ReplyDeleteMimi, thanks for this rant! When I heard the comment about "pink jack boots" my skin began to crawl. The thought of all who died in camps wearing the pink triangle just because men and women who had never come to terms with their own sexuality whatever it was could be "comfortable makes me heartsick.
ReplyDeleteI am also getting very tired of politicians using the backs of LGBTQ folk to get press time. But then again--the press is being manipulated to focus on LGBTQ folk so that the populus will not realize we are being stolen blind by the rich and powerful.
Muthah, yes to all you say. The focus on the LGBTQ folks is no more than a diversionary maneuver to distract from the enormous problems facing us in this country.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Homeland Security, I had a visit to my blog from their office. I wonder what that means.
ReplyDeleteThey're coming to take you away, Mimi..
ReplyDeleteTim, you may be right. Grandpère's always telling me to tone it down.
ReplyDeleteRenz, I doubt the visit has to do with MadPriest. I wondered if it was the mention of Hitler in the title of this post. Their notation does not allow me to see which page or pages they visited.
ReplyDeleteRenz, I WAS truly worried when Clumber did the photoshop of me wearing a bomb vest JUST BEFORE I LEFT TO GO TO ENGLAND.
ReplyDeleteActually, Mimi, popular belief aside, Godwin's "Law" says nothing whatever about losing an argument if one throws Hitler or the Nazis into play. The original, cited at the link you give, reads “as a Usenet [talk about dated!] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one” [Stylistically very badly worded, BTW.] It's a very silly "law" anyway - not a scientific law in any way and would disqualifty one for comparing Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot to Hitler. Renz is quite right.
ReplyDeleteActually, Mimi, popular belief aside, Godwin's "Law" says nothing whatever about losing an argument if one throws Hitler or the Nazis into play.
ReplyDeleteLapin, I know. Bishop Alan and I made up that part. We find it useful. Godwin's law may be silly, but I like it.
As I said to Renz, I will defend on the beaches your right to respectfully disagree, even as I stand by what I said
So if we compare Stalin to Hitler we DO lose?
ReplyDeleteYou don't lose with Stalin. The deaths by starvation of the peasants plus the deaths in the Gulags probably surpass the Nazi numbers.
ReplyDeleteI am not even sure that comparisons to the Nazis should be made in the case of mass torture and killing. It can cheapen the scale and full horror of what the Nazis attempted. Just don't chuck the term Nazi around (unless you are aiming for comic effect, in which case that can be okay).
ReplyDeletePS I think you have to be a Jewish person tho for the comedy effect to work, ie Seinfeld or Mel Brooks, or a member of Monty Python.
ReplyDeleteI will add that the fact that no one at the CofE newspaper spotted that the column was dodgy before it went to press despite the fact that numerous people must have worked on it, and that no one even drew the editor's attention to it, says everything about their professionalism as an outfit (or the lack of it). That column would have been rejected straight away at any Fleet Street paper - even the Mail wouldn't have run it, I don't think.
ReplyDeleteAlso, even if the editor didn't read it I don't buy that he would not have known the general thrust of it because they will have had an editorial meeting of one kind or another during the week (or month, or whatever it is) at which whoever commissioned it, or deals with the columns, will have said "Alan Craig is going to write on such-and-such".
Arrggh! My rather long comment disappeared. Let's see if I can reconstruct.
ReplyDeleteAt least in comparing Stalin to Hitler, you could have a serious discussion. Some people think everyone who opposes them is a Nazi. Remember the posters with Obama made to look like Hitler? Those folks have to be seriously ignorant in comparing a black man to Hitler, with his ideal of the blond, fair-complexioned Aryans as the master race.
Some Nazi humor is funny, but I would not feel at all comfortable telling or posting a Nazi joke. I don't refer to anyone as a Nazi, who was not a real Nazi.
The editor's response is laughable. The buck stops with him, whatever his excuses.
What about people who do legitimately behave like Nazis?
ReplyDeleteGood Lord, keep us from having a mind so open our brains fall out!
The first time I was ever called a Nazi was by a commentator on 'Father Jake Stops the World'.
ReplyDeleteIt was certainly a disconcerting experience for a left-of-centre voter like me.
I don't believe that the use of German war language has anything to do with a genuine comparison of gay people with Nazis.
ReplyDeleteBritons are fiercely independent, even when greater cooperation in Europe would be to their advantage and they are pitifully ignorant about what actually happens in Europe.
That whole Nazi language is usually rolled out when the writer fears that some kind of imaginary independence is under attack.
And I believe the language is still used because the second world war was the last time the country was so affected, linguistically, by an event that it still resonates.
Not many have a clue what an Oberkommando is, but we know it's menacing, threatening, coming to get us. There are no other words that can cause this same collective emotional awareness of what the writer is driving at than Gestapo, Waffen-SS, Mein Führer.
And, predictably, they are used time and time again for their emotional content when the subject at hand simply doesn't validate them.
They're really nothing more than lazy writing by ageing writers aimed at an equally ageing target readership.
My own kids can't make head nor tail of them because they were not brought up with the emotional connotations - and they can see very well that they don't make any actual sense in the context.
That doesn't make the language acceptable, by no means!!
But we're crediting our opponents with too much intelligence if we take those outbursts as genuine political statements about the status of gay people in our society.
I think the more accurate comparison for most of the far-right theocrats in the USA is with the Spanish Falange.
ReplyDeleteI do not rule out Taliban comparisons either.
The Nazis were too secular.
Mark, pardon me while I search for my missing brain parts. ;-)
ReplyDeleteErika, thank you.
'The pink boot' is perhaps the most ridiculous of the analogies. I find that a good many people resort to Nazi and Gestapo language when their arguments are weak.
Counterlight, I agree.
Although I was a child during WWII, I remember it well. Perhaps that's part of the reason for my aversion to the Nazi analogies.