Do Net Liberals call Rightwingers Nazis based on 20 yr old TROLLING?

Apparently back in the day on the internet, it was Liberals and Progressive who were given the Moniker of Nazis, and compared to hitler.

This was discussed in an article from 1994 on wired.com titled Meme, Counter-Meme. Where the author suggest turning the tide on Right wingers by using the meme of Nazi against them.

Its a fascinating read. And even more amazing to think that this Trolling tactic is still being used today! Here are some snippits from the article, but it is two pages long and worth the read.

Meme, Counter-meme

[link to www.wired.com]

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.....


....By 1990, I had noticed, something similar had happened to the Nazi-comparison meme. Sure, there are obvious topics in which the comparison recurs. In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons. And birth-control debates are frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably raises the specter of Nazi book-burning.

.... So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it - the counter-meme was reproducing on its own! And it mutated like a meme, generating corollaries like the following: .....