More Coke, I’m afraid. Comedian Mark Thomas is planning an exhibition on Coca Cola and their links with the Nazis at the 1936 Olympics, and has asked the b3ta community to come up with Photoshopped artists’ impressions of what it might have looked like (as, apparently, no photos of it have survived).

While I normally like Mark Thomas I have to voice my feelings of distaste towards this - after all Coca Cola have had a presence at every Olympics since 1928, nearly 70 years have passed now, and all they did was sell them sugary water, for fuck’s sake. There’s plenty of other companies that did far worse, such as Ford producing military vehicles, or IBM supplying mechanical computers for the Nazi bureaucracy. And you don’t have to look back to the 1930s to find bad things that Coca Cola do.

Although I wouldn’t quite go as far as comparing it to Holocaust revisionism (as one dissenting b3tan has) to try and pin them together with the Nazis is a cheap form of protest - after all, there is no better brand that says “evil” than the Swastika, so trying to twin Coke with it is cynical and cheap. Just another way of branding a cause - which can be a force for good if it forces companies to be more responsible by threatening to damage their brand.

What I find disturbing is when, as in this case, when attacking the brand for attacking the brand’s sake takes over (as mentioned a couple of days ago, protesting can be more for show than for the cause), and we lose sight of why they should be attacked in the first place. It also lets off companies that are corrupt or damaging society that don’t rely on their brands - Halliburton and Bechtel don’t worry about what the person in the high street thinks of their brand, do they? Brand protesting and branded causes can only go so far - they can win some battles and raise the profile of anti-capitalism, but real political change is the only way to fully defeat rampant corporatism.

PS Sorry to warble lots on about branding and protest by the way, I swear I haven’t been recently reading “No Logo” or anything like that, it just seems the issue has cropped up recently.