If you’re not familiar with obscure Nazi iconography, you might want to brush up.
Leftists have successfully whipped up online mobs to harass organizations they dislike by accusing them of deploying Nazi symbolism.
Last week, Amazon felt compelled to change the logo on its smartphone app, featuring a brown shipping box with a jagged piece of blue tape above the company’s smile-shaped arrow. The critics (no joke) claimed this looked too much like Adolf Hitler’s mustache.
“It’s not just a ripped scotch tape, it’s a ripped scotch tape that has a similar shape and is right on top of a smiling mouth. Looks like a happy little cardboard Adolf to me,” one user said on Twitter.
Several critics agreed, and before long, Amazon had changed the logo’s design to feature a folded piece of blue tape instead of the jagged cut. When asked why the company redesigned the app icon, a spokesperson said Amazon is “always exploring new ways to delight our customers.” Here, “delight our customers” should be understood to mean “not trigger insane wokesters.”
The Conservative Political Action Conference ran into a similar problem this week after activists decided that its conference stage at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Orlando, Florida, looked too much like the Othala rune, a Nazi symbol featured on some soldiers’ uniforms. If you’re unfamiliar with the Othala rune, don’t be ashamed. It is not the swastika, which would have been easily recognizable. It’s a different symbol, derived from the Germanic alphabet, used by only two units in Hitler’s military.
In other words, no one knows what the Othala rune is, what it looks like, or why it matters. But that didn’t stop filmmaker Morgan Freeman (no, not that one) from accusing CPAC of intentionally designing its stage “to be a rune used by the Nazis” and encouraging his hundreds of thousands of followers to hound Hyatt about its decision to partner with CPAC. The mob took up his request with glee.
Hyatt caved almost immediately. “We take the concern raised about the prospect of symbols of hate being included in the stage design at CPAC 2021 very seriously as all such symbols are abhorrent and unequivocally counter to our values as a company,” the hotel chain said in a statement.
CPAC’s organizers denounced its critics for trying to draw such a far-fetched comparison and pointed out that Hyatt’s staff members were the ones who helped design the stage so they could make sure the hotel was following federal social distancing guidelines. But it didn’t matter. The mob had already made up its mind.
So, get to it, and brush up on your World War II history and commit to memory the minutiae of Nazi iconography.
