Airline Backs Down on Woke ‘Nothing is Truly Scandinavian’ Ad Campaign After Backlash

The Scandinavian airline SAS has scrapped a recent advertisement that claimed there is nothing uniquely Scandinavian after a massive backlash on social media.

The airline announced the scrapping of the video, which was initially posted to social media platform YouTube, on Wednesday in a press release stating, “When we look at the pattern and the number of reactions to our film, there is reason to suspect an attack and that our campaign has been kidnapped.”

“We do not want to risk becoming a platform for someone else’s values, which we do not stand for. Therefore, we have currently removed the films from our channels and are now discussing the next step,” they added.

Despite claiming to have scrapped the ad, the video was put back up on the SAS YouTube channel on Wednesday where it has garnered over 128,000 views, over 34,000 dislikes and just 1,300 likes. Comments under the video, which were overwhelmingly negative, were also disabled.

The company also released an edited version of the ad which has been reduced from over two minutes to just 45 seconds and cuts out the narrator claiming there is nothing uniquely Scandinavian at all. The shorter version of the advert has just 88 likes to 2,100 dislikes.

Those on social media who slammed the advert were joined by anti-mass migration politicians such as Danish People’s Party (DF) foreign affairs spokesperson Soeren Espersen who said, “I have always flown with SAS a lot but I would have bad taste in my mouth if I did it again because they spit on us like that.”

“What nonsense and self-hatred. Always tried to fly with SAS, but never again. That’s a promise,” Richard Jomshof of the populist Sweden Democrats said.

The ad echoes the sentiments expressed by the BBC’s Nish Kumar who marked Brexit Day in a skit for children’s programme Horrible Histories by claiming that everything British is actually foreign.

“Your empire’s built on fighting wars, that’s how your income’s swollen, your British things are from abroad, and most are frankly stolen,” one of the characters, a butler to Queen Victoria, states in the skit.