Lacing up my Zyklons-offensive or not?

Great Debates
1

Acording to a story here Umbro recently came out with a new pair of athletic trainers and gave them the name “Zyklon”, keeping with the “Zy----” theme of their shoes. They changed the name after protests from Jewish groups who objected to the fact that the main gas used by the Nazis in WWII to kill Jews was Zyklon B. From the article:

I am of two minds about this. First, I completely understand being horrified by the Holocost. It was evil on a scale that boggles the mind. The victims of this genocide have every right to be sensitave about any act which trivializes the horror. We already have a growing industry of idiots and bigots who flatly deny that the holocost occured, these people don’t need any encouragement with their delusions. A substance used to murder 6 million people is certainly not the optimum name for a shoe, and to be fair, Umbro discontinued the name when it received the protests, explaining that they had chosen a “Zy—” name at random without being aware that the poison gas used in WWII had the same name.

On the other hand, the evil here was the genocide itself, the dehuminization of a group of people based on their race and religion and the attempt to murder all of them. The evil is in what the Nazis did, not the tool they used to do it. Zyklon B was an insecticide that happend to be extremly lethal when the crystals were exposed to air, making it quite efficent at killing. If the Nazis had murdered all those people by hitting them over the head with chair legs, would references to chair legs be offensive? What is more important, the act or the tools used, or are they equally culpable?

I think that Zyklon was a poor choice of names, but I don’t believe that it was intentional, as some of the sources implied in the linked article. What I can’t decide is if this is something that is worth getting all worked up over.

2

How utterly insensitve! Whille we’re at it, lets remove any and all references to radiation and nuclear devices, explosions, etc. because it’s clearly a slap in the face to the Japanese.

3

How utterly insensitve! Whille we’re at it, lets remove any and all references to radiation and nuclear devices, explosions, etc. because it’s clearly a slap in the face to the Japanese. :rolleyes:

4

Most people would not know what Zyklon was if they had not been told. I certainly didn;t.

5

Did they pronounce it like “cyclone” or like the actual gas (short o)? If the former… sheesh.

6

Some people, unfortuntely, take great pride in being as upset as possible about anything even tangentially related to the Holocaust.

7

Eh?

Zyklon was the ‘brand name’ (if you like; or at least the name of a single product) of the chemical used in the gas chambers. Radiation is a generic term. I think you’re comparing apples and oranges by suggesting that the misuse of generic non-branded terms is as offensive as specific, individual branded products.

8

Well, I’m flashing on the factoid drifting around in my head that reminds me that “Enco” means “broken car” in Chinese (Japanese?), Enco being a branch (?) of somebody, Standard Oil? So the parent company (?) had to change the name from “Enco” to something else for their China (Japanese?) franchises. Or something like that.

And of course “Nova” means “No va” or “it won’t go” in Spanish, so Chevrolet had to change that for the south-of-the-border contingent.

And I’ve read magazine articles talking about how corporations, before they’re going to introduce a new product, do random word and letter combination searches on a computer, to pick the name for the product, just to make sure they don’t come up with something embarrassing. That’s how they come up with nondescript product names like “Previa”, which could be anything–car, shampoo, granola bar, who can tell?

And ultimately what matters is the market, doesn’t it? And if consumers won’t go for the shoe named one thing, then the company will have to change the name to something more market-friendly.

So what I’m getting at is, I’m sorry for Umbro, but hey, they shoulda checked. :smiley: They should have consulted whoever it was that thought of calling the Patagonian toothfish the “Chilean sea bass”. Now there’s a spinmeister I want on my marketing team. :smiley:

Re “Zyklon”/Radiation, etc.:

Possibly a better parallel would be if someone tried to market a shoe named the “WTC 9/11”. Even if they had come to the name perfectly innocently (say it’s the Walter Thomas Corporation and the shoe line is the “9” line, and it’s the eleventh model for them), still they’d just about have to change it, if they wanted to retain market share.

9

Sorry, this is a myth. Cite (Snopes).

10

Dave, would you have asked this question if Umbro had used a swastika-based logo for this line of shoes?

My point here is not to try and paint you as a closet anti-Semite, but to point out a weakness in your argument. If using a swastika for a sneaker logo is unacceptable because of its ties with Nazism and the Holocaust, then it shouldn’t be surprising that the use (intentional or not) of the brand name of insecticide used to gas the Jews would raise objections as well.

I would have found it totally unacceptable if had Umbro had said “It’s the evils the Nazis did, not the symbol they did it under” in responding to objections of a swastika logo, and so I think “it’s the evils, not the tools” is likewise an unsatisfactory argument against the objections. These kind of philosophical yardsticks are completely useless in judging real human actions.

Objecting and taking action on those objections in and of itself is not an action to be criticized. It’s why those people are objection and what they hope to accomplish with their actions that provides the basis for moral or ethical criticism. I don’t see what’s so wrong about being upset over the Holocaust, myself. It depends on whether you’re saying “This is reminding us of a horrible event in a way that’s unacceptable” or “You’re all just a bunch of closet anti-Semites and this proves it”.

11

Yeah, the reactionary fuckers! And don’t get me started about all the Nagasaki whiners! And the WTC bombing crybabies!

sheesh.

12

DDG, I had thought your post was tongue-in-cheek due to the “nova” reference (and the debunking that fluidruid linked to). And to my knowledge no one’s marketing 9/11 clothing this comes close enough to bug me, even though it seems his biggest crime is having a brother that’s an a-hole.

I find “Zyklons” to be kinda offensive, although that’s mostly because I knew what Zyklon B was (including the European skinhead band) prior to hearing about this shoe debate. I think the great debate is- where do you draw the line?

13

Well, is there another meaning to “Zyklon”? Or is it purely the name of a brand of gas used in the concentration camps?

14

Zyklon is German for ‘cyclone’, but I imagine the most common use outside Germany for the word is to refer to the cyanide gas produced by the German firms Degesch and Tesch/Stabenow under license from IG Farben. Although also used as a pesticide, the firms’ directors were prosecuted as the sheer quantity produced could not have been for purely pest-control purposes.

15

I’ll admit, my example was a bit lacking, but I think Dr. Samuels statement, (“outrageous misuse of the Holocaust is an insult to its victims and survivors”) is exactly what Dr. Samuels did. By making a statement that Holocaust survivors should feel insulted for a shoes name is more insulting to me. I would feel embarrassed to have this individual speaking for me if I belonged to this group.

“The apology came after Dr Shimon Samuels, of international human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said in a letter to Umbro that its “outrageous misuse of the Holocaust is an insult to its victims and survivors”.”
“Nick Crook, from Umbro, said: “We regret that there are people who are offended by the name.””

Damn, I love that statement. We regret that there are people that so easily get offended by unintentional crap that has no significance. He didn’t say that he regretted offending anyone.

16

But…but…but…

We learned it in CIVICS class!

aw dang

really

17

Maybe I know more about the Holocaust than most, but seeing a sneaker with the word “Zyklon” on it would creep me out. Lots of other words would have the same effect: “Phosgene”, “Bhopal”, “My Lai”, “Bergen-Belsen”. It seems to me that before lauching a new product any company with half a brain would do a little research. Gee, all they had to do was type “Zyklon” into Google to find several hundred references to gassing in the camps. Thirty seconds work by a low-level flunky could have saved them a major PR problem.

Unless they knew what the name meant and didn’t care … in which case Dr. Samuels is spot on … .

18

Bless you, Rug Burn. Now I know what to think. Whew–I’m so relieved. I was all ready to let other people decide for themselves what was or was not significant to them.

19

I would not, because I would find swastika shoes offensive, because the swastika was the symbol the Nazis used to identify themselves. Swastika means Nazi, to this day. Zyklon was just a product the Nazis used in the commission of unspeakable acts. It could just as easily have been Mustard gas or Cyanide pills or Chlorine gas. Zyklon B happened to be cheap, available and effective. Nazis didn’t call themselves “Zyklons” or adopt Zyklon as the official insecticide of the Nazi party or anything else, they just used it. Thus, my question, stated more planely later on in the thread: Where do you draw the line? Swastika shoes- definitely offensive. Zyklon shoes-I can see the arguement, but it it persuasive?

20

Its persuasive to me. If I had seen these shoes, I would immediately assume that they were named that deliberately to appeal to neo-nazis, and I would assume that anyone wearing them is one.