Honestly I don’t equate stripped shirts with concentration camps at all.
Horizontal ones are retro jail uniforms (still used in some places), and vertical ones are referee uniforms.
It’s funny how things seem obvious to some people, but are oblivious to others. I’ve learned this working with people 15 years younger than me and their cluelessness to what used to be popular cultural references.
I know just the guy.
I felt so incredibly old the day I made a “Where’s the Beef?” reference when I was working in a restaurant and absolutely no one got it, not just didn’t think it was funny, but totally didn’t even know the reference, and I realized it was because I was surrounded by people who weren’t old enough to have heard the commercials.
I have a little brother that is 16 and a while back while he was getting up from laying on the ground to look under my sink, I made an “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” reference. It’s incredibly tough to explain the humor in that one to someone who wasn’t around back then. “Um, why was a commercial about an elderly lady falling down and needing assistance funny?” Then I seemed not only hopelessly outdated, but also sort of an a-hole.
~ sigh ~ you used my real name!
Executive: Kids still like playing cops and robbers, right? Let’s sell some pajamas with an “old-timey law enforcement” look to them. Use these photos for reference.
Designer: You mean pajamas that look like the cop’s outfit or like the robber’s?
Executive: DON’T BORE ME WITH THE DETAILS.
Probably not (what possible motivation would they have?) but I don’t think the people who saw it that way were overreacting. It’s pretty clear that the shirt looks a lot more like the outfit on the right than the one on the left.
Spain was officially not involved in WWII – I think the term is “non belligerent” – but the country provided a lot of support to Germany during that war. In fact, Spain’s government was sympathetic to both Hitler and Mussolini. These two Holocaust-specific incidences, one right after the other, are starting to smell like something more than honest mistakes. Does anyone know the politics of the founder/owner of the company?
As someone from the same autonomy as the founder of Zara, I can tell you one thing. We know absolutely nothing about Jewish people. They are just not a thing in here (the inquisition might be responsible for it, it’s a bit of an unique situation).
Since there’s no Jewish person in here to tell us about it, specially not in media (to raise awareness), and most images we see about the conflict are in black-and-white or sepia…well, this is no conspiracy, it’s mere ignorance. For the same reason, anti-semitic feelings are very rare around here. The unwashed masses just don’t even remember they exist (and they aren’t mentioned in media other than in Hollywood films). We have tons of racism against blacks, moors and Chinese, though, so we are no saints. But you can attribute any antisemitism to ignorance pretty safely, when it comes to Spaniards.
Also, no one supported Germany in here other than Franco and his cronies, really. We had our own stuff to take care of at the time.
(also, never ask for kosher food here, you’ll most likely get something boiled. even pork)
(For the record, I do know about Jewish people, their customs, kosher cooking and their religion I find quite interesting to read about. I also consider racism a waste of energy, but I am quite a rare case, I learned it all from the internets and friends from other countries)
Well played. That’s just crazy enough to make sense.
You mean this?:
http://surmise.blogspot.com/2006/11/wal-mart-is-still-selling-nazi-ss.html
(and the answer is “yes”)
This argument would be more compelling if Zara was some small, locally-driven Spanish clothier, whose products were 100% designed and approved by Spanish bumpkins, but the reality is that Zara is sophisticated multinational enterprise with almost €14 billion in revenue.
And even if your comments are accurate when discussing most Spaniards/Catalans/autonomies, then I’m shocked at how bad the education system must be. I grew up in a place with virtually no Jews (and certainly no history of Jews, let alone the source of a distinct Jewish lineage in the Sephardi), but even in my 100% secular education we covered the holocaust quite extensively.
Funny, it doesn’t look like a Hugo Boss design.
Excuse the verbose, but here goes, since you make some valid points that I can’t explain in less words.
The educative system here is notoriously broken, actually. They tried to patch it a few times, but it was never good. The way I experienced things, we jumped from the romans to the industrial revolution and nothing in-between or after (due to educative reforms in the way). We didn’t even touch WWII, only local events. I am mostly sure older kids and younger kids did, but the way my peers did was a spectacular failure in terms of history and geography (outdated data in textbooks and such). We discovered just recently that a famous cup d’etat was a fraud, after believing it happened for the good half of a century.
Censorship and false information is commonplace here, even if we don’t have the fame of it like other places do. Even if English is a mandatory school subject, no one understands a word of English unless it’s people explicitly planning to leave the country in the first place or have relatives that require it, so most people is confined into tight Spanish-only (maybe with a latin-american mixed in, due to the language) circles and sites, and very few pursue anything out of there. So they can’t really go and educate themselves. Sites like Google and Youtube also have defaults to spanish-only sites and recommendations, and most people can’t be bothered to activate “show sites from any country”. Other sites force you into exclusive, dumber pages by geolocation, and several things are blocked, including popular viral stuff. There are also laws that facilitate censorship of spanish sites. I think they got recently covered in this site, actually.
It’s like a dumb version of China censorship, just lazier to the point of being barely noticeable if you get your news from outside sites like I do. TV is still relevant here, too, and it reeks of political meddling. International news are barely discussed in favor of local scandals that keep popping up and are given uneven and contradictory coverages, all biased based on the TV station and who the editors are in bed with. But the language barrier makes it harder to kill, and older people still has that “soccer team” mentality with their TV channel of choice.
This is not, of course, exclusive to this country. But it has that “half-assed Spanish quality” to it, so it’s all weird and crude like that.
Although, maybe, if we want to think of secret agendas, maybe it’s intentional they get so little coverage. Racism in form of exclusion? Like, pretty much hiding their existence? Those in positions of power are of highly religious upbringing, and it was religious nuts who tortured and converted or kicked those of Jewish faith out of the country, after all. I don’t think it’s the case (I hope not), but could be an explanation.
And about Zara, it was a locally-driven Spanish clothier until not that long ago. Given how it used to operate, the product might have been designed by a French couture (for the sake of example, I seriously doubt that tacky thing came from anyone with competence), but approved by Spanish bumpkins. I am not 100% sure on this though, so take it with a grain of salt. But I’d rather blame it on the distinct lack of information about the subject at hand. Seems the most logical to me being from here, but I can understand how the concept is completely nuts to outsiders. It was shocking enough for me, that I can say.
How do you figure? Sheriff’s badges are 5-pointed stars - see the picture @Brainspore posts later in this thread.
Thanks for the info.
I spent about three months on the Iberian peninsula in 2001-02 (getting euros back from street vendors just after New Year’s fireworks was interesting), and I can understand some of what you’re saying: it was interesting to see just how much more English was spoken in Portugal, though the usual reason I heard was that they are a small country and can’t/don’t dub their TV shows, and not because of great differences in the education systems.
But even then I remember seeing a fair bit of information about Jews (both under the Moors and their expulsion around the Inquisition) at places like the Alhambra and the Aljaferia, as well as in museums, so it’s surprising to hear that their history in Spain isn’t very well known amongst Spaniards.
Ha, that’s what you think!
I’m thinking of John Rabe. Wikipedia entry
Sheriff badges can be either five or six-pointed. Seems like most modern ones are six.
The whole problem could have been avoided just by printing “sheriff” on the shirt. Or just handing out a sticker - that way could choose whether they wanted to play cops and robbers or Jews and Nazis.
Thank you for your reply. I don’t know whether to be skeptical or horrified that an entire European country has not been taught about WWII, but it’s good to get the viewpoint from an actual Spanish citizen.
As an aside, I’m (partly) descended from those who escaped the Inquisition. You might be interested to know that the Spanish government has recently decided to allow repatriation to anyone whose Sephardic ancestors had to flee the country due to the Alhambra Decree of 1492 and now wishes to regain Spanish citizenship (and the European passport that comes with it).
Astonishingly, the Alhambra Decree was not officially revoked until 1968.
Thanks again for your continued involvement in this thread. It’s very enlightening.
