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"When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they've got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is non-violence and humor."
For almost 30 years, the worst sin that could be committed in a political debate has been to compare the person you are arguing with to Adolph Hitler, his party to the Nazis or her position on an issue to the Holocaust.
For about the last 30 days, reasonable people are wondering if it is time to abandon that standard. Times have changed, and stuff is getting real.
In 1990, when internet chat rooms and bulletin boards were becoming a thing, online pioneer Mike Godwin put forward what soon became known as Godwin's Law. It stated that any comment or discussion thread on the rapidly growing World Wide Web, if it went on long enough, would assuredly see a Hitler or Nazi comparison thrown into the mix.
A quickly added corollary was that the first person to play the Nazi card in a discussion was declared to have lost the argument, and the thread was to be closed.
It is almost always lazy arguing to call Nazi on a political rival. But the real crime is to minimize the real towering horror of that regime, to trivialize the untold suffering of millions, by comparing it to some idea or event that merely bugs you.
But today, with the rise of Donald Trump, his race-baiting, ultra-nationalism and relentless propaganda, thoughtful people are wondering if the law, in the words of Capt. Jack Sparrow, isn't really more of a guideline.
(Notice that word choice. "Rise of Donald Trump." That's what people say when they are talking about dictators, not democratic leaders.)
Godwin himself has been heard to reconsider the flatness of his pronouncement.
People need to think things through and be precise, Godwin wrote for The Washington Post more than a year ago, but, "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician."
It is, of course, possible to say things are Nazi-like without saying the person doing them is a Nazi. Bad things, like telling big lies. Good things, like building big highways.
It all recalls the shift in the attitude of many British and European intellectuals between World War I and World War II.
It quickly became accepted that the first war had been an utter disaster, killing people, shattering societies and nations, introducing new mechanized means of mass destruction that targeted civilians and soldiers alike, all to no good end whatsoever. War, the smart people declared, was a really bad idea, and thus so were armies and navies and tanks and fighter planes.
"I launched the phrase, 'The War to End War,'" H.G. Wells said. "And that was not the least of my crimes."
But, as the 1930s moved along and horrid rumblings came out of the east, the philosophers of pacifism began to reconsider. World War I veteran A.A. Milne published the pacifist tome "Peace with Honour" in 1934 and the not-so-certain "War with Honour" in 1940. (Milne by then was best known as the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, so it is possible that neither book was taken seriously.)
War was bad, they said, but Hitler (for real, not a metaphor) was worse. So, just this once, arm up and be ready. It didn't help much.
One thing that really, really will not help is if American liberals, and the many true conservatives who don't like Trump either, play into the White House's hands by doing some really stupid things. Like what happened in Berkeley Wednesday when a protest against the planned appearance at the University of California by a nasty race-baiter who still works for the alt-right news site Breitbart turned into a riot.
If Trump is a Nazi, or Nazi-like, or Nazi-lite, or none of those, what he and propaganda minister Stephen Bannon really, really want is their own Reichstag fire. An American version of the 1933 destruction, supposedly by a communist agent, of the German Parliament building that shocked people and was a great help to Hitler (the real one) in his quest for power.
Protests, big protests, loud protests, are clearly in order. Violent protests ruin everything. Whatever Trump opponents do, they absolutely must not fall into that trap.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, is not much for street protests. Though he has been known to draft a wicked petition.