There are much better examples that aren’t 80 years apart
I’m all for the cynicism, but supposedly that BMW badge is a fake.
But for real, don’t let me dampen the corpo snark. Just thought some of you may like to know.
I think the lesson we’ve all just recently learned is that you’d rather see them do pride in a cynical attempt to win our dollars than not see it.
This isn’t a good example. These two images were 80 years apart, and the people running the company under Nazi rule are long dead. May as well be a different company at that point. A much better example is the exact same company in the exact same year putting Pride flags all over their socials in western countries, while refusing to put Pride flags on any of their non-western socials because they don’t want to offend the countries that gleefully imprison and execute LGBTQ+ people.
Even better example would be the day after Pride month when all the Pride stuff suddenly disappears from every one of those stores.
Though I’d be willing to bet real money that those companies won’t be putting any pride flags up this year or any other year that Trump is President.
Also BMW was a major sponsor if NSDAP when the Communists were considering nationalizing private wealth.
All the hate and cynicism directed at Bavarian Motor Works can never be enough.
the original swasticar
i think they are a reasonable indicator. if spineless corporation want to market to queer audiences, it means it is deem OK to be queer, however, consider banks prode campaigns to be a canary in a coalmine, when they are gone it’s time to worry and probably get out.
While it’s not wrong to be cynical about it, this isn’t exactly the right reason. The Nazis would just take over companies and install new leadership if they were inadequately supportive.
It’s not even “if I don’t do it, someone else will, so I may as well do it”. A lot of people did refuse to do it and were arrested or fired.
Beyond that, everyone involved in the decision is dead now. They could have all been Nazis and that would have little bearing on if the people who work there now were.The reason to be cynical is because companies can’t care about things, so if they say they do it’s a lie.
People inside the company might care, and might find a way to get the company to do something good, but that’s a person finding a way to use the company for good, not the company caring or being good.Unlike the Nazis, no one is forcing them to embrace pride. They do it because they think it’s a profitable demographic.
They do it because they think it’s a profitable demographic.
Maybe it’s just liberalism Stockholm syndrome talking, but I find it somehow comforting that communicating support for LGBT+ issues is considered a good business move.
It’s an important bell-weather. Hate might be increasingly popular, but it’s still not a good way to make money.
So yeah, rainbow capitalism is crass and self serving and shallow. But it also means the global economic elite aren’t quite ready embrace full on queer killing Nazis just yet.
It’s precisely a good bell-weather! It means that the cold money monsters think gay people and their supporters have more money, and hate doesn’t have the power to punish them. It also means that good people who work for the company feel safe saying “donating resources to LGBT teen suicide prevention would be great… Advertising?” And the money monsters don’t disagree, and the bad people don’t have enough sway to squash it.
Rainbow capitalism is a parasite that feeds on social tolerance. It’s gross that it showed up, but it couldn’t unless society was in an at least moderately healthy place.
Just don’t fall into the trap of personifying the companies that do many people do.
The family that still owns large parts of BMW had multiple members in the NSDAP and other Nazi organisations. They made a fortune with selling military equipment to fuel world war 2 and they kept most of that fortune after the war.
They were absolutely deliberate in what they did and the only thing that coerced them was their greed.
Oh, I’m not defending BMW or any company in specific regarding Nazism. I’m saying the actions and beliefs of dead people who used to run the company are the wrong reasons for cynicism, particularly in the context of a violent and coercive regime.
A company doesn’t have opinions so it can’t support anything, good or evil. It makes as much sense to be cynical of “posters” because there have also been evil posters.on the other hand, bmw didn’t really exist outside germany at that time, like most companies pre-globalization. if the choice was between “collaborate” and “stop existing” it becomes murkier.
I assume it is by ignorance of the history, but you should be very careful not to make apologies for Nazi collaborators unless you know for sure that they were coerced. BMW and the Quandts went way beyond what would be explicable by coercion. The reason why you didnt hear more of it is because the UK and US protected Quandt like they protected many other Nazis in order to quickly build up a right wing bulwark against the “communist threat” in Europe. Claiming to have been coerced is the typical excuse and repeating this narrative is helping fascists and their allies to revision history.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quandt_(Familie)
spoiler
Nach der nationalsozialistischen Machtübernahme und anfänglichen Schwierigkeiten im Verhältnis zu den neuen Machthabern (der NSDAP nahestehende Teile des Vorstands der AFA versuchten 1933 ohne Erfolg, Günther Quandt zu stürzen) konnte Quandt seine Stellung innerhalb der deutschen Industrielandschaft festigen. 1937 wurde er zum Wehrwirtschaftsführer ernannt. Die Akkumulatoren der AFA fanden unter anderem in U-Booten und Raketen Verwendung, die Textilbetriebe lieferten – wie schon im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik – Uniformen und Decken für die Wehrmacht. Andere Quandt’sche Unternehmen stellten Waffen und Munition her.
Vom NS-Staat enteignete Konkurrenzunternehmen jüdischer Eigentümer konnten von Quandt günstig übernommen werden.
Bekannt ist in diesem Zusammenhang der Fall der Batterienfabrik Société Anonyme des Accumulateurs Tudor des Luxemburger Unternehmers Léon Laval in Florival bei Wavre. Quandt war bestrebt, dieses Werk der AFA einzuverleiben. Nach der Eroberung Luxemburgs und Belgiens durch die deutschen Besatzer versuchte Quandt mit Unterstützung der Gestapo, Laval durch Verhöre zu zwingen, seine Aktien an Quandt zu verkaufen. Nach seiner standhaften Weigerung wurde Laval zunächst in Luxemburg, dann in Deutschland bis Kriegsende inhaftiert.[3]
deepl:
After the National Socialist takeover and initial difficulties in his relationship with the new rulers (parts of the AFA Board of Directors close to the NSDAP tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Günther Quandt in 1933), Quandt was able to consolidate his position within the German industrial landscape. In 1937, he was appointed military economic leader. AFA’s accumulators were used in submarines and rockets, among other things, and the textile companies supplied uniforms and blankets for the Wehrmacht, as they had done during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Other Quandt companies manufactured weapons and ammunition.
Competing companies of Jewish owners expropriated by the Nazi state were taken over by Quandt at favorable terms.
The case of the Société Anonyme des Accumulateurs Tudor battery factory owned by the Luxembourg entrepreneur Léon Laval in Florival near Wavre is well known in this context. Quandt endeavored to incorporate this factory into the AFA. After the conquest of Luxembourg and Belgium by the German occupying forces, Quandt, with the support of the Gestapo, tried to force Laval to sell his shares to Quandt through interrogation. After his steadfast refusal, Laval was first imprisoned in Luxembourg, then in Germany until the end of the war.[3]
spoiler
Schon wenige Wochen nach der Kapitulation im Mai 1945 hatte die AFA als eines der ersten Unternehmen eine Betriebsgenehmigung der britischen Besatzungsmacht bekommen. 1946 wurde Günther Quandt auf Anordnung der US-Militärregierung verhaftet und blieb zwei Jahre interniert. Belastende Dokumente über Günther Quandts Aktivitäten im Dritten Reich hielten die Briten allerdings zurück und leiteten sie nicht an die amerikanische Anklagebehörde weiter. Bei den Nürnberger Kriegsverbrecherprozessen wurde deshalb trotz anfänglicher Ermittlungen keine Anklage gegen ihn erhoben. Im Rahmen der Entnazifizierung musste sich Quandt vor einer Starnberger Spruchkammer unter anderem wegen seiner Rolle bei der Enteignung Léon Lavals verantworten. Laval hatte die Lagerhaft überlebt und trat als Nebenkläger im Verfahren auf. Trotz seiner Verstrickung in die Verbrechen des Dritten Reichs endete das Verfahren 1948 mit einer Einstufung Quandts als „Mitläufer“. Die Rolle von Quandts Rüstungsunternehmen während des Krieges und der Einsatz von Zwangsarbeitern wurden nie Bestandteil eines Verfahrens gegen ihn. Quandt selbst erklärte, er sei „von der nationalsozialistischen Regierung jahrelang auf das Schwerste verfolgt worden“, was nach Aussage des Quandt-Biographen Rüdiger Jungbluth als absurd anzusehen ist; das Spruchkammerverfahren selbst sei eine „Farce“ gewesen.[1]
Just a few weeks after the capitulation in May 1945, AFA was one of the first companies to receive an operating license from the British occupying power. In 1946, Günther Quandt was arrested by order of the US military government and interned for two years. However, the British withheld incriminating documents about Günther Quandt’s activities in the Third Reich and did not pass them on to the American prosecution authorities. As a result, no charges were brought against him at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, despite initial investigations. As part of the denazification process, Quandt had to stand trial before a Starnberg tribunal for his role in the expropriation of Léon Laval, among other things. Laval had survived imprisonment in the camp and appeared as a joint plaintiff in the proceedings. Despite his involvement in the crimes of the Third Reich, the trial ended in 1948 with Quandt being classified as a “fellow traveler”. The role of Quandt’s armaments company during the war and the use of forced laborers never became part of the proceedings against him. Quandt himself declared that he had been “persecuted by the National Socialist government for years in the most severe manner”, which, according to Quandt biographer Rüdiger Jungbluth, must be regarded as absurd; the Spruchkammer proceedings themselves were a “farce”[1].
no i know. i was generalizing. bmw in particular is not easily defended.
if the choice was between “collaborate” and “stop existing” it becomes murkier.
No it doesn’t. We already established how much of a defense ‘just following orders’ allows, and that’s exactly as much defense these companies deserve: none.
You’re confusing a personal and moral decision with an economic one.
A company, the legal entity, is not a person (despite what some people say) and it can’t make any moral decisions. For a company the decision between “collaborate” and “stop existing” isn’t murky nor is it a hard one. Corporations exist to continue operating and to continue making money. They are machines built to do that one thing.
Now the people who run the company, are different. They are humans and they are capable of making moral decisions.
BMW is also an interesting example because they didn’t really make cars before hand. They made one model which was more or less of a failure until they were nationalized by the Nazi party to make aircraft engines and other vehicles. So the people who owned it did decide to jump ship when the company was taken over.
You’re confusing a personal and moral decision with an economic one.
Now the people who run the company, are different. They are humans and they are capable of making moral decisions.
I’m not confusing them, I’m refusing to accept a moral dodge that a corporation (which is just a bunch of people hiding behind a legal piece of paper) and the people making the decision should be held to different standards.
It’s like saying that a leadership position can’t commit crimes, but the person elected to that position can. The person is still making the call, but it’s somehow different because reasons.
i mean i agree, and i’m not saying that the owner family should be absolved for supporting the nazis, but companies are not people and in a capitalist world, especially in a country where “useless eaters” are vilified like in nazi germany, shutting down and thereby putting hundreds of thousands of workers out of a job would have huge consequences for the own population no matter the allegiance of a particular company.
however, it is also true that bmw in particular was very happy to collaborate and employed actual slave labor from concentration camps so that point is eroded somewhat…
however, it is also true that bmw employed actual slave labor from concentration camps so that point is eroded somewhat…
That’s kinda my point. This isn’t ‘oh no, we have to collaborate or die’, this is ‘oh, we have to collaborate? Cool, fuck those subhuman rats’.
Nazi collaboration companies killed people and contributed to countless human rights violations. Being ‘forced’ to collaborate is just a convenient excuse to wave away their crimes and how some of the people behind the companies were spared by justice because capital is convenient to capture.
yeah it was a bad decision to generalize on my part.
BMW didn’t exactly need to be forced, they were directly involved in the Holocaust.
It’s not even “if I don’t do it, someone else will, so I may as well do it”.
Or in BMWs case
“I’ll do it”.
Fair. Not intending to convey sympathy for companies and the people in them that supported Nazism, to be clear.
They’re not people that can have opinions to flip-flop. They’re legal fictions made of people who are now dead.
Also see the recent “anti-DEI” backlash.
I tried to get hired at an “anti-DEI” company pre-pandemic, for an intern position. They asked my brother if I had “unexplainable” fits of rage that would lead to destroyed equipment and bitten coworkers. Then in the second round they asked if I knew how much is 2 + 2, in a joking manner. Finally they instead tried to hire those who actually cheated the entry tests (they had to be let go), they had the best luck with reeducating a Javascript dev into a Java one. All because they though all disability that isn’t coming from amputation is “severe intellectual disability”, because joke made at the expense of the intellectually disabled.
And what was the severe intellectual disability that got you this treatment?
Autism. Did not tell them, but they found out.
I feel your pain, that absolutely sucks.
But I also feel Schadenfreude for the company: refusing to hire a dev because they are autistic is just hilariously incompetent HR.
If you exclude autists, ADHD, trans people and furries, the only thing that has a severe disability is your company’s IT skills hahaha
Make Computers Great Again
I am so sorry that happened, people can be really mean to us autistic folk for no good reason
Because people like this are fragile as fuck and can’t handle seeing anything other than their inflexible conception of how the world works
Fucking worthless trashcans, all that effort and hate to justify not hiring someone they clearly didn’t deserve.
How did they “found out” about that? But I’m sorry that sucks :/ Although I wonder why you’d want to apply at such a company
They noticed my “odd behavior”.
DEI or die in action again.
Ooh, ooh! Now do Hugo Boss!
I mean to be fair, the nazis would fuck your life up / kill you if you didn’t do as they said, so… Yea.
My great grandfather was in the Gestapo. I’ve painstakingly translated and read his old journals. Fucking wooof.
You can’t just say that and not lay any dirt down at all.
OMG, this is so historical and it would be amaaazing if you published it
LGBT and Buddhism, didn’t know BMW was so lib
Bisexual Monks Works
That’s right, reform is impossible and people are absolutely never allowed to change.
Sorry buddy, your opinions from 10 years ago? Your political stance 80 years ago? That’s who you are. We won’t be taking any rebuttals.
Sure bud. BMW is on your side.
I always forget lemmy is filled with edge lord reddit refugees and always take things at face value. Oops, my bad.
I didn’t realize it was still edgy to dunk on corporations
Maybe ask your teenage kids what they think
Unwavering opinions regardless of nuance or reality is the edgy stance I’m referring to, but you’re an ml user so you were never stating anything in good faith to begin with.
