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Argumentum Ad Naziam (or Ad Nauseam)

Why isn’t a form of the argumentum ad Naziam considered a fallacy when debating war, just as the reductio ad Hitlerum is fallacious when arguing with an opponent whose position you reject?  Why isn’t there some sort of corollary of Godwin’s Law for arguments about war?  It would prevent a whole host of bad or tendentious arguments from being made.  Thus, under this […]

Why isn’t a form of the argumentum ad Naziam considered a fallacy when debating war, just as the reductio ad Hitlerum is fallacious when arguing with an opponent whose position you reject?  Why isn’t there some sort of corollary of Godwin’s Law for arguments about war?  It would prevent a whole host of bad or tendentious arguments from being made. 

Thus, under this corollary, when your first response to the Iranian nuclear weapons program is, “We have to stop the new Hitler!” your credibility ought to be drastically reduced by, say, 50%.  If you persist in this line of argument, your credibility will decrease geometrically each time you make this claim.  Under this rule, each time your first response to any argument against the evils of war or against going to war is, “But what about the Nazis?” your credibility will likewise be drastically reduced.  I think this corollary could also be extended to cover false alarms over “new Holocausts” and genocide in general. 

The basic premise of this is that if your first instinct is to compare every situation and every moral problem to the problem of Nazism, you really haven’t very much to contribute because you apparently cannot or will not see things except in terms of one conflict with one set of circumstances that blind you to the rest of reality.  The tendency to rely on the argumentum ad Naziam hints that you may be unaware of the fact that we are not, in fact, at war with the Nazis any longer or that the Nazis are all dead.  It is liable to make you support horrendous arguments for how wars should be waged (see argument from war crimes) by saying things like, “Well, if we could torch Dresden, we can certainly blow up a few villages…” or “If it worked in fighting the Nazis, it must be okay…” or “I suppose you wouldn’t have been willing to lay waste to German cities to fight the Nazis, eh, would you, Nazi-lover?”  These are not serious, moral arguments.  They are the complaints of people who find themselves at odds with their moral tradition and the moral authorities which they purport to acknowledge and respect; they are the complaints of people who have become so accustomed to making excuses for government and the abuses of power that they no longer have their right bearings when it comes to questions of war.  They are the complaints of people who frequently endorse unjust wars and then wrap themselves up in their “moral tradition” to find some tenuous rationale for what they have done, so they are naturally offended when anyone happens to draw attention to the moral deficiency of their position.

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