The reputation of history’s most hated dictator will never survive this.
UPDATE: 11 MARCH 2010
I have been writing this blog for just over a year now. I love blogging. It is a very involving hobby that has expanded my mind and made me engage with a wealth of new issues relating to science, history, politics and philosophy. I love the buzz you get when the notification email arrives when someone has posted a reply to a thread, links to one of your posts on their blog, sends a message of praise or constructive criticism. I love the feeling of, “Perhaps this argument will make me change my mind?”
Of which posts am I most proud? Well, my report of the Hitchens/ Fry debate on the Catholic Church in October had a lot of views and comments. My rubbishing of William Dembski’s Intelligent Design “theory” ranks very high as well. Just to think, I nearly gave up on it halfway through I was so bored, and then an “unsolicited” email to Dembski’s college account and it ended up on his Uncommon Descent blog not once, but twice! Victor Stenger liked my analysis of his 2003 debate against William Lane Craig so much that he posted it on his own website and from where I get c. 20 referrals per day. And of course there’s my castigation of Craig’s appalling interpretation of Yahweh’s commandment to his chosen people to wipe out every single one of the Canaanites of which I am rather pleased.
Are any of these my highest viewed post? No. My highest viewed post is THIS: the result of a rainy Saturday afternoon dossing on YouTube coming across an Internet craze butchering the best scene in a brilliant study of history’s most infamous tyrant.
Posted on 26 August 2009. 11,700 views and counting. It’s getting ridiculous!!
The Hitchens/ Fry debate report was my PB with c. 600 views in one day. Now it is “The Hitler Meme” which has been getting 700+ per day of late. I really can’t explain why it is getting so many views. No one has left a comment. The post hasn’t been linked on any other blog or website. My WordPress stats monitor says that viewers are finding it through the search engine term “hitler”. Except I have searched for it on Google and it doesn’t come up in the first 10 pages of hits!?!?!?!?!?!
Anyone viewing this post now, how are you finding this page? What’s so great about it? Please leave some comments and put me out of my misery!
I don’t know whether to delete the post yet, but I may well do so. This is just getting silly! Answers in the comments box, please.
ORIGINAL POST CONTINUES
I recently became aware of a massive YouTube trend sending up Hitler. The clips are culled from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film, Downfall, which depicts the Führer’s last days in his Berlin bunker with the Allied forces closing in on all sides in the spring of 1945.
Except instead of throwing a wobbler at his aides and military commanders for the collapse of the German army in the face of the enemy, Adolf – played by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz – is getting all hot under the collar at slightly less profound matters, such as the live act for his birthday party…
Tasteless, spoiling a great film and above all funny. Very, very funny. Hundreds have been produced. Here is a selection of my favourites from a rainy afternoon’s viewing:
Hitler gets banned from Xbox online…
…finds out that Michael Jackson has died…
…hears about Sarah Palin’s resignation…
…complains about being stuck in slow motion…
…assumes the role of Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, over the NDP-Liberal Coalition…
…and finally, rants at the amount of spoofs about him from the film Downfall…
Tags: adolf hitler, berlin, biola university, Bruno Ganz, bunker, canaanites, catholic church, Chosen People, christopher hitchens, debate, Denyse O’ Leary, Divine Command Theory, downfall, generals, germany, goebbels, hitler, hitler meme, Intelligence Squared, Intelligent Design, Israelites, manicstreetpreacher, michael jackson, nazi, Oliver Hirschbiegel, reasonable faith, sarah palin, second world war, spoof, Stephen Fry, stephen harper, Uncommon Descent, victor stenger, William Dembski, William Lane Craig, World War 2, xbox, yahweh, youtube
manicstreetpreacher 
11/04/2010 at 02:08 |
Your picture of Hitler at the top comes up on the first page of a Google IMAGE search of “Hitler” 🙂
11/04/2010 at 13:35 |
So it does; thank you!!
I suspected that the neo-Nazi weirdoes of the world were merely trawling through every page on the web with a reference to “Hitler” in order to feed their sick appetites after someone posted the most incoherent and appalling piece of racist / anti-Semitic filth a couple of weeks ago. Which I trashed asap, I hasten to add.
My post on the afterlife has been getting a lot of views over the last month or so with people searching for “hell”. That post also appears on the first page of Google images because I have used a picture of Satan’s cookhouse.
I wonder whether to delete the images or the entire posts. They really are inflating my viewing scores something rotten…
23/04/2010 at 21:44 |
I came across this page because I googled for Hitler, as I needed a reference picture for comparing the real Hitler with the cats uploaded to http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com. There are a few cats there that honestly DO look like him.
The last video of these that you put up is priceless. It is almost perfect, was it not for kind of losing the funny at the end.
24/04/2010 at 09:10 |
The producers of Downfall, Constantin Films, have finally had enough and are hitting YouTube with copyright actions to remove the videos. The first two on this post have gone.
Spoilsports!
25/04/2010 at 21:59 |
Wait—you want to delete the biggest piece of bait you have for bringing people to your website? Are you sure you want to be a blogger? What you need to do is design the site such that when they arrive for the Hitler meme they wind up seeing your substantive posts and get drawn into those and stick around. My traffic doubled its daily averages, essentially setting a new daily average that lasted for months, after two random, topical posts that took off. http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/09/12/how-did-derren-brown-predict-the-lottery/ and http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/09/13/kanye-west-cruelly-disses-taylor-swift-proves-once-and-for-all-he-has-no-class/
They’re hardly the most substantive things I ever posted, but they both hit in one weekend, I blogged about them immediately after they happened, caught the wave of hot search engine terms on an overnight before formal news organizations had adequate coverage yet. And it netted real readers! If you bring in a thousand people off the street, at least a few will randomly be part of your blog’s target demographic, so treat it like free advertising!
25/04/2010 at 22:12 |
Thanks, Daniel; that definitely puts a new spin on matters. I keep meaning to redesign this blog and use a different theme, but never seem to get round to it. I’ll bear your advice in mind next time I have blogger’s block and tinker around with the widgets.
21/05/2010 at 05:04 |
google images, hiltler.
16/08/2014 at 03:49 |
I was looking for Dembski’s reported gaffe from a debate with Dawkins, “as everyone knows, Hitler was an atheist…” So of course I Googled DEMBSKI HITLER and there you were.
16/08/2014 at 07:24 |
Did Dawkins ever publicly debate Dembski?
I have not been able to find such a debate from a Google search and doubt whether Dawkins would ever consciously break his maxim of never sharing a platform with a Creationist, sorry, Design Theorist.
Hitchens debated Dembski in his final months and from what I remember, the exchange was fairly civilised.
MSP
19/12/2014 at 23:45 |
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