Good News: All the Real Nazis Are Dead

Looks like I’m good and busted, for breaking Godwin’s Law.

Last night, I published blog post, arguing that pundits and Americans in general would do well not to police too closely one another’s gut-level reactions to bin Laden’s death. It’s big; people’s feelings are bound to be strong, strongly mixed, or both.

Titling the piece “Down with Reaction Nazis,” I cited among the guilty Joan Walsh; for a piece she published in Salon; Jim Geraghty, for his rebuttal in his National Review blog; and (by way of setting up context) Leon Wieseltier, for his too-sharp criticism of Adam Gopnik’s post-9/11 meditation, “The City and the Pillars

Today, Mr. Geraghty has blogged in protest of what he considers a mis-characterization:

I’ll readily cede him the point. Calling someone a Nazi or any other kind ototalitarian is a big deal, and should be. I had not imagined that anyone would take the comparison literally. Mr. Geraghty’s just too un-Nazi like for that. But then, that faith is always easier to come by when someone else’s good name is at stake.

Once, in the combox, under a Patheos article I’d published, someone wrote that my bishop looked to her like a living representative of “the banality of evil.” Hannah Arendt originally coined the phrase in honor of Adolf Eichmann. The poster seemed to mean it seriously, so I shot back an angry response.

So, for the record, Jim Geraghty is neither a Nazi, nor a communist. (Unlike Joan Walsh, he doesn’t sound like a schoolmarm, either.) And as I hope he gathered from reading my blog post, I’d be the first to defend his right to pump his fist in the air over bin Laden’s death. Like the legal principle goes, his right to pump his fist should only end where my nose begins.