fuhrer friendly fashion

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THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 30, 201228

JEWISH WORLD

THE TOOTHBRUSH MUS-tache, the smug scowl, thearm raised in salute – theyinstantly give him away.Otherwise, though, it’s Hitler

as you’ve never seen him. Plastered onmyriad designer T-shirts, the Nazi tyrantshows up in ever more unexpected hybridsof cartoonist caricature. In each he looks

cute, cuddly almost.In one cartoon representation Hitler is

turned into Ronald McDonald, the fast-food chain’s clownish mascot, sportinga bouffant cherry-red hairdo and acensorious look. In another he’s shownwearing an oh-so-lovely panda costumewith a Nazi armband. In yet another heappears as a pink Teletubby with doe

eyes, jug ears and a pink swastika for anantenna, pouting irritably like a spoiled

For couples who wish to wear the führer

cost from 200 baht to 370 baht ($7 to $12)apiece – come in both male and femaleversions. On the latter, Ronald-Adolf isdepicted as a transvestite with fuchsia

As part of Thailand’s

homegrown ‘Nazi chic,’

Adolf Hitler has been

reinvented as a series of

cutesy cartoon charactersemblazoned on T-shirts.

The Israeli Embassy and

the Simon Wiesenthal

Center are concerned.

Ti b o r K r a u s z Bangkok

HEIL McHITLER: A young woman poses for her boyfriend with the trademark dummy ofSeven Star, a shop at a high-end mall in Bangkok that sells popular caricatures of AdolfHitler on T-shirts, jackets and cigarette boxes

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THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 30, 2012 29

hair, lipstick, long lashes and a timidsmile. Panda Adolf’s manlier alter ego,meanwhile, wears a Brownshirt uniform.

I N BUDDHIST THAILAND, WHEREspiritual rebirths are believed tobe a fact of life, the führer has been

reincarnated as a popular fashion accessory.Some Jews and Israelis aren’t amused.

“They get upset [when they see myT-shirts]. They come to my shop andcomplain,” laments the owner of SevenStar, a small clothing shop at Terminal 21,a new high-end designer mall in centralBangkok. He’s a thirtyish, wiry fellowwho crowns his wavy, shoulder-lengthlocks with a jaunty bowler hat. A graduateof a local university’s arts program, thecartoonist does brisk business selling his

only by his nickname as “Hut.”

Covering walls in Hut’s garage-sizeshop are large hand-drawn comic strippanels. They feature his caricaturesof Michael Jackson, Kim Jong-il, Che

most prominent character by far is Adolf McDonald. In one panel by the entrance,the Nazi dictator greets visitors with aSieg Heil salute and a friendly “Helloeverybody.” In another, he smiles anddeclares: “Time to party!”

McHitler dummy, whose motorized leftarm goes up and down, up and down, in theNazi salute. A week before Christmas, thedummy wore a Santa hat. A week beforethat, it had a sign soliciting donationsfor the victims of the recent devastating

“It’s not that I like Hitler,” Hut insistsdefensively. “But he looks funny and theshirts are very popular with young people.”

“Hitler looks cool because he seems likean interesting character,” agrees PitawatChaiyot, a 21-year-old university studentwho buys himself a green shirt with the

image of Hitler as a yellow Teletubby.“Actually, I don’t know much about him,”he admits. “In school we only learn Thaihistory. But I know he was a communistleader,” he says, unwittingly demonstratingthe level of ignorance the average youngThai has about the Nazi leader and thegenocidal crimes of his regime.

Following a popular vote, Hut’s clothinglabel has been named by a local youthstreetwear magazine as one of Thailand‘sTop Five T-shirt brands of 2011. Onhis Facebook page, the up-and-comingdesigner basks in his fame by proudlydisplaying photos of soap opera starlets,actors and pop stars posing at his shopwith his trademark dummy.

“I F GOOD MANNERS DON’Thelp, I may go back and break thehand of that doll,” fumes Itzhak

Shoham, Israel’s ambassador to Thailand.The Israeli Embassy is located just a fewhundred meters from Terminal 21, and re-cently Shoham came face to face with theHitler look-alike dummy saluting nonstopwith its electric arm. “You don’t want tosee memories of the Nazi period trivial-ized in this manner,” he stresses. “It hurtsthe feelings of every Jew and every civi-lized person.”

He decided to confront the shop’s owner.

take the face off,’” recalls Shoham, a portly,grandfatherly man in his 60s. “He completelyignored me. He just turned his back on me. SoI lost my temper.” He chuckles.

Hut still seems frazzled by theexperience. “Israeli big boss came in hereand got angry,” he complains, with the air

some of my shirts and crumpled one of mybusiness cards.”

Now nearby shop owners alert him to thepresence of approaching foreigners wholook like trouble. In such cases he yanksdown the shutters and disappears for a

while. “When foreigners complain [aboutmy representations of Hitler],” Hut tells The

Report , just as a series of Thai shoppers stopby to pose cheerfully with his doll, “I tellthem it’s Charlie Chaplin.”

Do they buy it? “No!” he says and laughs.Shoham wants all Hitler imagery

removed from the shop. He’s spokento the mall’s managers, who have beennoncommittal about the issue. So he plansto recruit other ambassadors, such asGermany’s and Austria’s, to apply furtherpressure on Thai authorities, who, he says,have promised to see if there are groundsfor legal action against shop owners sellingmerchandise with Hitler’s likeness.

The ambassador may be facing a losingbattle. Unlike in Israel and Europe, Naziregalia aren’t illegal in Thailand. Acrosstown at another fashion mall, another smallshop hawks its own cutesy caricatures

of Hitler plastered on T-shirts, includingPanda Adolf. The Nazi leader takes prideof place among Smurfs, pop stars andJapanese manga characters. “Hitler shirtsare very popular, especially with teenageboys,” notes the shop’s owner, SirinapaHemmaruk, 30, whose family operates aclothing factory.

On Bangkok’s Khao San Road, abackpacker haven popular with youngIsraeli travelers, yet other T-shirtdesigns boast images of Hitler. Theseinclude Photoshopped prints of theführer sunbathing naked on a tropical reproduction Third Reich propagandaposters, pennants with the Iron Crossand Nazi eagles, and faux SS helmets for

Chatuchak weekend market, where they’reon sale alongside Bob Marley portraits andRastafarian accoutrements.

When I show him pictures of Panda Adolf and Hitler as a Teletubby, Shoham sighs.“There’s no ill intent [in such designs],”he concedes. “Let’s be realistic: Thais just

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THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 30, 201230

JEWISH WORLD

don’t know about history, including their

unpleasant phenomenon.”During his previous posting in

Singapore, Shoham says, he encountered

similar manifestations of so-called “Nazichic,” an appropriation of Nazi imageryas subversive symbols in popular fashion,which traces its origins to the punk subculture in Britain, in the 1970s. In Japanand Hong Kong, Nazi-themed costumes arepopular in cosplay, a fashion fad that seesteens dress up as their favorite Japanesecomic book and cartoon characters.“Mein Kampf” has even been adapted asa manga-style comic book in Japan, where“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is aperennial bestseller.

LAST SEPTEMBER IN THEnorthern Thai city of Chiang Mai,a group of high school students

managed to outdo their rivals by show-ing up for “sport day” in something trulyeye-catching: homemade Nazi uniforms,complete with swastika armbands and toyguns. Led by a fresh-faced teenage girl ina Brownshirt uniform, sporting a paintedHitler mustache and wielding a cheerlead-er’s baton, they paraded around downtownin their SS uniforms, carrying a large Nazi

them on merrily from the sidewalks as for-eign tourists looked on stunned.

In 2007 hundreds of students at a gov-ernment school in Bangkok staged a simi-lar Nazi-themed costume parade. On both

occasions an international hue and cry en-sued. At each school teachers blamed thestudents, pleading ignorance of their plansfor using Nazi designs during their cos-tume parades. In the case of the recent pa-rade, though, it didn’t help matters that thestudents came from Sacred Heart College,a Catholic preparatory school attached tothe local diocese. The city’s bishop hassince apologized to Shoham.

“It’s true on one level that [such displays]are all down to ignorance,” says RabbiAbraham Cooper, associate dean of theSimon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.“But with ignorance comes lack of sensi-tivity,” he adds. “We’re not blaming thechildren. But teachers should have knownbetter, especially at a Catholic school.”

Harry Soicher, a Romanian Jew whoteaches geography at a Bangkok highschool, isn’t so sure about the teachers.“The foreign teachers [at my school] wereshocked, but the Thai teachers didn’t un-derstand what the fuss was all about,” hesays. “They just want to live their livesstress-free. They don’t want to know aboutsubjects like the Holocaust. Their favorite

expression is mai tong kit mak (Don’t think too much).”

“The Jewish concept of memory, whichemphasizes an overarching connection of the past to the present, is not a universally

practiced or even accepted idea,” explainsCooper, who has studied the phenomenonof Nazi chic across Southeast and North-east Asia from Thailand to Taiwan.

It’s not that countries in the region don’thave their own cultural taboos. SeveralThais, for instance, have been sentencedto long years in prison for posting doctoredimages on Facebook of the country’s invio-lable royals, who are protected by a draco-nian lèse-majesté law. “Thai people knowfull well where they must draw a line onparody,” Cooper notes.

Then there’s the issue of cultural discon-nect. Jews recoil at the very sight of theswastika, which, as Cooper puts it, “hasa toxic and foreboding image as a livingsymbol of pure evil.” Yet to Hindus andBuddhists, the swastika, which Hitler ap-propriated as an emblem of Aryan superi-ority, is an ancient good luck symbol. Dur-ing World War II, countries in SoutheastAsia came under the yoke of Japanese oc-cupiers, but they had no direct experienceof Nazi atrocities. And so, shorn of theirhistorical context, the potent imagery andhallucinogenic pageantry of Nazi visual

AFEW YEARS AGO TWO ENTERPRIS-ing restaurateurs in Taipei, Taiwan,

came up with a novel idea: an eatery modeled a ter a concentration camp.

Called Jail, the designer restaurant invited diners to polish of their plates o gourmet dishes among hand paintedmurals and WWII photographs o skeletaldeath camp inmates in striped pajamasstaring rom behind barbed wire or lyingon their bunk beds. Toilets were dubbed“Gas Chambers” and decorated with gaspipes and pressure gauges.

Not to be outdone in its embrace o Nazichic, India, too, had its own Hitler themedca é. Catering to a posh clientele o businessmen and Bollywood stars in Mumbai, Hitler’s Cross – as the restaurant wascalled a ter the Nazis’ Cross o Honor o the German Mother, a cruci x with a swastika awarded to ecund German mothers– boasted a logo with a Hitler mustached

che , a pair o Nazi swastikas and the motto in Gothic ont: “Fine Dining Macht Frei.”

Both eateries were redecorated, willynilly, by their owners a ter an outcry rom

oreign embassies.Such incidents across the region ollow

a predictable script: Some locals decide touse Nazi imagery or commercial or ashion purposes; oreign embassies expressoutrage; the culprits plead ignorance o the Nazi period and issue apologies. Thencomes another case o blatant Nazi chicsomewhere else. And so the merry goround spins on.

A decade ago, a Thai advertising agencythought it a swell idea to market potatochips with Hitler’s image. Two years agoa new waxworks museum in the country

ollowed suit by advertising itsel with a giant billboard eaturing the ührer with thewords in Thai: “Hitler is not dead!”

In Taiwan, 7 Elevens sold dolls and

key chains with Hitler’s likeness. In HongKong, a clothing store decorated itspremises with Nazi ags and banners. InSouth Korea and Japan, Nazi style memorabilia are coveted by many ashionconscious youths, who o ten enjoylistening to white power music, orgood measure.

In 2002, “The Times o India” surveyedstudents at elite colleges across thesubcontinent about who they saw as anexemplary leader. Hitler nished ahead o the likes o Nelson Mandela and AbrahamLincoln, coming close behind MahatmaGandhi. The students cited his drive,discipline and e ciency in their choice orthe ührer.

“The ault,” the paper’s political editor lamented, “lies with the collapse o the higher educational system.” The lack o teaching history to young people, heopined, has led to “the atrophying o society’s value[s].”

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Nazi Chic Merry-Go-Round



THE JERUSALEM REPORT JANUARY 30, 2012 31

propaganda continue to fascinate fashion-conscious youngsters across the region.

Unlike in neighboring Muslim-majority

Malaysia, anti-Semitism among Thais is know who Jews are. Yet “in the era of the Internet, where anything can go viralovernight,” Cooper stresses, “we can’tafford to let the frivolous use of Naziimagery go unmentioned.”

And some Thai-style Nazi chic has goneviral. A recent music video by a popularThai pop group called Slur shows its fourmembers each dressed up as Hitler. “Themohawk or the skinhead... is it hip?” thecatchy refrain goes in a jejune song aboutfashion. The Thai expression hit ler (mean-ing “Is it hip?”) is a homophone that rhymeswith the dictator’s name. In their video,which is highly popular on YouTube withmillions of hits and thousands of “likes,”the Thai musicians prance about and tor-ment prisoners in striped pajamas.

F OLLOWING THE NAZI-STYLEparade in Chiang Mai, Soicher de-cided to organize a lecture at his

school about the Holocaust. He showedstudents old photos and newsreels from the

death camps. “They were shocked,” he says.“But many of them found it hard to believesomething like this could have happened.”

A recent interview with Thai college stu-dents suggested that most educated youngThais have only a very vague notion of neighboring Cambodia’s recent genocide,never mind the Holocaust. This, despitethe fact that the policies of the communistKhmer Rouge regime, which was respon-sible for the death of an estimated two mil-lion Cambodians between 1975 and 1979,directly impacted politics and events inThailand for decades.

Undaunted, Shoham and Cooper are bothworking on plans to offer educational proj-ects for some Thai schools about the Naziperiod, using learning materials developedby Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem and the SimonWiesenthal Center. “It will have to be very -where,” Shoham notes.

Some locals, though, don’t think Thaisshould bother learning about Nazism atall. “Why should they [Thais and Asians]care about a period in European history?Why should they have Westerners’ culturalhang-ups about it?” insists an editor of aprominent daily, which publishes a supple-

ment for students.Cooper has an answer for that. “Had the

Nazis prevailed during World War II, theirracist ideology would have eventually tar-geted all races the Nazis deemed ‘inferior,’

including Asians,” he points out. “Manyneo-Nazis today loathe and demean andsometimes attack people of Asian descent.”

Yet if online comments are any indica-tion, quite a few Thais have adopted ahaughty leave-us-be attitude in the faceof foreigners’ criticism of Thai-style Nazichic. “This is just a song, grow up already!”one commenter opines in English on You-Tube in defense of Slur’s Nazi-themedmusic video. “Shut the [expletive] up andenjoy the music,” advises another.

On Seven Star’s Facebook page, mean-while, fans of the clothing label complainthat foreigners upset about Hut’s führer car-toons have “no sense of humor.”

Soon after his run-in with the Israeli am-bassador last December, the Thai designertaped down his McHitler dummy’s mus-tache with a small piece of paper scrawled“sensor” on it. (He meant “censored.”)Presently, though, the sign was off.

Arguably, playful depictions of Hitlercan be seen as just mischievous satire. Af-ter all, it’s unlikely that the intensely image-conscious Nazi dictator would be pleased tosee himself depicted as a fast-food chain’s

red-haired clown or a pink Teletubby.Jewish humorists, too, have engaged insubversive parody of the führer and theNazis, most notably in Mel Brooks’ 1968

two down-on-their-luck Jewish theater pro-ducers hatch a get-rich-quick scheme thatinvolves staging a harebrained play glorify-ing Hitler. Ahead of his new movie “TheDictator,” due out next summer, British-Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s pro-motional posters feature a scantily dressedMegan Fox with a Hitler mustache standing

Seven Star’s own motto is “Made forFun,” and Hut insists he means no harm oroffense. Meanwhile, buoyed by great de-mand for his hybridized Hitler drawings,he has just started selling jackets, cigaretteboxes and postcards with them as well.

Cooper doesn’t see such images of Hit-ler as a laughing matter. “In a country thatseeks and welcomes millions of touristsevery year, claiming these designs are a

joke just won’t do,” he insists. “They are aparody of what? Mass murder?”

OH SO CUTE: A collection of cartoonist designs with Hitler’s image from designer T-shirtson sale in Bangkok

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