No, it wasn't Andrew Sullivan or Michael Wolff who said it: Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave just said in his Nobel lecture to the Swedish Academy, "if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day." What a surprising show of faith in blogs (the ridicule specialists of "the internet") from the uber-elite! We remember when bloggers were the drunken, discretion-less, pajama-clad degenerates of the media world. Now they're saving the world, retroactively! Of course this is hopelessly naive.

It was precisely Hitler's grasp of modern communications that accelerated his rise to power. Maybe the internet would have made him look dumb. Or maybe it just would have helped him rile even more global fascists, like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh (and maybe Prescott Bush!) in the U.S.

If bloggers' track record against human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are anything to go by, it seems more likely that a 1930s internet would have simply accelerated the development of the people's new opiate, LOLcats.