Joe's Jottings

Category: Politics

  • Dubbed Hitler – why is it funny?

    After the last post on here, ‘Gazing in to the abyss’, I concluded that I needed to take off the Old Testament ‘Prophet of Doom’ robes for a little while and take a slightly lighter view of something.  Which is why, at first glance, the title of this piece may raise the odd eyebrow.

    Some months ago, a clip from the film ‘Downfall’ appeared online.  The film is about the final days in the Berlin Bunker at the end of World War 2.  The scene features Hitler and his Generals studing a map, discussing a counter-attack that will never come.  Hitler goes off on a serious rant at his military commanders, eventually settling down in to an admission that it’s all over.

     So far, no great bundle of screaming laughs. But the 4 minute piece of video was then dubbed with whole new story lines – ‘Hitler discovers Michael Jackson is dead’, for example (left) is one of the funnier mashups on this theme on the Web.There are lots of others – Hitler finds out Oasis have split, that he’s been thrown off Xbox Live, that twitter is down again, that Liverpool have lost a soccer match. The list goes on.  There’s even one where Hitler rants abouyt being subtitled…

    The quality varies – some are just plain nasty, others mildly amusing, some I find laugh out loud funny.What this says about my sense of humour and the sense of humour of the people who put the mashups together is what I want to look at in this post.I guess now would be a good time to put in the usual justification that seems to be required these days….no, I don’t find Hitler amusing per se. No, I’m not a Nazi sympathiser, Yes, I do appreciate that World War 2 was not funny. 

    On a more practical basis, if you have even ‘schoolboy German’ the whole illusion is destroyed, so winding the sound down is quite helpful! 

    And having got that out of the way…

    I guess we’ve always used humour to poke fun at evil. In the 1930s George Orwell (I believe) commented that the goose-step was a ludicrous way to walk, but as the marchers had guns it was best not to laugh too loudly.

     Even during the Second World War, various rude comic songs were sung by the allied soldiers remarking on the rumour about Hitler’s single testicle – although the sentiment was expressed in less polite words – and various satires and comedies emerged from the War taking the mickey from the so-called Master Race – To Be or Not To Be and ‘The Great Dictator’ being the two most famous.  However, it’s worth remembering that both of these films were made before the sheer scale and nature of the atrocities committed by the Nazis became known; after news came out about the Concentration Camps and the extermination policies of the Nazis, it took until Mel Brooks’s ‘The Producers’ in 1968 before it became possible to laugh at the Nazis again.

    It’s worth noting that this sort of humour always picks fun at the Nazis, never their actions.  There are invariably some very dark and usually unfunny attempts at humour that pick up on the cruelty of the Nazis, and occasionally even the death camps, but they’re uncommon.

    The Downfall Mashups all have one thing in common; they feature Hitler ranting and raving on the behalf of the mashup creator about something that matters to them.  Hitler’s been subverted to any number of things that cause people to ‘lose it’.  Maybe he provides us with that excuse we need to really lose our rag to the degree of what might be called a ‘towering fury’.  I had one of those years ago – it was kicked off by soemthing really stupid and I went ballistic.  About 30 seconds in I KNEW I was in the wrong but what the heck, I was enjoying it so much that I genuinely didn’t want to stop – I knew I was going to have problems looking my colleagues in the eye for days afterwards, but it just felt so worth it.  I literally did feel that I was towering above the situation!

    Maybe the Downfall Mashup allows us to project our feelings on to a character well known for his rants – a sort of scapegoat for acting out in public.  We can script our ‘actor’, wind him up and let him go.  We vent our spleen, and as a side benefit reduce one of history’s most evil men to the part of an actor in one of our own rants against society.  I wonder how long it will be before there’s a ‘personally abusive’ version where someone takes it out on a real, named individual that they dislike? 

     Is there a down side to the Downfall Mashup phenomenenon?  I’m not sure – there’s one school of thought that says that this actually humanises Hitler and gives young people today a view of the Fuhrer as a comic spectacle, a foil for our own humour.  This might be so, but the solution there is to ensure that we don’t forget the original evil committed by a bunch of very ordinary men with glasses, bad haircuts and bad breath who were allowed to get to where they did in life because no one stopped them.

     Or, just maybe, no one laughed at them long and hard and sent them off with their tails between their legs before they got the illusion that they were something special.  Who knows.

  • Google and ‘The Dead Past’

    Earlier this year we saw the launch of Google’s Street View system – here – and with it came a plethora of complaints about the invasion of privacy implications.   I was one of the happy complainants – Google had a view right through my house, showing people in the house.  To be honest, their reaction was swift and the imagery was removed, but it was an invasion of privacy and I’m still to be convinced that there is any long term gain to be obtained from the system.  yes, I’m aware of all the ‘well, you can see what a neighbourhood’s like before buying a house there’ arguments, but if you do all your checking out of the largest investment you’ll ever make on the Internet then you deserve to find yourself living between a Crack Den and a student house.

    Enough…step back and breathe…the title of this piece is ‘Google and ‘The Dead Past’ – now what on Earth do I mean by that?

    Science Fiction afficionados amongst you may recognise part of the title as coming from an old story by Isaac Asimov, in which a researcher develops a time viewer to look in to the past, only to eventually realise that the past starts exactly a fraction of a second ago – for all practical, human purposes, the past, to his machine, is identical to the present.  He’s accidentally invented the world’s finest surveillance machine.  As a character says at the end of the story – ‘Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever.’

    Now, there’s a looooong way to go between Google and eternal damnation through surveillance, but as is often pointed out, the road to Hell is firstly paved with good itentions and always starts with a single step.  Let’s do soem of that old style extrapolation, though, and see what we’ve got coming up in our future.  Here are a few things that have been posited and talked about as being part of our online future,  some of which are already here, some of which are extrapolations, all of which are technically feasible, if not yet politically acceptable.

    1. Decreased latency between changes in the online world and those changes turning up in Search Engines.  At the moment we might expect a day or so even on busy sites regularly trawled by search engines – a possible future might be that items get folded in to search space within hours.  We’re also already heading towards Tweets being searchable – perhaps future APIs will allow combined searches of facebook, Twitter and general webspace all in one shot?
    2. Use of  ‘mechanical turk’ approaches in encouraging people to use their spare time to classify images, scan online video, etc.  to tag media that are currently not searchable by search engines in their raw form. Imagine that being idone in near real-time.  DARPA are already researching tools to extract context out of text and digitised speech; perhaps some degree of automated scanning of video will follow.  And it’s not outlandish to suggest that what might be useful for the military will sooner or later find its way into civillian online life.
    3. The possibilities inherent in IP Version 6 for a massively enlarged Internet Protocol addressing space make it easier than ever to ensure that everything that can have a separate IP address will have a separate IP address.  Combine that with the geolocation capabilities that come with reduced cost GPS chip sets – many phones now have GPS built in – and the tracking of devices (and their owners) in real time or near real time, sold to us as extensions of the social media experience, becomes a reality.
    4. The increasing usage of ‘Cloud’ computing where everything about you is stored not on your computer or phone but on a ‘cloud’ storage system run by your phone company (T-Mobile?), software supplier (Microsoft?), media seller (Amazon?) puts all your digital life in to teh network – where it can be scanned and examined in transit or in storage.

    Add to the technical advances the willingness for peopel to share their activities via Social media (or eventually the commoditisation of their activity patterns and media interests, as ISPs and phone companies realise that people will give up a lot of privacy for cheaper connectivity) and we are perhaps heading towards the science fiction scenario described above.

    If people were concerned about the impact of Street View on their lives – a single snapshot taken as a one off – imagine the possible impact of your real-life world being captured as a mosaic by different sources and then being rendered and made searchable by interconnected search tools.  A phone call positions you in one place, photographs taken on the same phone and geo-tagged by the software are sent to a searchable social media site and so identify who you were with and when.  You show up in other photos,  as a recipient of a call from another phone, and so on.  The other evening I was asked ‘Who doesn’t want to be tagged in these photos?’ – the new social nicety for people who are concerned over the privacy of their friends.   Sooner or later I’m certain that nicety will slip by the wayside, and it will be up to us to police our own image online.

    A recent business enterprise where people are being asked to monitor CCTV cameras in their spare time  – Internet Eyes – may be regarded as distastefully intrusive, but I do wonder whether it’s the start of a whole range of ‘mechanical turk’ type activities where people are encouraged to act as high-tech lace-curtain twitchers.  That past is not looking as dead anymore.

    Are you feeling spied on yet?  If not, I’m sure you soon will be.

  • Meanwhile, back in June…..

    Originally a Facebook Note, June 8th 2009, after the EU Elections….

    The problem with democracy is that sometimes it allows people to vote for folks that you personally don’t want to gain any sort of power. Unfortunatley, that’s democracy for you. She can be a total bitch. FWIW, I voted for the Socialist Party inspired ‘No2EU – yes to democracy’.

    There is an old latin saying – Ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est – the wrath of the gods may be great, but it is slow – that we can perhaps borrow and replace gods with people. To everyone saying how disgusted they are with their regions, their countrymen, stating people are idiots, etc. I ask them to think about the following.

    From 2003 (beginning of the Iraq war) through to this weekend, the major parties in the UK have singularly managed to ignore or disregard the concerns and criticisms of voters. The Government has thundered on, ignoring calls for inquiries on numerous issues, ignoring the fears and concerns of voters on a number of issues, whilst keeping their “heads down in the pig bin, saying ‘Keep on digging’”, in the words of Pink Floyd. I’ve lost count of the number of people and groups who’ve asked the Government to reconsider their policies on things like immigration, ID cards and personal privacy, civil rights and freedom of expression in the UK. Phillip Pullman put it better than I can… http://www.joep.communityhost.org.uk/?p=71

    We’ve recently had the financial debacle and then the site of MPs ignoring repeated requests for over 18 months to release details of their expenses.

    And people wonder why voters voted the way they did? After the Government and major parties have acted with such hubris and contempt?

    To be honest, we’re lucky this morning that we don’t have a handful of BNP and far-right groups holding seats all over Europe.

    Voters used the only power left to them to get the attention of their leaders – the one thing that, as yet, New Labour haven’t removed from us. The power of the ballot. And when people used it they no doubt considered how they’d been ignored, taken for granted, treated as idiots and generally regarded as sheep who would quite happily vote for the famous ‘rosette on a dog’ representing the major parties.

    Guess what – they didn’t. They said ‘Listen. We will not go this way again with you. You repeatedly ignore our concerns. You treat as as children and with contempt. Listen. We’re going to take the one course of action that will get your attention. We will vote for the parties that you and all those with a vested interest in the current system don’t want us to vote for’.

    And that’s what they’ve done. Vox populi – the voise of the people. Keep on ignoring that voice – so apparently quiet in Westminster and Islington and the in inner circles of New Labour and the other major parties – and this will keep happening.

    My final question – what are WE going to do about it? Many of you will know I’m a Libertarian – I believe in small government, and maximum involvement of the people in that governance. Wearing badges and shouting slogans and signing petitions is not enough. Wherever you live there are going to be issues in YOUR community that need tackling – social and political issues that left a mess for long enough will provide more grist to the mill of those on the extreme right and left who want to remove freedoms from us all.

    Get out there and start fixing YOUR community and YOUR society. Listen to the people who’ve said ‘Enough’s enough.’ Work with them to address those issues that they’re concerned about and maybe, just maybe, we can collectively remind all politicians that they’re there because we give them the permission to be there.

    If you need to blame anyone, need to feel ashamed or disgusted with anyone – just look to Westminster. Briefly – don’t dwell on it. Then look back to wherever you are and start fixing this mess.