KFC ran (or their robots did) a Kristallnacht-themed ad in Germany offering customers a “crispy treat” to “commemorate” the historic tragedy of national terrorist attacks on Jews (Reichspogromnacht).
This disgusting notification that was pushed by an advertising engine can not avoid blame no matter what their excuse. I mean KFC literally used the German word “Reichspogromnacht”, a highly curated term by historians to evoke particular sentiment. Yet KFC still ran “pogrom” as fit for their celebration algorithm. What’s next, a genocide party?
KFC used their social media platform on a day of solemn remembrance to toss out ads invoking imagery of high heat (e.g. soft cheese on crispy chicken), as if nation-wide terror attacks on the “night of broken glass” should make you crave intense fire.
Thousands of fires were set on November 9th, 1938 Source: Yad Vashem
Flames leapt into the sky across Germany when the Nazis gave a foretaste of the Holocaust in the vicious pogrom against the Jewish community. By the time the rampage had ended, thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues had been burned down or looted by thugs as police and fire brigades looked on.
[…]
More than 400 people were beaten to death, shot or driven to suicide, records show. More than 30,000 were rounded up and packed off to concentration camps.
Nearly 50 major disasters in the city of Vienna alone were caused by Nazis. Any Jewish building was viciously targeted and set on fire to overwhelm response and maximize suffering.
Here’s a map using Google I helped work on to show just the Vienna fires, after I noticed the Austrian government has exactly zero maps published anywhere showing the extent of the disaster.
Source: FHS St. Pollten
It’s very useful to look at Vienna in detail because I’ve read as many as 100 simultaneous terrorist attacks were carried out in a concentrated urban area — a total disaster for any city. Can you even imagine any modern city trying to fight more than 50 buildings set on fire?
The best you might find in terms of awareness are plaques like this one, obscurely placed on buildings in the Austrian capitol city.
Source: You tell me. Good luck finding it in Vienna.
Violent crime in a systemic “Reichspogromnacht” by Nazis with all their enablers standing by doing nothing… is NOT something any restaurant should commemorate with fried or melted anything.
Source: Yad Vashem
In conclusion, Kristallnacht ranks as one of the largest tragedies documented in history despite attempts to play dumb or cover it up (looking at you Austria). We all should know this day in history for exactly what it was: widespread organized Nazi thug violence, including arson and murder, in a prelude to genocide.
There are few worse things on any social media platform than advertisers unfiltered pushing veritable hate speech themselves, in this case encouraging customers to celebrate genocide.
Leave it to Twitter’s new management, however, to do even worse than KFC. Their CEO personally was tweeting Nazi imagery during Kristallnacht, which I am certain the KFC media robot algorithms — if not the humans — sadly ingested.
The word on the street is Elon Musk thought Nazi was spelled with a T, which is why he put it on the hood of his cars.
Elon Musk often sounds a lot like Hitler. Click to enlarge. Source: Twitter (Hitler Speech December 28, 1938)
But seriously, Tesla’s public relations with the German government thus far have its CEO telling people to ignore long-standing rules while he promotes the worst possible failures of history.
Start with the fact that the German government a long time ago offered incentives to buy electric cars, which are expected to change at the end of 2022.
Germany will extend its enviromental subsidy for electric cars [from 2020] until 2025, government and auto industry sources told Reuters on Monday, a day ahead of a German auto industry summit in Berlin. In June, Germany doubled incentives for electric cars, which comprised of a 3,000 euro (£2,693) bonus for electric…
Tesla, the low-quality and racist manufacturer led by a South African habitually caught delayed and lying about its capabilities, two years later has announced it doesn’t care about German government rules (e.g. wants people to ignore 2022 ending as expected).
To put it another way, we all should expect 2023 incentives from the German government to continue on plan… while Tesla thinks people instead should be squeezed to put orders in right now (put money onto Tesla’s dying books before year end — it’s sales in Germany have crashed) even when it knows it can’t deliver the cars.
This is social engineering of the worst kind, trying to pay people to go around long-standing German regulations linked to delivery of actual vehicles.
The incentives, or premiums, paid to buyers of electric cars will expire completely once an allocated sum of 3.4 billion euros ($3.44 billion) from the next two years’ budget is spent, according to government sources. “E-vehicles are becoming more and more popular and will no longer need government subsidies in the foreseeable future,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement.
Popular means driven on the roads, not in some fake balance sheet gamed by unethical Tesla accountants. Germans are talking reality, Tesla is begging the market to shift instead towards their selfish fantasy using the well-known Nazi deposit scheme (click to enlarge).
Source: “The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy” by Adam Tooze
Every other electric car manufacturer has delivered in Germany while Tesla falls far behind, so it’s a wonder why anyone at this point would consider buying one from such serial liars and under-performers.
That’s not all, though. Tesla also is being very political in its attempt to reverse history.
Adam Parkhomenko tweeted, “Wait. Elon endorsed Republicans AND shared a picture of a Nazi soldier? So he’s exactly what we thought he was.”
The CEO of Tesla buying Twitter to overtly push political extremism and promote Nazi messaging is exactly what many people expected.
Back in June, mind you, Politico reported that Musk was “leaning” toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, as his preferred 2024 presidential candidate. And go figure, he’s not advising Florida voters to vote for Democratic state legislators in the name of divided government. The guy isn’t just a Republican, he’s a Republican who embraces far-right memes and cozies up to neo-Nazis.
As one analyst astutely put it, Tesla’s CEO is calling for the return and rise of Nazism as his idea of “balance” in government.
Gotta balance not-nazis out with some nazis, otherwise the not-nazis will run wild with their not-nazi agenda
In other words, the Tesla CEO doesn’t like the not-Nazis of Germany going unchallenged and repeatedly seems to want to bring Nazism back.
He might as well tell people his cars kill more people in his master plan to “balance” safety on the streets with not-safety.
One of my favorite analyst paragraphs ever about Tesla being built on lies has this anecdote:
Elon Musk demanded that Tesla stop testing brakes on June 26. Doug Field, chief engineer, resigned on June 27. Is this a coincidence? Of course not—Doug Field doesn’t want to be responsible for killing people.
That should sound familiar to anyone who has studied Hitler’s leadership. And not very long ago the Tesla CEO ran into heavy criticism while presenting himself as a Hitler apologist.
He tweeted an image of Adolf Hitler that said, “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a budget.”
Despite all these unforced errors, and despite all the opportunities in the world to be an anti-Nazi while engaging with the German government, the Tesla CEO has presented himself only as open to a return to Nazism.
A penchant to promote and coddle Nazism continues unrepentant and growing at the worst times.
Take for example how the U.S. has been dealing with news of anti-semitism promoted by celebrities.
Incidents of bias and hate speech have also been rising in the U.S., including recent comments by the singer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and a social media post shared by NBA star Kyrie Irving.
What would you expect the German government to want to see next from a car company leader? Perhaps silence. Perhaps concern for safety. Certainly not Nazi memes.
Within this context of concern the Tesla CEO jumped up and…
Wait for it…
…used his giant giant bully pulpit to openly promote Nazism as if a show of approval during the reported rise in anti-semitism. And he even took such action during the memorial week of Kristallnacht.
BERLIN (AP) — Holocaust survivors from around the world are warning about the reemergence of antisemitism as they mark the 84th anniversary on Wednesday of Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass” — when Nazis terrorized Jews throughout Germany and Austria. In the campaign #ItStartedWithWords by the organization that handles claims on behalf of Jews who suffered under the Nazis, several Holocaust survivors have recounted on video how antisemitic speech led to actions that nearly saw the mass extermination of Jews in Europe in the last century.
Could a car company get any more wrong than its CEO pumping support for Nazism into Germany during the start of November, while admitting delivery failures and trying to tell people that government rules don’t matter?
To be fair, in one case the CEO “deleted the tweet after a number of users informed him that he wasn’t quoting a famous French philosopher, but a neo-Nazi pedophile.”
Or to put it another way Germany under strict occupation by militant anti-Nazis became famous for producing the best cars in the world. Coincidence? Given how bad Tesla engineering is and how much their CEO seems to always end up fiddling around with Nazism… Germany might as well look in the mirror for why allowing Tesla’s allergic reaction to law and order (“permanent improvisation“) will end badly for everyone.
As you may remember, I’ve explained before why and how Elon Musk constantly stands accused of enabling racism while doing absolutely nothing to help anti-racism (e.g. he’s racist).
Elon Musk increasingly has shown himself to be racist since illegally immigrating to America from South Africa to launder his family’s apartheid fortunes. Like many around the world, he was led to believe being racist still leads to a very successful career path in the United States.
It’s a wonder how such unsafe vehicles are allowed to operate on public roads. Uber had the good sense to terminate its entire driverless program after it killed just one pedestrian, while Tesla is so dumb it’s killing unprecedented numbers of innocent people and shows no intention to slow down. In fact, the explosion of serious safety complaints to regulators from new Tesla owners is shocking. Complaints even went up after attempting to do safety recalls, to give you some idea how bad Tesla engineers are at their job.
Tesla quickly rolled out an over-the-air update to address the issue, yet, since that recall reports of phantom or unintended braking are higher than ever. In fact, the single highest reported cases of phantom breaking analyzed by the Post occurred just one month after the recall.
Banning Tesla is the right move in any region concerned with its safety, as such a vehicle has little to no self-regulation. Such a ban will prevent easily predictable accidents and reduce serious harm.
Now we’re watching Twitter being turned into a toxic white nationalist organization, to gestate and coddle terrible ideas even worse than Tesla.
Blocking Twitter thus is the right move in any region concerned with its safety, as such a vehicle has little to no self-regulation. Such a block will prevent easily predictable accidents and reduce serious harm.
History is the right guide here. The unregulated empire of Ford (infamous for enabling racism while doing absolutely nothing to help anti-racism) very noisily bought a newspaper to spread hateful disinformation, which led directly to the rise of Nazi Germany and genocide.
Arguably Henry Ford loved to breed hate so much he created an industrial engine for it that directly influenced and aided Adolf Hitler. Source: The Dearborn Historian
For those who don’t remember Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper (The Dearborn Independent) in 1918 specifically to viciously spread his vision of hate (e.g. personally promote baseless political conspiracies) such as a bogus conspiracy about America being “infected” by Jews. Ford pushed nearly 100 issues of his garbage ideas, bound them all into four volumes imaginatively titled “The International Jew,” and distributed half a million copies via his own network of dealerships and subscribers, not to mention by Nazi leaders in Germany.
Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his “inspiration”, explaining his reason for keeping Ford’s life-size portrait next to his desk.
Steven Watts wrote that Hitler “revered” Ford, proclaiming that “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany”…
50,000 American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protested Ford’s relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State University
Henry Ford the rich automobile man thus bought a media company to breed and spread hateful disinformation that otherwise would have had far less authority. His tragic history and direct role in the rise of Nazism thus brings an obvious lesson in what to do now to avert global suffering from Elon Musk.
Banning Tesla and Twitter would immediately enable the market to produce far higher quality goods, as well as protect consumers, expanding the market for more ideas at the same time as improving it with better ones.
After all, we have seen courts clearly regulate online hate speech as equivalent to physical harassment, right?
…online campaigns of hate, threats and intimidation have no place in a civil society and enjoy no protection under our Constitution.
Or more to the point of how regulation drives innovation, after America occupied Japan and Germany to explicitly ban Ford-like fascism (remove violent cheaters and liars from the market) those countries rose rapidly to produce the highest quality and most trusted cars in the world. America shouldn’t have to contemplate what occupying itself means, in order to enforce laws against racists amassing power, but here we are.
Some have suggested to me recently that British fashioned their Operation Mincemeat in WWII after details in the book “The Millner’s Hat Mystery” (by Sir Basil Thomson, published 1937).
Thomson (1861-1939) was a solicitor who had worked for British Intelligence and in the Foreign Service.
During WWI he served as an Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police.
Such credentials definitely give a detailed and grounded approach to his writing.
The story-line of this book, a seventh title out of eight books about a particular investigator, kicks off with a couple people who duck into a barn during a storm and find a dead man.
The death is reported as murder because of a fatal wound by gunshot without any sign of the weapon. However the victim’s identity is a total mystery, challenging the protagonist.
This search for meaning in a discovered body could have been a reference for some aspects of Mincemeat. However, the operation wouldn’t have worked if identification of the victim had not been intentionally made very easy (disinformation). That’s basically the opposite of a mystery.
Thus it seems more accurate to say the methods pioneered in WWI, such as the Haversack Ruse for Beersheba, had set an overall objective of disinformation that was used successfully in WWII Operation Mincemeat. If anything, the book could have been based on intelligence from WWI, just like Mincemeat.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
