Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Oh, dear. Another liberal celebrity has opened her mouth, and that's set my favorite conservative, Rachel Lucas, to the usual foaming at the mouth. She takes exception to Janeane Garofalo's characterization of the boycott against the Dixie Chicks as "Nazi stuff".

She's got something of a point. It's a long-standing bit of Net-lore that in any online conversation (probably, any conversation in general, but I've only seen this discussed online) that the first person to invoke Hitler or Nazism automatically loses. This is usually cited as "Godwin's Law", although the precise formulation of Godwin's Law indicates otherwise. But the point is well-taken: invocation of the Nazis generally indicates that a given discussion has reached a point where rationality has reached its breaking point. And it also seems to cheapen the Nazis, to mute that sense of evil that the word "Nazi" should imply, if we apply it too easily to any source of disagreement that comes down the pike. So Ms. Lucas is right in that sense, and while I find George W. Bush nauseating, I too get tired of seeing his picture with a little "Hitler mustache" penciled in.

(Of course, I think our "Evil Indicator" is seriously out of whack these days. If people on the right are annoyed at folks who equate President Bush with Adolf Hitler, they should perhaps check out some folks on their side who genuinely hold the same belief about President Clinton.)

But then, I think that Ms. Lucas is ignoring the fact that freedom of expression does occasionally seem to be less-valued these days, which is Ms. Garofalo's main point (albeit ham-handedly made). Ms. Lucas says that the Nazis were about killing and genocide, but that's not all they were about -- in fact, those are just the ugliest symptoms of the Nazi disease. What the Nazis were really about was totalitarianism. They were about the establishment of a society in which dissent, real or perceived, was to be stamped out ruthlessly and efficiently. So I think that Ms. Garofalo isn't saying that the people boycotting and book-burning are Nazi-like, but rather that they are taking the first steps on what could possibly be the road to Nazism.

I don't think Janeane Garofalo made her point all that well, but by the same token, she's not some idiot screaming at the rain.