Godwin's law

It was not meant as an observation but as a countermeasure: Godwin watched how casually the Holocaust was used as a rhetorical weapon on Usenet and began deliberately propagating the law as a memetic virus, to make people think twice before getting there. The tradition that grew up around it was that whoever draws the comparison first has automatically lost the thread. Godwin has repeatedly said the law does not apply to warranted historical comparisons — it targets reflexive ones. One of the earliest examples of someone designing a meme for a stated purpose and succeeding.