A follow-up to an item I posted earlier this week while sitting in for the Instapundit. As MSNBC (of all places) notes, “Daimler AG apologized Thursday for using an image of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara during a promotional presentation for Mercedes-Benz cars:”
The image briefly appeared Tuesday during a presentation by Dieter Zetsche, head of Daimler’s Mercedes unit, at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It reproduced a famous Alberto Korda photo of Guevara, the Argentine communist who spearheaded the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in Cuba. The photo became a symbol of communist revolutionary movements during the 1960s and ’70s.
But in place of the star that adorns Guevara’s beret in the original, Mercedes affixed its corporate logo.
Activists reacted with horror to the appropriation of Guevara, whom many political conservatives and Cuban-Americans consider a mass murderer who helped subjugate Cuba.
“Mercedes-Benz Uses Communist Madman Che Guevara to Sell Luxury Cars,” said the headline on a blog post from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative political organization in Washington.
“Che Guevara, not to put too fine a point on it, was a psychopath whose sadistic lust for blood was not easily quenched. He killed for pleasure,” said the post, written by Heritage Vice President Mike Gonzalez.
In a statement Thursday to msnbc.com, Daimler said the image was just “one of many images and videos in the presentation,” which it said was intended to represent “the revolution in automobility enabled by new technologies, in particular those associated with connectivity.”
“Daimler was not condoning the life or actions of this historical figure or the political philosophy he espoused,” the company said, adding: “We sincerely apologize to those who took offense.”
Daimler’s statement was welcomed by Ernesto Suarez, who organized an online petition calling for Mercedes-Benz to apologize for using the image of a man the petition called “a racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and tyrannical killer who admitted in his own writing to his endless blood thirst.”
“I’m very satisfied with the reaction from Mercedes-Benz,” Suarez, a Cuban-American who lives in Kansas City, Mo., told msnbc.com Thursday evening. “I believe that they have done the right thing.
“The victory, if there is one, is not mine, but belongs to the descendants of [Guevara's] victims [and] the survivors, to common sense and to civility,” he said.
As I said at Instapundit, The Baader Meinhof Complex rolls on.
(Now if we could just convince Greenpeace not to use stormtroopers when protesting Volkswagen.)
Related: Back in late 2008, Nick Gillespie of Reason looked at the ubiquity of Killer Chic:
“We sincerely apologize to those who took offense.”
As for the rest of you who *didn’t* take offense: hey, pretty cool, huh?
Sheesh, if it weren’t for Godwin’s Law these swells would be talking about buying a Benz as “the final solution” to your auto-purchasing needs.
I assume this probable puts the kabosh on any 2012 Diego Rivera-inspired Mercedes Benz ad campaign. But a lot of the OWS trust fund crowd does have parent at or near the 1 percent, so who knows?
I am still waiting for Volkswagen to say something about the “Green Police” ad for Audi a few years back that conjured up memories of the SS and Stasi. Until then I will not consider any of their offerings for purchase.