My very minor status as an authority on Adolf Hitler comparisons stems from having coined “Godwin’s Law” about three decades ago. I originally framed this “law” as a pseudoscientific postulate: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” (That is, its likelihood approaches 100 percent.)
… We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.
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What’s arguably worse than Trump’s frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler’s rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word “vermin” to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler’s rhetoric seem inescapable.
He’s said the same thing before. Back in 2016, in fact. He never meant it to mean “any comparison to Nazis is wrong” despite a bunch of fools on the internet thinking that’s what it means.
Technically, Godwin’s law was used to mark the point where a conversation was over because most comparisons to nazis are unwarranted and the argument was that once the tone has become this incendiary it’s pointless to continue, not that all nazi comparisons were intrinsically wrong.