KFC's Krystallnacht Celebration

"Memorial day for the Reich pogrom night."

"Treat yourself to more tender cheese on your crispy chicken."

"Now at KFCheese!"

“Commemorate Kristallnacht – treat yourself to more soft cheese and crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!”

 

"[The notification was an] unacceptable message and for this we sincerely apologize."

"We use a semi-automated content creation process linked to calendars that include national observances."

"In this instance, our internal review process was not properly followed, resulting in a non-approved notification being shared."

Kentucky Fried Chicken Germany 

GAZING AT the carnage of Kristallnacht, November 1938. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The history of Jewish persecution is endless, through the past to the near present. The growing popularity of targeting Jews and Israel for racist commentary has kept the Jewish community on notice that their fondest expectations that the world community would some day tire of bludgeoning Jews, all things Jewish, and Israel along with everything reputed by Jew-haters to be attributable to the dark aspects of Jewish character has faltered on the lethal spike of a renewal of the pathology of antisemitism.

Celebrities have now realized they can excite their audiences with antisemitic sneers and swipes accusing Jews of being ... well ... Jewish, and elicit guffaws and growing popularity among their admirers. As publicity goes it is effective and it is cheap. From film stars to rapsters, sport figures to politicians the opportunities present themselves to spout racist, derogatory slanders against Israel under the pretense accusations of 'apartheid' and oppression against the Palestinians are politically sanctioned but those smearing Israel are not antisemetic.

That Israel has a proxy-use for Jew-haters is a given; a friable screen to protest innocence of racism. But that a world-wide network of corporate interests would be so obligingly oblivious to what it is they are urging their customers to celebrate by indulging their appetite to celebrate what historians refer to as the beginning salvo of what would soon become better known as the state-sponsored genocide of the Holocaust strikes a new low in the free-enterprise system.

 

A menu of a drive-in counter of a branch of the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). After severe setbacks in the Corona pandemic, Germany’s fast food industry wants to expand its drive-in car counters to keep customers in line.  Rolf Vennenbernd | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

 

It is telling that this occurred in Germany. The backlash to a global corporation's vapidly clumsy effort at publicity and enhanced sales opportunity came directly from Jewish sources; the perpetrators of the Third Reich's elaborate scheme to obliterate the Jewish presence throughout Europe appears not to have been the least bit discomfiting in the KFC public relations appeal to the sensuous image of food linked to hateful savagery against Jewish existence.

Krystallnacht, the night of 'shattered glass' was a wide-ranging event orchestrated by Nazi Germany that swept Germany and Austria. Germany's Jew-haters came out in numbers to march through the streets shouting imprecations and threats against the Jewish residents in a pograom that murdered an estimated 91 Jews, rounded up hundreds more to be sent to concentration and slave-labour camps where they perished. The mobs marauding through the streets of towns and cities torched over 1,400 synagogues, and vandalized 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses. 

Germany went on to prove that the night of November 10 to 11 of 1938 was not a one-off event to assure Europe's Jews that they were not forgotten. A world war would be fought, Europe occupied by the Axis supporting Germany in its bid for world supremacy under fascism, but there was considerable effort, dedicated military labour and focus along with resources such as rail services, campsites, investment in chemicals and furnaces to exterminate six million Jewish children, women and men. And KFC felt that was something to celebrate.