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I want to end this portion of the debate by posting a humorous FAQ describing an ettiquette of discussing fascism and nazis from the USENET days. It seems that when people reach the end of their tethers, they often resort to calling each other nazis, appropriately or not. That truism is summarized by Godwin's Law, which states that the longer a given thread of discussion, the probability that a comparison of someone or something will be made to Nazis approaches one. (In other words, it almost always happens on long threads.) I think this is a function of angry people wanting to find the worst insult they can imagine, and throwing the label of nazi at them. I think we can all agree that they could be resorting to calling each other communists, but even today there are people walking around with holier than thou looks who are proud to say they are part of a movement partly responsible for the deaths of at least 100,000,000 people.

I realize you're all making a serious point that totalitarianism ends up with more similarities than differences, but I still think it's appropriate to offer some levity after so many strong opinions (all in virtual agreement that Nazis and Communists are both vile).

Here's the introduction:

One of the most famous pieces of Usenet trivia out there is "if you mention Hitler or Nazis in a post, you've automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in". Known as Godwin's Law, this rule of Usenet has a long and sordid history on the network - and is absolutely wrong. This FAQ is an attempt to set straight as much of the history and meaning of Godwin's Law as possible, and hopefully encourage users to invoke it a bit more sparingly. Of course, knowing Usenet, it won't do an ounce of good...