Posted on 09/18/2007 6:41:08 PM PDT by oblomov
TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's biggest phone company has apologized after a punk-rock reference to the Holocaust appeared on billboard advertisements for its cellphones.
The ads for Bell Canada's Solo discount service showed a young woman decked out in flashy punk rock attire, with a button that reads "Belsen was a gas" -- the controversial title of a song by the Sex Pistols, and a reference to Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
"It was inadvertent," Bell Canada spokesman Mark Langton said on Friday, noting that the dozen ads were taken down as soon as the company realized its mistake. "Obviously, we would never depict such an offensive slogan in our advertising."
He said Bell officials approved the ads after examining sample images that were smaller than the final billboards. The button inscription could only be read when the ads were blown up to their full size, he said.
"In the proofing and approval materials, it was impossible to see the button, so our folks missed it."
BCE apologizes "for any offense or distress that we caused," Langton said.
The billboards appeared in mass-transit systems in Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as in Toronto, which has a large Jewish community and many Holocaust survivors.
ping
Certain topics can never be ironic.
That’s a sick kind of irony.
Of course, who can blame Bell Canada though? Most of those folks have probably never heard of Bergen-Belsen.
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Yes, it was a sick kind of irony. To understand it, though, you have to have some knowledge of the punk scene in 1977. There were neo-Nazis who infiltrated the punk scene to recruit the disaffected youth who flocked there. It was a mockery of these people, and of their particularly crass attitude toward the weak, similar to the song “Kill the Poor” by the Dead Kennedys.
But you’re right, who can blame Bell Canada for apologizing? A respectable company can’t afford to offend anyone, no matter if the offense is misconstrued or not.
I dont think the sex pistols made light of genocide in the song - it was a comment on the Holocaust and hippies.
Yes, the song title was a reference to the lighthearted letters the camp guards wrote home to their families. Then the song describes how in contrast to the guards, the prisoners were lined up and shot, then cleaned of their pocket change and gold teeth.
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