EU posts bizarre “anti-racism” video (or anti- or pro-something video), which is condemned as racist and is pulled from the Web

The other day CNN reported (our discussion begins below):

EU kills Kill Bill-style video over racism complaints

London—Somewhere, Quentin Tarantino is laughing hysterically.

Trying to riff on one of the bad-boy movie director’s iconic characters, the European Union has landed itself in a whole mess of trouble.

The 27-nation bloc released a video last week trying to promote an anti-racist message, then pulled it days later amid accusations that the clip itself was racist.

It features a white woman wearing a yellow track suit, like that of the Uma Thurman character The Bride in Tarantino’s two-part kung-fu fest “Kill Bill.”

Standing alone in an abandoned train station, she is threatened first by an east Asian karate master, then a scimitar-wielding turbaned Arab, and finally a bare-chested, dreadlocked black man.

She calmly duplicates herself 11 times and surrounds her three attackers, prompting them to stop threatening her and sit cross-legged as the 12 track-suited white women do the same. The entire scene then morphs into the European Union flag, her track suits becoming the flag’s 12 yellow stars.

The 127,000-euro ($167,000) ad prompted head-smacking from critics as it spread across 7,000 websites starting on Friday.

“So the message of this video is: no other race can challenge ‘white supremacy’?” was the most popular comment on the video on YouTube.

But EU spokesman Peter Stano said the video was “absolutely not intended to be racist and we obviously regret that it has been perceived in this way by some people,” and apologized “to anyone who may have felt offended.”

The clip was aimed at 16-to-24-year-olds “who understand the plots and themes of martial arts films and video games” and featured “typical characters for the martial arts genre,” he said.

“It started with demonstration of their skills and ended with all characters showing their mutual respect, concluding in a position of peace and harmony,” Stano said.

The EU spent 121,500 euros ($160,500) distributing the ad, which was made by the Mostra agency, Stano said.

That’s a total cost of nearly a quarter of a million euros for a clip which—like Tarantino’s Bill—got killed.

Kilroy M., who sent the item, writes:

This advertisement is hilarious on at least three levels:

1. The obvious idiocy of the advertisement, aimed at combating racism, being pulled for being racist itself.

2. The concept of the European (represented here by a wise woman) conquering masculine third-worlder threats by … sitting down. [LA replies: While your overall point is correct, she does not conquer them by sitting down. She multiplies herself and stands in a circle around them, which prompts them to sheath their weapons, then they all sit down.]

3. The slogan at the end, which states that European strength correlates with the size of its population. [LA replies: The words on the screen at the end are, “the more we are, the stronger we are.” I don’t think that the “more” refers to the size of the EU population, but to its diversity. Diversity is our strength. The more diverse we become, the stronger we become.]

Of course, Europeans are too busy aborting themselves out of existence and promoting their wise women into the work force instead of going forth and multiplying. And the belief that passivity can vanquish brute force, something that is explicitly part of this advertisement’s narrative, is so violently divorced from reality that it could well have been produced by the team at The Onion.

The elites know there’s a problem; otherwise they wouldn’t be spending money (aren’t they a bit short lately?) on such comedy. Yet the content of this ad proves they fit the clinical definition of madness: repeating the same thing over and over (deracinated liberalism) while expecting a different result each time (resolving the problem caused by deracinated liberalism).

LA replies:

I can’t figure out what the thinking was of the people behind this ad for harmony, since, completely violating the First Prime Directive, it portrays all the threatening figures as conspicuously nonwhite.

Here is my theory. The EU people who conceived this advertisement do know in their hearts that violent nonwhites, namely blacks and Muslims, are a threat (the Asian kung-fu master was just thrown in as an extra). And they know that the people of Europe know that nonwhites are a threat. But, given their liberalism, what answer can they imagine to this threat? The answer they imagine is your typical female superwoman, except that, this being the EU and not the U.S., the superwoman does not use crotch-kicking violence to subdue the villains. Instead she multiplies herself into twelve duplicates of herself, then these twelve women stand in a circle, their hands extended and touching, around the men, and then the mere sight of twelve unarmed yet confident women standing in a circle around them makes the three ferocious armed men—who could easily kill the twelve unarmed women if they chose to—change their minds, put away their weapons, and sit down to have a confab with the women.

There is no mystery as to what the twelve yellow-garbed women standing in a circle represent, since, at the end of the video, they are morphed into the twelve yellow stars of the EU flag:

Thus it is the EU itself—not through the use of force, but through its very existence as the EU, as the political representation of the equality and harmony of mankind—which instantly subdues the nonwhite violence.

At the same time, I remain astonished that the EU honchos who authorized the video did not insist that some of the threatening men be white. After all, there is no end to skin heads, neo-Nazis, English Defence League spokesman, Islam critics, believing Christians and others who could be used to provide a better racial balance among the villains.

But now that I think about it, I realize that it could not have worked if some of the villains were white. Because at the end, the armed men and the women sit down together in harmony. To include white men in this circle of harmony would violate the liberal vision.

Consider my three-character script of the liberal order: the white liberal who embodies the virtue of the liberal regime, the nonwhite who is the object of the white liberal’s compassion and inclusion, and the white non-liberal who threatens the liberal regime with his bigotry and must be suppressed.

To include whites among the villains who are brought into harmony with the EU by the EU superwoman would imply the acceptance and forgiveness of the symbolic white non-liberal. But that is impossible. Consider how Sandra Fluke refused to accept Rush Limbaugh’s apology! that’s the feminist spirit for you. Furthermore, the white man, symbolically, has no place in the Circle of Peace. Or consider the $100 coin of a non-American America, showing an attractive, idealistic white woman gazing into the distance, accompanied by three rather dull-looking nonwhites:

No white man in sight.* The white man, or the white non-liberal, must be subdued or eliminated, leaving the New Order free to form itself—a New Order consisting, symbolically, of white liberal women leading nonwhites and Third Worlders.

_____
* It’s a liberal-feminist version of the statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback with an American Indian and an African accompanying him on foot, except that the “racist” statue gives far more dignity and purposefulness to its nonwhite figures than the PC image on the $100 coin gives to its.

- end of initial entry -

T. writes:

The EU “anti-racist” commercial is hilarious. Just one observation, the “more” at the end actually refers to “more countries”—the objective of the ad is to promote the enlargement of the European Union, including Turkey. So it is indeed a call for more diversity, but in a different way than through immigration. However, in that case the commercial doesn’t even make sense: I am not sure how the foreign character fits in, unless they intend to include China and India as part of Europe. Here the commercial can be seen in its entirety.

Also, the guy with the sword is supposedly not Muslim, but an Indian man practicing “kalaripayattu” (Indian martial arts), while the black guy is clearly practicing “capoeira” (Brazilian martial arts). More information here.

T. continues:

Actually, now that I think about it, the commercial might indeed be “racist.” See, the three foreigners represent India, China and Brazil, three growing nations who could become international powers in the future (It’s the so-called “BRIC”—but Russia is missing). So the commercial is actually saying, “If we enlarge Europe (with the inclusion of other countries in Eastern Europe and maybe Turkey), we become stronger (economically) and can better fight against the other nascent economic powers.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 11, 2012 08:29 PM | Send