Hitler, uncomfortably enough, has been a trending topic lately.

It seems that YouTube has started pulling down a series of immensely popular videos that remix a tense scene from a 2004 movie about the dictator. The videos alter the original so that Hitler addresses various petty modern grievances, from being duped by Balloon Boy to being irked by Kanye West. Over the last couple of years they’ve proliferated to the point of becoming totally rampant. You can’t go two clicks online without running into a yelly Hitler sounding off about something.

And now, the original film’s rights-holders are demanding the clips be taken down. They want to protect their work, they say, and besides – it’s Hitler we’re talking about here. Using him for humour can be a fraught proposition.

The takedowns have sparked a small uproar: The Internet is defensive of its memes, and a flap about the fair use of copyrighted material is brewing. But there’s another, faintly uncomfortable fact that underpins the whole issue: Hitler is in an Internet icon. And on the Internet, he’s not an icon for what you think he is.

So, maybe it’s time we had a talk about Hitler.

The videos that caused last week’s ruckus were drawn from Downfall, a sober 2004 German-language movie that followed Hitler’s final, bunker-bound days. (I’ve seen it in its entirety, and it’s compelling, thanks in no small part to a humane portrayal by Bruno Ganz.) In one memorable scene, as the hopelessness of his situation finally sinks in, Hitler, erupts in front of his staff, eventually reducing himself to a quivering wretch.

The Downfall meme takes this scene, and adds new subtitles for comedic effect. Instead of yelling about Soviet advances, the remixed Hitler screams about petty modern indignities: Getting banned from an online gaming site. Watching his real estate tank in the recession. Learning that the wrong kind of trance music is going to be played at his favourite festival. Hundreds of variations were made, until Hitler all but became the official online spokesman for peevish aggrievement.

It’s a strange, jarring thing, the juxtaposition of high drama and petty griping. Evidently, the sillification of Hitler doesn’t sit well with everybody. When news of the YouTube takedowns broke, a spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League told the Associated Press that he was “delighted.”

“We feel that they trivialize not only the Holocaust but World War II. Hitler is not a cartoon character.”

Indeed, Holocaust survivor groups had previously complained about the Downfall videos, for much the same reason.

The trouble here is that Hitler became a cartoon character a long time ago. Almost since he first appeared, pop culture has made room for two separate constructions of Hitler: Hitler the genuine monster, and Hitler the buffoon. Even during the war itself, the Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin were sending him up as a bumbler (though Chaplin later wrote that he wouldn’t have gone for a humorous portrayal had he known what was actually happening in the concentration camps at the time). Ultimately, Hitler jokes became a mainstay of American humour.

On the Internet, though, Hitler represents a very particular kind of cartoon. His place is codified in Godwin’s Law, the famous axiom that describes the flow of online conversation.

“As an online discussion grows longer,” it states, “the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” A corollary is sometimes cited: The first person to invoke Hitler in an online argument is said to have automatically lost the argument. Not that it stops people.

Now 20 years old, Godwin’s law calls out online culture for its tendency to reduce any discussion to its most hyperbolic dimension. (I was fascinated to discover the Wikipedia entry for the concept of “Reductio ad Hitlerium,” which I encourage you to look up.) It lampoons the jerk in the conversation who wants to keep dragging everything back to Berlin, 1938, without really thinking of what that represents.

“So you like social medicine. Know who else liked social medicine?”

“So you like a parade? Know who else liked a parade?”

“So you’re eating deluxe pizza. Know who else liked deluxe pizza?”

There’s no end to it. Over the years, the slack-jawed Hitler-citing debater has become a parodic figure of its own.

So it is that, online, the bumbling Fuhrer became not just a satire of Hitler himself, but also of the shoddy thinkers who use him as a talking point – the forum-dwellers, the chat-room arguers, even (dare I add) the occasional person who leaves comments on news articles. To invoke Hitler is to invoke every other time a genocidal maniac has been trotted out to support some asinine argument.

This is the fertile ground that sprouted the Downfall meme. At their core, the Hitler reaction videos satirize the spirit of small-minded grievance that’s so prevalent online. Nothing says “losing perspective” like Hitler. And that’s what this meme was about: satirizing people who think their problems, their ideas, are so bleeding important that they have to drag out the Nazis to prove it.

The Downfall videos aren’t going to disappear entirely. In the event that the clips’ rights-holders, Constantin Film, does get them entirely wiped from YouTube, they’ll live on elsewhere, though fewer and farther between. (When I contacted Constantin, a representative politely told me they didn’t want to comment on this story anymore.)

But no matter what, Hitler’s status as a rhetorical figure in the world of online conversation is assured. Hitler was an icon before these videos came about, he’ll still be an icon after they’re gone. Downfall isn’t the meme; the meme is Hitler. As long as people keep invoking Hitler, others will use Hitler to lampoon them right back. He’s not going anywhere.