A couple of years ago when we were busy with a number of campaigns against airlines who allowed forced deportations from europe on their flights i did a spoof website targeting the KLM (‘KLM – uw uitzettingsagent‘) that was part of a campaign with the same name of the now defunct autonoom centrum in Amsterdam.

It is kind of ironic to see that now more than 5 year later the KLM (in an email offer to the german members of their flying blue frequent flyer programme) advertises itself as a ‘fluchthelfer’ (german for ‘people smuggler’), which is exactly the opposite of what we accused them to be back then:

Of course it equally ironic that by now we are on most of the frequent flyer programs of the airlines we campaigned against. But then we already had a certain fascination for frequent flyer programs back in those days (which is beautifully expressed in gif animation on the page of the lufthansa deportation class active miles programme).

Update [12-02-08]: Predictably the Dutch version of the email offer fails to carry over the irony of the German version (did i ever mention that Dutch is quite an incomplete language?). I received the same email offer today and where the german says ‘fluchthilfen‘, the dutch version just says ‘break-away’ (em did i mention that dutch is basically a bad rip-off of german with a bit of english thrown in at random places?).