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.
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.
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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.
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.
Pulling back, this Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (LpB) map suggests there were over 1,200 other areas under attack in Germany that one night.
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.
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.