I'm reminded of Godwin's Law, the idea that as the length of an online argument increases so does the eventuality of one side or the other being compared to a Nazi, to the point of becoming a certainty.

To me, there is a certain laziness to it (in addition to the trivialization). It's not dissimilar to how profanity could be considered an overly expedient, if understandable, way to punctuate a point, though taken to an obvious extreme. I guess there is simply nothing in the 20th century that stands quite as starkly emblematic in the minds of Western thinking as the Holocaust. Rwanda, Khmer Rouge, and the purges of Stalin approach the horror, though they all somehow feel like copy-cat killings; an after-the-fact echoing that likely found some perverse inspiration in the Jewish Holocaust. So I guess I kind of understand it. And I've undoubtedly done it myself somewhere in a far removed paper I wrote for a college class. But I shouldn't have. And this is a good, concise reminder of why.