Buckley: Red Sox’ J.D. Martinez gets A for effort, F in history
There’s even a term that applies to the reckless appropriation of Hitler’s name to wage an argument or make a case about something. It’s called Godwin’s Law, and it was created by Mike Godwin, an author, attorney and senior fellow at R Street Institute, a public-policy think tank in Washington, DC. Godwin’s Law holds that “if you mention Adolf Hitler or Nazis within a discussion thread, you’ve automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in.”
In other words, you lose when you cavalierly toss Hitler and the Nazis into a general discussion. Martinez, who apparently likes to carry a gun (“This is why I always stay strapped!”) is comparing his plight to what happened when a murderous psychopath came to power in 1930s Germany and set the stage for World War II, which included the Holocaust, which resulted in the extermination of millions of Jews.
“The rhetoric of invoking Hitler is indefensible because it trivializes what he and the Nazis did,” Godwin said yesterday. “It’s historically inaccurate to state that Hitler wanted to take people’s guns away. If anything, he wanted all citizens to have guns, except Jews.
“The Nazi gun control argument is a myth. It’s wrong. It’s not true. It’s so not true that it has its own Wikipedia entry.”
