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IBM Cooperation With Hitler, Nazis During Holocaust Shows How Corporations Think

Ryan Shaw |
March 3, 2012 | 9:30 a.m. PST

Staff Columnist

(Cover of Edwin Black's book,"IBM and the Holocaust.")
(Cover of Edwin Black's book,"IBM and the Holocaust.")
The Supreme Court concluded in it's ruling in the landmark case Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that corporations are people, and should therefore enjoy all the rights and privileges that go along with personhood. One of the luxuries now afforded to corporations is the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on "Super PACs." These Super PACs hide under seemingly sterile, generic names. Yet they operate with specific purposes, often spending millions on TV ads condemning a specific candidate or issue. They do this with the intention of helping their opponent, thus indirectly contributing to the campaign. You can learn more about Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission here.

So if Corporations are people, why don't we hold them to the same accountability as a regular person? When a corporation steals hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers it's called a "quantitative easing," or more popularly a "bailout."  If you stole $20 from anywhere, you'd be going to jail.  

If you are a person in the United States during World War II and you supported Hitler and the Nazis, you'd be considered a traitor and find yourself incarcerated.  If your the corporation of IBM, well it's just another day at the office.  

IBM worked for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany for years, doing everything from "customer service" to coding individuals by number. This relationship between IBM and the Nazi regime helped to send people to their death. Using generation and tabulation of punch cards, which relied heavily on census data, the Nazis were able to more easily locate Jews, Gypsies and other minorities. Death by gas chamber also had it's own special coding provided by IBM. This just barely scrathes the surface of IBM's involvement with Nazi Germany.

"From the first moments of the Hitler regime in 1933, IBM used its exclusive punch card technology and its global monopoly on information technology to organize, systematize, and accelerate Hitler's anti-Jewish program, step by step facilitating the tightening noose," researcher Edwin Black wrote in his recent Huffington Post piece. Black extensively researched the connection between IBM and Hitler's government in his book, "IBM and the Holocaust."

This raising a critical question. What kind of low-life does it take to not only be content, but to actively participate in the atrocities committed by Hitler's regime in Germany? If IBM were a person, they would be the most contemptable, deplorable person to ever walk the earth. So since we consider corporations people now, maybe we should start holding them accoutable for their inhumane behavior. Or better yet maybe we should stop considering them people in the first place, because they aren't.

Corporations lack the most important human virtue that makes us people. They lack compassion. They lack the ability to understand human suffering, and the consequence of it. They lack the very traits that would make a person a person.  They have no ability for morality.   

Corporations are set up for one sole purpose—to make money.  The path taken to acquire the money is not considered, the lives ruined, not given a moment consideration.  A corporation looks a lot more like a machine than a person.  

Maybe we should start treating them like the machines that they are. And perhaps we ought to start treating eachother like people again.   

 

You can follow Ryan on Twitter here.



 

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