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[usonian]

6. I support IBM's decision, but recognize their ugly past.

IBM, under Thomas Watson helped the nazis exterminate Jews in WWII.

DISCLAIMER: This is historical, in order to show that technology can be used for good or evil. IT'S A CHOICE. Many people choose poorly.

In this week's decision, IBM CHOSE WISELY. And I urge all companies to avoid the hate-filled cesspool that is X/Twitter.


This card-sorting machine is in the Holocaust Museum.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2

It’s a disgrace to history to ignore the power that technology has in facilitating acts of evil — and IBM’s work with the Nazis serves as a prime example of that facilitation.

Beyond questions of morality, the Holocaust presented a number of logistical hurdles to the Nazis, and IBM offered them a perfectly legal solution. Indeed, during the mid-20th century, the software company’s punched-card technology helped the Nazis carry out the genocide of millions.

https://www.jns.org/spotlight/ibm-and-the-holocaust-twenty-years-of-corporate-denial/
‘IBM and the Holocaust’: Twenty Years of Corporate Denial

Twenty years ago, IBM and the Holocaust exposed with crystal clarity—backed up with a literal tower of physical documentation—that IBM knowingly organized all six phases of the Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination, all under the micromanagement of its celebrated CEO, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., operating from his New York office on Madison Avenue, and later through European subsidiaries.

Custom IBM programs controlled the census and registration processes, organized the pauperization, and ensured that the trains ran on time. There was an IBM customer site—the Hollerith Abteilung—in almost every concentration camp—some with tabulating machines and some with card organizers. IBM even engineered Germany’s odious extermination-by-labor campaign, where skills were matched to slave labor needs, and Jews were called up to be worked to death. IBM’s code for a Jewish inmate was “6” and its code for gas chamber was “8.” The evidence indelibly proves that IBM was an indispensable and pivotal partner in the greatest crime in history: The Holocaust. But to IBM, it was just another business project