IBM and the Holocaust
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
TJ Watson (of IBM) is quoted as saying: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.”
I hear a lot of similar echos within tech companies right now. People using “we’re a business” to shut down discussion about the role of supplying AI technology to Israel, who has been using AI to choose bombing targets [2].
[1] https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/11/lessons-from-ibm-in-nazi-ger...
If we the people as represented by our government decide that a particular foreign regime is off-limits, then companies are compelled to not do business with them. We don't leave it to choice.
So if you want companies to have any form of morality, you need to enforce it. Because otherwise all the ones that do care are just going to be outcompeted and die out, and you'll be left with specifically the worst of the bunch. Organizations and individuals act to their incentives, and if they don't, then they stop existing.
If ethics were self-enforcing, then we wouldn't need to be talking about it. We have laws against killing and stealing because without those laws, killing and stealing are a shockingly effective way to get ahead.
(note this is true regardless of your feelings on the morality of Israel's government's choices)
Or "As long as I'm not the only one who's complicit, it's okay"?
hmmm... I don't know if that argument holds water.
for example, the corollary would be that your obligation is less if other firms have the capability?
although AI and choosing bombing targets is pretty horrible, I think surveillance tech ("advertising") is something more fundamental that everyone should think more about.
Sure, being able to work with people who have different values is a noble thing. But what about whether or not they observe international law?
This is like a business saying "I cooperate with all customers, regardless of their criminal nature". That is a quite different statement.
Also, legality doesn't have a close relation to morality, so cooperating with people regardless of legality can also be noble or evil.
It's because of the holocaust that we thankfully have changed our collective attitude about such things. But in 1939, people's knowledge of the racial atrocities happening was very restricted, so I don't think we can underrate just how naïve some people where at the time.
What happened a lot at the beginning of WWII was that people didn't know what was happening at the concentration camps. And yes, there were some twisted moral templates at the time based on racism and dehumanization.
Oof, how I wish that were true. You may be interested in Pernick, Martin (1999): The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915.
Several nations (the US included) were well on their way to "Great Society" ideas of shaping the next generation by controlling genetics (be that in who reproduced or who was allowed to live). A lot of experiments ended abruptly when the Allies reached the camps, and a lot of politically-powerful institutions have kicked dirt over their own pasts to try and help people forget that's where we were headed.
(Quite a few experiments did not; forced sterilization wasn't outlawed in the US until, IIRC, the eighties).
French concrete corporation Lafarge was caught funding terorism by paying ISIS to leave their concrete trucks lone in Syria and all they got was a fine from the US government. Nestle is responsible for a shit tonne of infant mortality in impoverished nations and IKEA for major deforestation and nothing really happened to them despite preaching how much they care about people and the environemnt.
I still maintain my PoV that if the execs were to face jailtime or a trail at The Hague instead of petty corporate fines that become part of the cost of doing business, companies would be a lot more mindful on how humane they earn their money. Bring the downvotes, I made peace with it.
The company I work for is in the process of being acquired by IBM. Even though I'm located in Europe, I have Russian citizenship. Does it mean that I'm also going to be "divested from" after the acquisition is complete?
I work for an IBM subsidary, and to the best of my knowledge this is how it worked. One of my coworkers is a Russian expat (and I believe still citizen) living in Europe and they were unaffected.
It's less true that corporations don't have a soul or moral compass and more so that they reflect the soul and moral compass of their owners. Anti-semitism was common amongst the US business and intellectual classes, and many companies - IBM included - were run by people who sympathized with Hitler's ideals.
The uncomfortable truth is that the US and Nazi Germany were a lot more similar in terms of their ideology than the propaganda leads people to believe. Hitler even credited the US' policies of genocide against native Americans, eugenics and racial discrimination as inspiration.
This stuff is why businesses need to be equally owned by the workers that do all the work. That power and wealth is diffused throughout the population, not concentraighted in the hands of a few men with fewer morals.
The inequity of our way of life is a existential threat.
We don’t treat other ethnic or religious groups this way. We shouldn’t treat anyone this way.
I can give many examples of non-Jewish businesses with links to Israel that have been targeted by BDS.
Also I never questioned that some targets are non-Jewish. There being some non-Jewish targets who support the self-determination of the people of Israel doesn’t invalidate targets that are placed on synagogues, day cares, schools, community centers, bagel shops, etc on specious grounds.
I'm not local, but I did see random internet comments to the effect that "most local Jewish organizations aren't listed", so it seems plausible that the list might in fact be limited to Zionist organizations and those who do business with htem?
Besides that, remember that the ADL in particular has a history of mapping projects of its own, and went beyond that to actually committing crimes. Either mapping of bigots is acceptable or it is not; the one stance that is obviously wrong is that only some types of bigots are allowed to be mapped.
I think it's important to note that it has been condemned by BDS.
According to the website you linked to - "Even the BDS Movement has called on BDS Boston, a group promoting the Mapping Project, to cease doing so"
I don't know more about the issue than what you shared, and do not know the structure of BDS, but decentralised groups are vulnerable to their sort of thing where one autonomous group undertakes actions that are entirely unacceptable.
It's one of the reasons it is so important for groups to stamp out antisemitism within their own ranks and not let it fester.
Anyways, do you think ADL should be defined by its loose association with genocidal extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir? Because that's the level of guilt-by-association that you are recommending here.
Western companies exiting Russia created several Russian billionaires overnight
Resulting in more tax revenues and money staying within that country
I'm sorry but Western virtue signaling impact is routinely over-exaggerated and actually achieves the complete opposite of what it set out to do
Nonetheless, it does add a lot of friction that slowly grinds away at the economy.
For example:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/russias-arctic-l...
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-sp...
Russia can't sustain autarky on their own, and especially not with their demographics, manpower shortages due to the war, wartime spending, and corruption. Right now they're coasting on what's left of their reserves, but those are finite. Their economy won't outright collapse but it will get more and more inefficient and fragile.
Russia is clearing pulling out ahead and its delusional to think that Ukraine even had a chance to begin with
Quantity always wins over quality.
Do you think Ukraine's demographics are doing any better?
I live in western Europe and every day I hear Ukrainian on the streets . Wherever you go in Europe, Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, etc. it's full of Ukrainians (mostly women and youngsters). How do you think Ukraine's chances of success look like when all their women and youngsters are living abroad? Those are you future and they're not where they're needed most but building up other countries future and economies.
Ukraine is dying the slow death. If Russia doesn't do it, their demographics will. Even if they "win", the victory gained will be bombed out land hosting mostly scarred men and elderly pensioners. How is that a victory?
How is that relevant to the discussion? I only brought it up in the context of Russia not being able to compensate for sanctions with their internal economic output.
It made a largely circumstantial case for IBM's involvement in the holocaust.
Yes - the following things are true:
* Germany used IBM Tabulating Equipment to compile its racial census.
* Deutsch Reichsbahn used IBM Punched Card equipment to run most of its operations.
* The German Government made extensive use of IBM Punched Card equipment to track prisoners, including in the concentration camps.
Beyond those three facts the case is basically circumstantial - Black made a bunch of suppositions when drawing his conclusions -
* IBM New York knew all of the particulars of use of its tabulating equipment, and what the outcomes would be.
* IBM New York had defacto continuing control of its german subsidiary (Dehomag) even after it was functionally nationalized.
* IBM New York provided technology and parts thru IBM Geneva.
* Profits from Dehomag were funneled thru IBM Geneva to IBM New York.
* Most glaringly, he asserts that IBM Punched Card technologies were the only way to do what Nazi Germany did at the scale it did it at.
However he makes the assertions without much backing evidence for it, and its all clouded in an aura of leading purple prose.
This article presents a pretty concise version of the gaping flaws in the book - https://muse.jhu.edu/article/33853
Most notably, the book leaves out important context - even if everything he supposed about IBM were true, what IBM did wasn't unique, it was common corporate practices at the time, indeed, many american corporations had similar subsidiaries, all of whom at a minimum contributed to the german war effort.
Not only an ethically irrelevant assertion, but additionally a scientifically irrelevant assertion: one cannot be expected to research all subjects in all contexts. Black investigated the subject for which he had observations. The rest is up to the rest of us.
https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/The-business-of-makin...
I do remember that Coca-Cola in Germany was not able to use the formula for the eponymous soft drink, and developed Fanta during this time. I do not imagine that much secrecy in tabulating machines was present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag
Looking over the DEHOMAG wiki, there are some curious facts...
"Watson had received Order of the German Eagle medal at the Berlin ICC meeting in 1937, but after Nazis' pogroms against Jews started in 1938 Watson himself wanted to distance himself and IBM from Germans but was convinced not to do so by Secretary of State Hull and he gave up the idea until spring of 1940.
"Leon Krzemieniecki, the last surviving person involved in the administration of the rail transportation to Auschwitz and Treblinka, stated he knew the punched card machines were not German machines, because the labels were in English. Income from the machines leased in General Government was sent through Geneva to IBM in New York."
EDIT: not flagged any more :)
What is even more surprising is that US under Reagan, of all people, had cut off aid and stabilised Israel aggression much more than the current government. Yet, we have bipartisan support for the apartheid genocide machine when they commit even more cruel crimes against humanity.
You can draw a line from there to the NSA, surveillance capitalism, and the commercial data broker markets of today. It's just a matter of time until the information gets used.