Brian from Jeollanamdo earned April's Blogger of the Month award from Blogoseyo, for breaking the story about Coreana, a Korean cosmetics company, using a woman dressed like a sexy femme-nazi to sell face cream, which eventually attracted the attention of the Simon Weisenthal center and CNN, but for which Coreana, to my knowledge, has never apologized, another bit of extreme dis ingenuousness, given the way Korea has vociferously demanded apologies for references to their own wartime humiliations.
(Update: On the comment board, LiveWithPassion tells me that Coreana apologized, but does not feel sorry enough to actually pull the ads and stop glamourizing Nazis and pissing on the graves of all the Jews, Gypsies, Gays, and others killed in concentration camps and otherwise, during World War II. Thanks for the info, Livewithpassion, but sorry to say, this remains indefensible. I'm sticking to my guns, apology or none.)
Metropolitician also writes about the startlingly blase manner of hitler and nazi references here in Korea (and it's a bit of a puzzle, given the war atrocities Japan committed over here in East Asia, that Korea would be so insensitive about using Nazi imagery in Bars, and TV ads.)
Here's my own message to Coreana:
there are only three ways it is appropriate to refer to Nazis in the world today:
1. As a documentarian (see: Disovery Channel)
2. If they're the bad guys in a movie, and you get to kill lots of them. (see also Hellboy, and many, many more) (or if they're portrayed as tragic, inhuman monsters - see Schindler's List.)
3. If you make fun of them, and DON'T GLAMOURIZE THEM OR TRY TO MAKE MONEY OFF OF REFERRING TO THEM.
(from Youtube, via collegehumor)
(oops: posted Indy twice at first. Here's the right clip.)
That's my piece. Thanks for listening.
one expat's life in Korea
5 comments:
Some of the "best" Hitler videos are the ones that came out at the end of last (American) football season. They're from the movie "The Downfall" but the subtitles have been changed. I did a post about them, but then took them down the next day b/c I wanted to blog about some North Korea stuff and thought it hypocritical to condemn one regime while laughing at a guy saying "The German people will pay with their own blood." Anyway:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYu68SHWh64
http://www.donga.com/fbin/output?n=200804160115&top20=1 (한국어)
http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?biid=2008041636868 (English)
[Quote]
동아일보 Dong-Ah Ilbo - 16th April 2008
Coreana’s two CEOs sent written apologies to the embassy and the Jewish groups.
A leading Korean cosmetics maker has pulled its TV commercial that featured Adolf Hitler. A leading Korean cosmetics maker has pulled its TV commercial that featured Adolf Hitler.
Coreana made the move after a flurry of protests from Jewish and international groups.
The company had shot a commercial for a new product starring Korean celebrity Park Jin-hee. In one scene, Park showed up in a Nazi uniform with shell-firing sounds heard in the background. Behind her was the sentence, “Even Hitler could not get East and West at the same time.”
A Coreana source said, “Our new product has two main functions: moisturizing and curing. We just wanted to highlight this, and thus centered the ad on the concept of conquest and Hitler.”
After an internal review, however, the company pulled the word “Hitler” from the commercial and replaced it with “anybody.”
The original commercial, however, drew international condemnation of Korea through YouTube. The Israeli Embassy in Seoul and other Jewish advocacy groups demanded that the entire commercial be removed.
People around the world who watched the clip also said they could not understand how Koreans could make such a commercial when Koreans criticize Japan for its World War II atrocities.
Amid the rising criticism, Coreana’s two CEOs sent written apologies to the embassy and the Jewish groups.
The commercial was removed after two days and an amended version now airs on cable channels in Korea.
but it STILL AIRS!
after the comfort women photos, people shaved their HEADS! They took the word "Hitler" out, but STILL AIR the hot girl dressed up as a sexy nazi as if there's nothing wrong with that, as if nazis were sexy, glamourous, or somehow otherwise attractive enough to entice a person to buy cosmetics!
휴… 할말 없습니다. 처음부터 Nazi uniform (you can’t tell that it’s Nazi uniform) 이 문제가 아니고 ‘히틀러문구: 히틀러도 동서양 둘다 가지지 못했다’ 가 문제 였던것 같은데요. 그러니까 이제는 더 이상 유대단체에서도 문제를 안삼지요.
I'm pretty liberal with my "delete comment forever" button. I'm running a blog, not the forensics team or the Model UN.
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