Insensitivity About Nazism
By Brian Deutsch
Early this month an ad campaign with Nazi imagery raised a stir in Korea's foreign community.
Two television commercials for a line of Coreana cosmetics featured actress Park Jin-hee dressed as a Nazi officer as bombs rattled her office and gunfire sounded in the background. The words ``Even Hitler didn't have the east and west'' were splashed on the screen in Korean before the ad shifted focus to the line of cosmetics being advertised.
The ads caught the attention of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an American-based human rights organization devoted to combating modern anti-Semitism and global anti-Semitic hate-mongering. On April 3, the center issued a statement of protest against the ads, in which the center's associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper wrote, ``Frankly put, these images and references are an 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.'' The release continued by saying the ads must have been a mistake, a case of gross ignorance, and that the commercials must be withdrawn.
The Associated Press picked up the protest letter and articles ran in media outlets throughout the world. The story was even on the front page of CNN.com. Video copies of the commercials were uploaded to Naver, Daum and Youtube, and generated tens of thousands of views.
A few days after I uploaded the videos to Youtube, I received two letters from Coreana and Korad, the ad agency behind the commercials, asking that the videos be removed. The advertisement had been changed, they said, and mention of Hitler had been excised, and thus the old advertisements were no longer up-to-date and no longer newsworthy.
Neither Coreana nor Korad ever apologized, however. Instead, a Coreana official told the Associated Press that the ads meant to evoke Hitler's lack of success on the eastern and western fronts, an endeavor in which this cosmetic line would not fail. The official also said that Hitler was used to symbolize ``revolution,'' in line with the product's revolutionary abilities. Moreover, the company said that it had already changed the ad after receiving complaints in February, a clear lie since the ads ran with ``Hitler'' through March and early April. Rather than taking responsibility for the commercials, both companies said the ads were the other's idea. Neither company backed off the message that the commercials were meant to evoke Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Either Coreana or Korad had the old commercials removed from Youtube and Naver on April 7. The revised advertisements continue to run on the OnStyle network. The new commercials have changed the tagline from ``Even Hitler didn't have the east and west'' to ``No one has ever had the east and west.'' The Nazi uniform, the setting and the background noise remain, making the allusion to Hitler as obvious and as intentional as before.
It is shocking that the ads were ever filmed at all, that they were ever deemed suitable for a marketing campaign. Even more appalling is the flippant, dismissive manner in which the two companies responsible handled the brief uproar. We are reminded of the furor that arose in 2004, when two Korean companies collaborated on a line of advertisements depicting actress Lee Seung-yeon as a comfort woman. That campaign produced intense backlash, and those involved had to literally prostrate themselves multiple times before the media and a collection of maligned comfort women.
By contrast, in the case of the Coreana ads, which evoked a regime responsible for the murders of millions of people and for rewriting both history and a generation, not so much as an apology was issued. Instead, the companies backpedaled, then coldly removed the name ``Hitler" while callously permitting the offending images to remain. What's more, news of the advertisements and of the media backlash barely even registered in the local media. The news was picked up on just two Korean-language websites, and never even hit Korea's English-language papers.
The question here is whether the Simon Wiesenthal Center was wrong to call this ad campaign one born of gross ignorance. Modern Korea is full of anti-Semitism and Nazi-themed establishments. Not long ago Rhie Won-bok, author of the popular comic book ``Far Countries, Near Countries" was cited in a U.S. report on global anti-Semitism after his volumes stereotyped Jews in the United States as controlling and conniving, and that the ``Wall of the Jews" was an obstacle toward the advancement of all others. This is a country where Nazi bars are successful, so much so that they attracted the attention of TIME magazine a few years back.
Perhaps this is a country, then, that truly and horribly underestimates the impact the Nazis had in their day, and the influence they have had on the global consciousness. For South Koreans to ignore the horrific crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis is to willingly set obstacles on their road to maturity in the global community. A society that approves of Nazi Germany, for whatever reason, is not one that can seriously examine issues of, say, comfort women or visits to Yasukuni Shrine. Nor can it be considered fully-functioning members of a global society. These commercials in this climate is not something that can be forgiven as ``ignorance,'' or brushed aside by redirection campaigns. Nothing less than a full apology from those responsible for the ad, and full atonement for their crimes of idiocy is acceptable here, and neither citizens nor foreign residents ought to rest until both have arrived.
The writer is a teacher in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province. He can be reached at deutsch.brian@gmail.com.