Godwin's Law, Halbanat Panim and Health Care
August 21, 2009
Ethics | Social Action
(6 comments)
by William Berkson
Godwin's Law is a rule of internet conversations, which says that the longer a discussion thread continues, the higher the probability that someone will mention Hitler or Nazis. A popular variation is that the first person to invoke Hitler or Nazis is considered to have lost the debate.
There is a lot of truth in both these variations. There is something about the conditions of the internet that unleashes the furies in many who post in forums. Fortunately, this name-calling is generally of little consequence.
However, this dreadful practice has migrated more and more to the television and face to face political events. The more personal and public the name-calling becomes, the more dangerous it is. In Pirkei Avot it is written that a person who shames another in public will "have no place in the world to come." The Hebrew phrase for public shaming is halbanat panim, which means literally "whitening the face" of the other person, causing the other person to blanche. And the sages said that as blood drains from the face of the person insulted, that halbanat panim is so grave a sin as being equivalent to bloodshed, because it often leads to bloodshed.
In fact, the extreme right wing in Israel portrayed Prime Minister Rabin in a Nazi SS uniform, and showed him in cross hairs of a gun sight, before he was in fact assassinated. Because of the gravity of these insults, I am extremely disappointed that more leaders who are critical of Obama's Health Care initiative are not vocally condemning the rampant comparing of Obama and Hitler. Such comparisons are incitement to violence and need to be condemned in the strongest terms. Republican leaders need to be telling their followers, and hot heads in the media like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh to stop this incitement, and urge their followers to be respectful of the President, even when they disagree with the policies he advocates.
Rabbi Saperstein of the RAC did call on O'Reilly to stop his crying "Nazi", and the Anti-defamation League has condemned Limbaugh for this practice. But it really is going to take Republican leaders to stop this, as, to his credit, McCain did during his campaign. Unfortunately, too many elected leaders are silent on this. Can the RAC join with Christian organization to condemn this? Something more needs to be done to publically label this practice as shameful and outside the realm of proper democratic discourse.
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Per your comment -- Republican leaders need to be telling their followers, and hot heads in the media like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh to stop this incitement, and urge their followers to be respectful of the President, even when they disagree with the policies he advocates.
We were reminded during the election campaign of the need to keep this blog apolitical, and therefore I am trying to exercise care and caution as I suggest that whatever Republican leaders OUGHT to be telling their followers, the Lee Atwaters and Karl Roves and Sarah Whatsernames of this world are inciters of disrespect and of Big Lie tactics.
What the political parties and the media need is a "derech eretz squad" to keep discourse civil and truthful. There was a time when demagoguery was called by its name, and when it tended to be practiced by blue collar racist politians, and to be frowned on by the gentlemen (in the bst sense of that word) who used to dominate Republican politics and who maintained decency whether in authority or in opposition.
Is it my advanced age that leads me to yearn for "the good old days" or has there really been a total erosion of the concept of decency in our politics?