What does forgetting mean here? Is it like forgettable? Google failed me.
This refers to the grandparent comment's quotation of Mike Godwin from his essay kindly submitted here to open the thread, which in full context was, "The internet has been shaping an increasingly international culture and collective memory — with the Holocaust, just as with other countless human atrocities, we have a moral obligation to 'never forget'. My view, which I've held for many decades now, is that glib and frivolous invocations of Hitler, or Nazis, or the Holocaust, are a kind of forgetting."
I read this as Mike Godwin saying that the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated by the Nazis must never be forgotten, so that we guard against the same crimes happening again. But if we just mention Nazis every time we disagree with someone on the Internet, without thinking deeply about whether or not what we are disagreeing with really has anything to do with what the Nazis actually did, then we are nonetheless forgetting the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. Does that sound like a fair reading of the essay to you?
The way I would sum up Godwin's argument here is that it may be that some current events resemble events of the Nazi era in important ways. As we discuss policy issues online, we have to take care to check our facts and the logic of our own arguments, and if we think something going on today is like the activities of the Nazi Party, then first of all we should review the history and make sure we are correct in our thinking on that point.
By the way, I actually did learn a LOT about the Nazi Party from a thoughtful comment here on Hacker News back in about August 2014, when a reader here mentioned the book series about the Third Reich by British historian Richard Evans, which is well worth a read.
What does forgetting mean here? Is it like forgettable? Google failed me.
This refers to the grandparent comment's quotation of Mike Godwin from his essay kindly submitted here to open the thread, which in full context was, "The internet has been shaping an increasingly international culture and collective memory — with the Holocaust, just as with other countless human atrocities, we have a moral obligation to 'never forget'. My view, which I've held for many decades now, is that glib and frivolous invocations of Hitler, or Nazis, or the Holocaust, are a kind of forgetting."
I read this as Mike Godwin saying that the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated by the Nazis must never be forgotten, so that we guard against the same crimes happening again. But if we just mention Nazis every time we disagree with someone on the Internet, without thinking deeply about whether or not what we are disagreeing with really has anything to do with what the Nazis actually did, then we are nonetheless forgetting the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. Does that sound like a fair reading of the essay to you?
The way I would sum up Godwin's argument here is that it may be that some current events resemble events of the Nazi era in important ways. As we discuss policy issues online, we have to take care to check our facts and the logic of our own arguments, and if we think something going on today is like the activities of the Nazi Party, then first of all we should review the history and make sure we are correct in our thinking on that point.
By the way, I actually did learn a LOT about the Nazi Party from a thoughtful comment here on Hacker News back in about August 2014, when a reader here mentioned the book series about the Third Reich by British historian Richard Evans, which is well worth a read.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coming-Third-Reich-Destroyed-Democr...