Gene’s genius for cashing in
QUESTION Does Kiss singer Gene Simmons make money from trademarking common symbols and sayings?
GENE Simmons is the outlandish Kiss bassist/frontman, known as The Demon, famous for his devil’s tongue gesture.
He is also a serial entrepreneur. Kiss merchandise includes films, comic books, hunting knives, coffins, pinball machines, action figures and even water fountains.
The Gene Simmons Company has a host of failed or lapsed trademarks. These include: Master Chefs Of Rock; Gene Simmons Demon; Gene Simmons Tongue; Gene Simmons Rock Star Comedy Jam; Gene Simmons Media Mogul; Exotic Car Wash; Naked Car Wash; Topless Car Wash; Symposium Of Success; Because It’s My Life; Titans Of Rock; Gene Jeans; Gene Simmons House Of Terror; International Fight Club; Trophy Wife; Dominatrix; Space Hunter and I Want To Marry A Millionaire.
The musician also owns the moneybags logo: a bulging sack tied shut with a string and a dollar sign on the front.
In 2017, Simmons made his most controversial trademark bid when he laid claim to the devil horns hand gesture.
He claimed he had created the sign in November 1974 while performing on stage. But this was widely criticised by fans of the late heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio, who is credited as the symbol’s creator.
Simmons is proud of his entrepreneurial sidelines. He has said: ‘I own all kinds of things. I own “motion pictures” as a trademark. Anyone who thinks that’s silly – the silliest thing I’ve ever done is wear more make-up and higher heels than your mommy.’
J. B. Richards, Bootle, Merseyside.
QUESTION Did Hitler know in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour?
ACCORDING to contemporary accounts, Adolf Hitler was taken by complete surprise at his Wolf’s Lair war headquarters when he received news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour.
Up to then, he had been frustrated by Japanese attempts to secure a peace with the United States and its refusal to attack British assets in southeast Asia.
He welcomed the news, proclaiming: ‘This is the turning point. We now have an ally who has never been vanquished in 3,000 years!’ The attack on December 7, 1941, came at an opportune time, as Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, had stalled.
Hitler assumed the Japanese would support him by attacking the Soviet Union through Siberia. On December 8, he authorised Admiral Erich Raeder’s U-boats to attack US shipping.
Thus emboldened, at 3pm on December 11, Hitler delivered a harangue from the Reichstag. He derided President Franklin D. Roosevelt as ‘the honest warmonger... the man who is the main culprit of the war’.
He claimed that the war had been arranged and provoked by a small circle of bankers and plutocrats, mostly American and Jewish, who had employed Roosevelt as their agent.
Hitler could have avoided going to war under the Tripartite Agreement between Germany, Italy and Japan and would have been wise to do so. But he declared war on the US on his own initiative.
It was a huge mistake, and historians mark this as the moment he lost the war. It gave Roosevelt the pretext needed for the US to enter the war with the backing of a formerly recalcitrant Congress.
Hitler had provoked a grand alliance of powerful enemies – Britain, the US and the USSR – against whom he was destined for destruction.
Charles Eastman, London.
QUESTION Prince Harry told CBS ‘silence is betrayal’. Where does this phrase come from?
WHILE Prince Harry was drawing on Martin Luther King Jr – who is most commonly linked with the phrase – it was coined by Presbyterian minister Robert McAfee Brown.
In April 1967, King delivered the sermon Why I Am Opposed To The War In Vietnam at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. He said: ‘The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam today because I agree with Dante that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal.’
This speech won a Grammy award after King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and undoubtedly popularised the phrase.
Exactly a year earlier, he gave his first anti-war speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence, at Riverside Church in New York.
He said: ‘I’m in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organisation which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
‘And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.’
This makes it clear that he did not create the term.
Theologian McAfee Brown wrote the mission statement for the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, which began: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
‘Our allegiance to our nation is held under a higher allegiance to God, who is the sovereign of all nations.’ In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, slogans such as ‘Silence is betrayal’, ‘White silence is violence’ and ‘Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim’ were used by Black Lives Matter activists.
In a remarkable passage from Prince Harry’s 60 Minutes CBS interview with anchor Anderson Cooper, he carefully delivers this line for maximum impact.
Corinne Parker, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
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