British television at the moment is dripping with advertisements that parody or exploit the ethics of revolutionaries or non-capitalist states. There is something extremely unsettling about a Chinese gentlemen with a dodgy accent in Communist uniform stating that a brand of Chinese food represents “a Chinese Revolution”. An advert for Twix recently claimed that the Russian cosmonaut in the advert had “less spine than this capitalist snack”. But the most bizarre of all has to be the new Financial Times advert which has Lenin talking about share portfolios and “not Karl Marx, but Deutschmarks”.
I feel slightly as if anti-capitalist memes are being raped in front of me – is it the equivalent of Roman soldiers sodomising their enemies after military victories? Fight back. Pollute the advertising meme-stream with adbusters.