I was going to say it would be like refusing to buy a Toyota because of Pearl Harbor. Not that there aren’t people who do just that, of course.
I can see two arguments for avoiding VWs.
(1) It’s tainted money. You’re getting the benefit of the company’s unethicality, in that if it hadn’t collaberated with nazis early on, it would never be producing cars now, and you don’t want to get the benefit of that.
(2) It’s a boycott. That is, you hope that enough people doing it will discourage other companies from behaving unethically in fear that they’ll be boycotted for 50 years too.
But on the other hand, the company isn’t going away. Everyone involved now is as blameless as they can be. At some point people have to let it drop.
Can’t you? I seem to recall that it was Hitler’s distribution of the “people’s car” that made it so popular in Germany, which of course led to its eventual popularity in America.
I’ve never seen a VW boycott. A boycott is where someone goes out and galvanizes the public to stop patronizing a business. What I have seen is individual Jews deciding not to patronize Volkswagen because of that company’s history. Am I responsible for the welfare of the workers of Volkswagen? Am I obligated to buy their product? I must say that if we were all truly obligated to all low-level workers in the world to the extent that people will pile on someone for choosing not to patronize a certain company, we’d go broke trying to put food on everyone’s table. I choose not to buy Volkswagen products because of its history, just like I choose not to buy diet cola because of its disgusting taste, or like I choose not to buy tickets to auto racing events because the sport doesn’t interest me.
Anyway, I think of it this way: although I don’t have direct ancestors that I know of who were victims of the Holocaust, if I did, would they be happy to come back and see me driving Hitler’s Aryan “People’s Car”? Would my friends’ ancestors be happy to come back and see me driving it? I personally think they wouldn’t, and that I would shame them by doing so. You may disagree. If you do, go ahead and buy a Volkswagen. My choice is not to patronize this company. This choice is not going to bankrupt VW any time soon. You may choose to patronize the company, because you like their cars. Go right ahead.
The way I understand it, the issue is not that VW was complicit with the Nazi regime, it’s that VW was born out of the Nazi regime. Volkswagen is German for “people’s car”, a Hitler-designed (IIRC) machine for all Aryans.
Yes. But we (Jews who decide not to buy Volkswagen products) are not concerned about supporting companies with ties to oppressive regimes; we just don’t want to support Volkswagen because of its roots in a particular oppressive regime. The Nazis killed six million of my people, and I’m not allowed to not buy their car? (I’m not boycotting them, by the way, I’m just choosing not to give them my money; I don’t go around telling other people not to buy their car, I don’t give a damn what other people drive.) I’m sure lots of people choose not to purchase VWs because they don’t like the way the cars look, or because they don’t like the price, or because they prefer (for example) Chevrolet. Are we going to start big discussions about whether it’s logical for them to not buy VWs and call them oversensitive and say “Well, why don’t you decide not to buy Ford Tauruses instead, because they’re uglier!”? My point is this: We’re talking about people who individually make decisions not to patronize a certain company. We’re not talking about a boycott, which is where people go out and galvanize the public to destroy a company financially. Lots of people–each and every one of you included–make similar decisions (not to patronize certain companies) every single day, for one reason or another. I’m not about to pit (or even GD) any one of you for any of those. I should hope I can expect the same decency from all of you.
That’s the idea. They’re doing great without my money, so I don’t feel the least bad about not giving it to them.
No, we don’t. I’m not going to forget the six million of my people (a little more than two Chicagos, or the current Jewish population of Israel) who died, ever. I’ve gone to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and had myself a good cry, and I plan to do it again and again as often as is feasible, because we can never forget what happened. We can’t forget other injustices laid upon people, either, but it so happens that this particular one strikes a chord in my heart because it aimed to wipe out my people and, indeed, made significant gains toward that end. Because of my heritage, I’m personally not comfortable with supporting a company which had a stake in that. That’s my decision. You can go ahead and not buy certain bananas because you don’t want to support Castro, or not buy this or that for whatever reason you like. I choose not to buy this product. You can go ahead and buy a VW if you want to; I’m not going to think any differently of you or call you a Nazi supporter. I just don’t feel comfortable buying that product, so I don’t buy it.
“Last time I was that close to a Japanese machine, it was shooting at me.” - Red Foreman
Red Foreman was in WWII? As a T7S fan, I totally missed this.
It was a throwaway gag in the first episode, during a discussion of then-novel Japanese imported cars. I don’t think they’ve made a big deal about it, but if you assume Red was 51 or 52 in 1978, he’s just barely old enough to have seen action in the Pacific.
Well, maybe 53 or 54.
Note that CR (and others) has noted a large drop in quality and reliability in the VW line in the last few years.
My grandparents, who are Chinese and saw some of the worst atrocities committed by the Japanese during WWII, still refuse to buy Japanese products. They know it’s illogical, but they just can’t purchase anything made by the Japanese. Since its based on emotional and psychological trauma caused by the war, I can’t really blame them.
Interesting that VW is still in the news! Well, for one thing, Volkswagen Werke got its start via a scam. Hitler had Dr. Ferdinand Porshe design the original VW “beetle” …and Porshe actually stole the design from the Czech firm Skoda! The german people were shown the car (prototypes were driven around germany, with der Fuhrer ridng in them. The deal was this: you had to place a $300 deposit to secure your car. When the firm had collected sufficient capital, a factory would be built, workers hired, and VW would be in production, Then, you would get your car!
Only it didn’t work out this way-the german government used the funds collected to build tanks…and then 1939 rolled around and WWII came!
VW emerged from the war with little more than the original plans. they did make the cars…I don’t know if the original depositors got their cars!
My father is a conservative Jew, and he’s a Ford Man, despite the anti-Semitic beliefs of the company’s founder. He owned a VW Bus in the early 1960s. I’ve owned two Volkswagens with no protest from him or those on the “Jewish side” of my family.
But where does it end? I understand it’s psychological and not logical but shouldn’t we (in general) avoid Chinese made anything due to various atrocities caused by the Chinese government? Or avoid Russian err, whatever Russians make over it’s murder of millions of other Russians?
Does this mean the middle east should avoid US-made products over the Iraq war?
With the Japanese, I have spoken to people who say it will end on their part when the Japanese government acknowledges they were mistreated as PoWs and apologizes.
I’d say it’s debatable whether that’s “perfectly rational”. Assuming we’re talking about a perfectly respectable company, I don’t see the logic in punishing the company in order to indirectly try to get at a particular stockholder, when it isn’t up to the company whether that person owns the stock. Why should they be punished for something that’s out of their control?
No it’s not. The purpose of a boycott is to affect a company that engages in evil practices, to either try to leverage them to change their practices, or put them out of business. If the company isn’t doing anything wrong, boycotting is stupid.
You’re wrong. Read kellner’s post #15.
You’re right as far as I know, though there may have been some. It strikes me as a distinction without a difference in this case.
I’d be pretty fucking stupid if I was actually arguing this, wouldn’t I? You ARE responsible when you take an action that you know will harm innocent people. You’re hurting them only marginally, but you’re still acting irrationally. This is not the same as when you opt not to buy a company’s products because you don’t like the product. I do plenty of that too. That’s a decision based on your personal tastes. It’s rational not to buy something you don’t want to buy. It’s not rational to boycott a company for something done by people no longer involved with it in any way.
Blowero and Marley23:
So your belief is that, so long as a company has stopped engaging in whatever unethical practice it was engaging in, it should not be subject to shunning from customers?
Would it be different if the company had only stopped recently, say last year? Is it a matter of what percentage of present employees were there during the unethical actions?
If we think of a company as a collection of people (rather than an ethical agent itself), can we ever punish a company? (Since such punishment will always affect more people than were directly responsible for the crime)
I don't mean those as rhetorical questions. I don't have a strong intuitions either way. In the example of VW, I generally agree with you guys that a boycott isn't a sensible action (not sure whether that makes it illogical, but that's neither here not there). But I think the debate has transcended the example.ZD: *So your belief is that, so long as a company has stopped engaging in whatever unethical practice it was engaging in, it should not be subject to shunning from customers? *
Well, isn’t that kind of the point of shunning it in the first place? In order to pressure it to stop engaging in unethical practices?
If we just want to shun a company that isn’t doing anything wrong in order to vent our resentment for wrong actions that it stopped doing long ago or never did in the first place, as in fetus’s case, that’s our right, of course. In fetus’s case, it sounds as though s/he’s still mad at the Nazis (with perfect justice) and is taking it out on Volkswagen as an expression of irrational visceral resentment. There’s no logical reason to single out Volkswagen rather than any of the other companies that had ties to the early Nazi regime, such as some American automakers:
Or perhaps IBM for its connections with data processing in Holocaust concentration camps:
Again, if anybody wants to arbitrarily pick Volkswagen or any other individual company to be shunned as a scapegoat for their resentment of the Nazis, that’s their business, and I wouldn’t argue with them. But for people who refuse to patronize unethical companies as a matter of principle and logic—because they want to use their consumer decisions to influence companies toward more ethical behavior—it obviously makes no sense to go on shunning a company that has stopped its involvement in unethical activities.
Indeed, it would be counterproductive: if a company can’t get its lost business back by changing the behavior that its former customers are objecting to, what incentive are they providing for the company to change?
I’m going to agree with Kimstu. If your purpose is revenge instead of stopping the company from behaving unethically, then I guess it’s okay to press on, but once you are confident that the company is behaving ethically, I don’t see why it should be shunned.
I don’t think it’s a question of time. Whether or not the people who were responsible for the unethical actions are still present or in a position to profit from them is more important. Again, your purpose in avoiding the company is important, and your confidence that the company is no longer committing misdeeds or profiting from them is, too.
A company is both, and I guess the key question is what you want to accomplish. I know that the anti-sweatshop movement, for example, is moving away from boycotts: their ultimately goal is to help people they feel are being taken advantage of, so boycotting - which, if it is successful in penalizing companies that are taking advantage of their workers, might cause the company to fire those workers, thus leaving them even worse off - is a bad idea.
I can clearly remember, as a child, being at an adult party where one of my parents’ friends was talking with a group of people and I was seated nearby. I knew that he had been a POW in WWII and had suffered badly at the hands of the Japanese (maybe I had been forewarned ??). Someone mentioned a Japanese manufacturer and he instantly stated that no Japanese made product would ever enter his house. His conviction was so absolute that I can remember looking up at him and “understanding” how he felt.
It would be about as logical for blacks in the western hemisphere to avoid sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Terrible things happened a long time ago and there comes a point where you just need to let it go. For the most part we’ve punished those responsible, or they died, and there’s no need to keep punishing people who are innocent.
Marc