How did this happen? How is it possible that a great British company, known to every household in the country and used by most of them at one time or another, sells a healthcare product with a swastika tucked inside the packaging?
OK, you’re right. It didn’t happen. Tesco would never allow the Nazi symbol anywhere near its stores. And yet, during a half term break in Norfolk, sneaked in just before the new lockdown rule forbade holiday travel, my family and I popped into a Tesco to buy provisions for our self catering holiday. It was here that I opportunistically picked up a handy pack of face masks strategically placed by the entrance.
It was a day or so later before I opened it. Out fluttered a piece of paper. It was a certificate attesting to the quality and authenticity of the product, complete with a stamp of approval that displayed a five-pointed star. So not a swastika. And there will be those reading this who object to the comparison.
Their reasons are sound. Anything that distracts or diminishes the Holocaust’s status as a uniquely barbaric atrocity both in its scale and cruelty must be resisted. There will be also be those — Corbynistas let’s call them — who might jump at the opportunity to rope Israel’s own six-pointed star into this conversation, lest a chance to compare Israel to Nazis should go begging.
But this article is about something else. It is about the ease with which the symbol of an authority that is overseeing the systematic destruction of China’s Uighur Muslim population can be found here among the sandwiches and salads of our supermarkets.
It is also about how that same symbol, which has for decades been used by fashion and advertising executives as a way of attaching Cold War chic to their products, should now conjure images of thousands of people held in camps, the forced sterilisation of women and the extermination of a culture. Yet it apparently does no such thing. Instead the red star is as accepted here as easily as the red lion stamp on an egg.
There is an extra irony in finding it used in a packet of masks and as an emblem of China’s global commitment to protect people from Covid. Walk further into Tesco and you will find many bottles of Australian wine, one of the products that China has stopped importing to punish Australia for daring to suggest that there should be an independent enquiry into the origins of the coronavirus.
This is not a call to boycott masks made in China. But should supermarket executives really so unquestioningly subject their customers to such state propaganda? Because they should know that system that proudly announces itself as our protector by slipping its card into a seemingly blameless packet of masks, is the same authority that is committing the biggest crime against humanity this century.
