Not Another Nazi Ad Campaign in Korea …
Yes, I’m afraid it is. Hurry and see the video on this Naver page before it’s taken down. [Update: Brian, praise be unto him, made YouTube videos, which you can see on a previous post at his blog. Oddly enough, I looked for something about this on YouTube and didn’t find them, but it’s good to record these things for posterity.]
Isn’t fascism erotic? I wonder how long she would have lasted in Berlin in the early 40’s.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center forwards the text of a letter he sent to the President and Chairman of Coreana Cosmetics:
Your renowned company is all about beauty. In your own words you want to promote “Beauty, hope and happiness in your life”. It is therefore incomprehensible to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and its constituency of 400,000 families that you would launch a campaign using Nazi symbols and a reference to mass murderer Adolf Hitler in selling your product. Frankly put, these images and references are insult to the memory of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, when 6 million innocent Jews were systematically murdered and the millions of other innocents who perished at the hands of the Nazi regime, its SS and military. Further, the survivors of those atrocities are outraged that their suffering at the hand of these racist murderers is being mocked by such a campaign. As you know, the Jewish and Korean people have much in common in their long histories, including the terrible tragedies experienced during the years of the second World War. We can only assume that such a campaign was mistakenly undertaken.
We therefore urge Coreana to immediately cancel this campaign and pull all advertising elements that use Nazi symbols and references to Hitler. Please advise us of your decision as soon is possible.
South Korea’s affinity for Hitler bars and baked goods and anti-Semitic comic books has been controversial outside of Korea — it recently earned South Korea an honorable mention in the State Department’s report on anti-Semitism — but this latest episode suggests that Koreans really don’t see the tastelessness of this. Korea even has its own Hitlerjugend wannabes. Those are pretty odd things for a country with an obsession with its own history of being occupied oppressed by Adolf Hitler’s fascist Japanese ally. On further thought, maybe that’s not so odd.
Korea’s conspicuous inability to grasp the idea that genocide offends the rest of Earth may provide some insight into why so few Koreans seem bent out of shape about concentration camps in North Korea whose cruelty is comparable to that of Mauthausen or Dachau.
This reminds me — when looking at old photos of Korea with my wife recently, I ran across a photo I took of another Nazi bar with a gigantic swastika, right near the train station in Cheonju, just before the World Cup. The Polish team played in Cheonju that year. I’ll try to scan and post it later.