The Godwin Scale: How Hitler-y is it?

 One should avoid the internet.  What are you doing here, kids?  Go play outside, or read a physical book, or something.  Do I provide insufficient recommendations for books?  The internet, aside from being a series of tubes, is home to adorable cat videos and noxious political discussions best summarized by the famous aphorism that as any comment thread increases in length, the probability of a Hitler reference asymptotically approaches 1.  I'm not Hitler, you're Hitler!  The caged system is totally fascistic!  Can't you even see the implications of the name?!*

Let us systematize the Hitler analogy, because everything is systemic, right?  At the very least, I hector and harangue my students with the minutiae of measurement theory because, silly ole' me, I still strive for that which has been fundamentally debunked anyway, "social science."  Social science relies on measurement, so let us conceptualize and measure our variables.

Hitleriness:  the variable of Hitleriness is the extent to which a person or group expresses or acts upon beliefs or goals uniquely or distinctively associated with Adolph Hitler.

I am defining my term based on individual people and groups, not "systems" or "institutions," which insulates Hitleriness from having an "institutional Hitleriness" or "systemic Hitleriness" subcategory, or even a full-stop redefinition of Hitleriness as a characteristic of systems/institutions rather than individuals or groups.  I am doing so both for clarity purposes, and because some of my own recent readings have brought me to question the clearest category of systemic racism.  At some point, I will write more, but whenever I have written about the importance of understanding systemic racism in modern America, my primary example has been school funding.  Schools are funded primarily through property taxes, which means that funding is available based on property values, which creates empirical patterns of funding-per-pupil associated with race, not because anyone is intentionally constructing a system of rules to discriminate on the basis of race, but for a variety of historic and geographic circumstances that happen to work out in such a way as to create a "disparate impact," in legalese.

Here, though, are some potential glitches.  First, funding is not as disparate at the end stage, given state and federal supplementary funding, and second, per-pupil spending is not nearly as predictive of outcomes as the more critical variables, like family circumstances, parental involvement, and plenty of other stuff.  In that case, how much emphasis can I put on systemic racism?  I don't know.  I am revisiting.  Regardless, I want to define Hitleriness in terms of individuals and groups, and not systems or institutions.

I do, however, include both expressions and actions.  Action counts for more, and will in the construction of the Hitleriness scale, but words create a conceptual similarity, even if I remain a free speech advocate.  The ACLU was right in '78, Germany is wrong to ban Holocaust denial, and the most glaring problem with the university presidents' testimony before Congress (Claudine Gay's fondness for plagiarism not being a topic of those hearings) is the double standard for speech against Jews and even the most minor "microaggression" involving literally anyone else who isn't a "CIS-het-white-male."  I am in no way proposing legal actions, nor even necessarily institutional punishment for anyone who achieves a particular score on the Hitleriness index, but Hitlery speech is still Hitlery speech, earning a score of similarity.

Finally, note "uniquely" or "distinctively."  Hitler was not the only person in the history of the world to say the kinds of things he said, and as I must remind illiterate leftists, their hero, Marx, said some really reprehensible things about race, about Jews, and basically, was as vile a human being as Hitler on every measure, but they cannot admit it because they are still tied to the most destructive ideology in human history.  If I add no qualifier, I have the following problem.  Oh, you like oxygen?  You know who else liked oxygen?  Hitler.  If I were writing something more formal, I would go overboard with verbose legalese of my own, but if you pretend you do not understand my point, you are not the audience, so fuck off.

Now we need a scale.  Let's go 0 to 10.  0 shall be no Hitler-y content.  The zero end, of course, will consist of everything from the morning weather report to the I Have A Dream speech, but the point is not to measure anti-Hitleriness.  The point is to measure Hitleriness.  Besides, the left now hates the I Have A Dream speech's actual content, because it is "colorblindness," which they think is secretly racist and white supremacist and the truest form of Hitleriness that ever Hitler'ed a Hitler.  Hitler!  (But they still claim to love MLK.)

Now let's have some fun.  We are obviously starting with Donald Trump, and his recent series of comments.  When you refer to your adversaries as vermin, and say that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the nation, that latter statement is almost a direct English translation of Hitler.  The question we ask is whether or not Trump actually knows the history of these words, given that he is not exactly an avid reader.  Much of his verbal blather consists of endless repetition.  Witch hunt!  We'll see what happens, because it was a disgrace, and it never should have happened, but that much, I can tell you.  Has he ever demonstrated knowledge of history, or economics, or any subject?  I have never seen him do so.  Yet consider convergent evolution.  Some traits can evolve separately because evolutionary pressure favors those traits, and remember that evolution is quintessentially non-sentient.

Hitler may have used language about blood with intent, but a non-sentient force may put political-evolutionary pressure on less intelligent actors to arrive at similar language without that common intellectual ancestor.  Hence, Donald Trump may speak like Hitler without actually knowing that he is doing it, via political convergent evolution.  We truly cannot know.

Yet the similarities are there.  The question is how one scores these similarities on the 0-10 scale of Hitleriness.  Given the dehumanization and distinctiveness of the language, Trump is not at zero.  Yet, I cannot put him at the higher end of the scale.  He is not calling for a final solution or going anywhere near the largest horrors.  The family separations at the border were ugly, but seriously.  This is a scale, and by putting this on a scale, and putting Hitler's genocidal ambitions at 10, you have to ask, what does Trump say or even want?  What he wants is to kick the "other" out.  Murder them all and purify the planet?  No.  He's bad, he's very, very bad, but not that bad.  A scale forces you, by definition, to confront range.

I will note, as we look back at his first term, something interesting coming through the survey data about a difference between the US and the UK.  One of the interesting conflicts is over the Muslim population in the UK, which is much more radicalized than the Muslim population in the US, the current war notwithstanding.  That is the source of an intense conflict in the UK, but the Islamic population in the US simply does not share those most extreme of political attitudes.  Trump sees the population monolithically, because that's how his, sure, let's call it a "mind" works, but the point is that his goal is to kick 'em all out, not kill 'em all.

Where do I put that?  The inflammatory and dehumanizing rhetoric is bad, but without the call for direct racial/ethnic violence, I just cannot put him on the higher end of the scale.  Let's call it a 4.  Donald Trump gets a 4 on the Hitleriness scale.

OK, next.  Let's take a look at those university presidents.  They were wishy-washy on genocide against the Jews.  They would basically call for the immediate execution of anyone who misgenders a frogself, but calling for the genocide of the Jews?  Hmmm, I dunno, that's a hard question, kinda context dependent, maybe, lemme go check my plagiarized doctoral dissertation.

They did not say anything directly anti-Semitic or racist or genocidal, but they are enablers because they are anti-Semitic and they are, more importantly, useless, worthless cowards.

1.  Call that a 1.  Not a zero, because they implicitly stand with anti-Semites and genocidal maniacs, but the implicit nature of their cowardice keeps their scores low.

Next?  For funsies, does anyone remember Mel Gibson?  Do you remember his drunk driving arrest?  Way-back-when, Mad Mel got canceled when he was arrested for drunk driving, and he went on a rant about how "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."  Hmmmm.  Where do we put that one?  OK, that's clearly a higher score than Claudine and the Presidents of the Universities of Anti-Semitism, but he also is not directly calling for violence or genocide.  So, where do we put this relative to Donny?  It is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and a common one.  I'm going to say that Donny took it further, with a more uniquely Hitler-y invocation, so Mel is only at a 3.

OK, keep that in mind.  Here's ADL's data.  Mel's cancelation conspiracy theory is Question 10.  You can check, by country.  For fun!

Ready for the biggy?  Here's Hamas's charter.  You have your kill-the-Jews, your "warmongering Jews" (hi, Mel!), your "Zionist" control of the banking and media institutions, and you have mass murder of civilians, merely because they are Jews, with the stated goal of killing all Jews.

Have you read Mein Kampf?  This is "the full Hitler."  Every conspiracy theory that has ever been posed, plus stated genocidal ambitions, plus mass murder of civilians, with the goal of murdering civilians merely because they are Jews.  The full Hitler.

There's your Bo Derek.  Your 10.  It does not get any more Hitler-y than this.  There is literally nothing more Hitler-y than openly stating every ancient conspiracy theory about Jews, telling the world you want to kill the Jews, and then going out and doing everything in your power to kill Jews, not IDF soldiers, but Jews.

So remember, kids.  Measurement theory is important.  When invoking Godwin's law and comparing someone to Hitler, use this scale.  If you are putting a person or group at a 10 on the Hitleriness scale, it better be someone so completely Hitler-y that you check every box, the way Hitler definitionally did, or the way, well, Hamas does.  Creepy shitbags may check a few boxes, and they may use vile incantations, but the full Hitler is a rare thing.

Congratulations, Hamas!  You have achieved the full Hitler!  Even Donald Trump has not managed that.

Watermelon Slim, "Scalemaster Blues," live.  The studio version is from Up Close & Personal.

*Bonus points if you know what "the caged system" is, and hence can recognize both the absurdity of the diatribe and shake your head at the recognition that some asshole somewhere has probably called a proponent of the caged system "Hitler."