Absolut World ad offends, fails to offer solution

Steve Keller Guest Columnist

Imagine an advertisement run in Germany that displays the country in its pre-World War II state. The spot includes a depiction of Germany’s lost eastern territories, places that had been integral to German history and owned by Germans for centuries before the Nazi craze led to their surrender. The banner on the bottom of the ad reads, “Absolut World,” an appeal to German revanchists in an effort to sell alcohol.

Offensive? Certainly. All rational thought would say the advertisement wouldn’t be acceptable. Good thing it was never actually run. But a similar ad was publicized in Mexico in March that displayed the territories lost to the United States in the Mexican-American War.

Though I don’t agree with censorship, the ad is not constructive and exploits feelings of “Reconquista” within certain radical communities in order to sell vodka. With the immigration problem already at the forefront as a wedge issue and a rising tide of “Aztlan” revanchism within many Hispanic-American communities, I feel that the ad is unhelpful in any sort of debate regarding relations between the United States and Mexico.

A further example might illustrate the situation better. How about picturing an advertisement showing the entirety of Mexico under U.S. rule, as many had proposed after the Mexican-American war? Surely, we would not have the immigration problems we do now had we gone ahead and annexed it! (I say this sardonically.)

We didn’t end up annexing Mexico. That would have been absurd and imperialistic. Instead, we took the vast, empty territory known as the Mexican Cession and paid millions of dollars for it. We paid for land we took in a war we won.

The problem here is not the ad. The problem here is the ideas that the ad is playing on. Not only is the spot inciting revanchism, but the wounds of the genocide of Native Americans are still fresh. There is still injustice reaching back as far as the Trail of Tears to the inequality of many Native Americans in the economic system of the modern United States.

But the fact is that California, Texas and the land in between is American. The territory has belonged to the American people for over eight times as long as it had belonged to Mexico. During the time of Mexican ownership, it was a mostly vacant land. It was so empty, in fact, that they’d invited American settlers to live there, thus causing the Texan secession and the Mexican-American war.

To suggest that Mexico should have the territory back would open the door for other wild suggestions, especially because the land once belonged to Spain, who took it from the Native Americans. Should the entire Americas be given back to native rule, despite the fact as a white person I have just as much right to the land as a descendant of Native Americans?

We’re living in the present. The idea of giving land that was “unjustly seized” back to the “original owners” is ridiculous, not only because everyone who was alive at the dawn of history is now dead, but also because there exists no solid information on which to base these claims. To the contrary, these claims often contradict. If the borders in the year 1848 trump those of 2008, what about the borders of 1453? What about the Roman Empire?

Perhaps the one good thing about this advertisement is that it has given us a chance to have this conversation. At this point, it is too late to give the land “back” to anyone.

Absolut’s advertisement only fires up a very real movement among the Mexican public that seeks to separate these lands from the United States. That is why I am glad that the advertisement, in the end, was pulled.