Evil H gets last word, even on gun registry
Well, hello Larry!
There’s no better way to mark the end of the long-gun registry than with a brilliant display of Reductio ad Hitlerum, otherwise known as Godwin’s law, which states: “As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.”
And so we thank Conservative backbencher Larry Miller, MP for Bruce-grey-owen Sound, who in the closing hours of the registry debate offered an alleged quote from former Justice Minister Allan Rock. He claimed Rock had once stated, “’I came to Ottawa . . . with a firm belief that the only people in Canada who should have firearms are police officers and the military. ”
“Sound familiar?” Miller asked. “Adolf Hitler, 1939.”
“Don’t lose hair, Larry,” another MP warned. But he continued.
“Sen. Sharon Carstairs said the following (she didn’t): ‘The registering of hunting rifles is the first step in the social re-engineering of Canadians.’ That is what Adolf Hitler tried to do in the 1930s.”
Miller went on in this vein, misquoting, misinterpreting and damning not only Rock and Carstairs but the entire Liberal caucus.
After some time, Miller semi-apologized “to anyone it might have offended.”
“While the references to the gun registry and what this evil guy did to perpetrate his crimes are very clear, it was inappropriate to use his name in the House.”
The Speaker accepted this weird little dessert plate of an apology, despite Opposition MPS saying a dinner plate, if not a banquet platter, was required. And Miller then left the House, talked to a reporter, and said it was all true anyway. “While I retracted my comments, the similarities between the two are very clear and you can’t convince me otherwise. But it’s obvious the media didn’t have much to write about yesterday because that was the hot-button issue. So just in order to take the buzz off and what have you, I partially retracted the statement in the House,” he said.
Also, he had a great uncle who died in World War II, so there.
Liberal MP Irwin Cotler has formally asked the Speaker to reconsider having let Miller off the hook. Who knows? Larry Miller is and will always be Larry Miller, an MP who will lower the tone of any municipal wiener roast you invite him to. I am indebted to the great Kady O’malley of CBC.CA for having drawn my attention not just to the Hansard transcript but to someone who refers to the Führer — the stamp-mustachioed nerdlinger whose war killed as many as 70 million people and who nearly enslaved the planet — as an “evil guy.” Words do fail our Larry. But my interest lies not in Millers — there are many Millers out there scratching away intellectually — but in Godwin’s law, derived by digital theorist Mike Godwin who watched the Internet expand in its short history into a commenting forum for idiots whose heads swelled until they exploded in gratuitous Hitler references. It is considered bad form to go Godwin too quickly, or to go Godwin at all, given that a nonsensical Hitler analogy boots you out of the debate, as MPS Justin Trudeau and Bob Rae later pointed out. But there’s one rule for us and another for Internet commenters (in Miller’s head, it isn’t the House of Commons but the House of Comments). Dilbert put it beautifully in a cartoon that encapsulates online work life: “How can you compare outsourcing to our restrooms? Are you a racist?” “Um . . . I didn’t say anything remotely like that.” “Did you learn to debate on the Internet? “How can you tell?”
My laughter at Miller thrashing about as he embarrassed his own party is a little forced. I just read historian Caroline Moorehead’s new book, A Train in Winter, about 230 French women Resistance fighters taken to Birkenau in 1943 and then to Ravensbruck in Germany. Only 49 survived.
The book’s genius is its rendition of daily life: how these women — dentists, fishwives, teachers, hairdressers — lived day after day after day in the wet cold, watching the eyes of tiny Roma children being torn out by dogs, eating a raven, gently nudging each other along and eventually failing to live.
What does this have to do with Canadian gun records? Nothing. Everything has a tenuous link to something associated with Hitler: stars, the colour yellow, greatcoats, showers, trains, soap, men named Putzi, women named Magda, careful record-keeping, missiles, parachute silk.
To put such a link into Hansard is to brush it with gilt and frame it.
Godwin’s law is a good one, especially now that Miller is aware of it (he won’t get the reference, though). I now propose Larry’s law, which is that the first person to mention MP Larry Miller in a debate has shut it down. hmallick@thestar.ca