Highly recommend listening to this HBR podcast about the same topic. [1]
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].
This is where government sanctions come in. While some companies may behave morally, we can't expect that they all will when there is money to be made.
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.
I think the moral obligation is slightly different when you have capabilities that no other firm has. I believe IBM falls into that category then, a company like ASML would now. Google Cloud would not: Israel can get cloud services anywhere.
(note this is true regardless of your feelings on the morality of Israel's government's choices)
If anything, "Israel can get cloud services anywhere" is an argument that Google should be even less inclined to take their money. If they have alternatives, it's not even as much money as it would be if they don't.
> I think the moral obligation is slightly different when you have capabilities that no other firm has.
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.
There is a line between saying "I am a business person and therefore I don't judge people with different values" and saying "I am a business person and therefore I expect not to be judged for my lack of ethical behavior".
As a complication, it's important to state that concentration camps were not against international laws at the time! Pursing racist and eugenic policies was in vogue, and many of Germany's concentration camps were toured and audited by the Red Cross before the war!
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.
I don't think eugenics by means of killing people was ever widely considered moral or even a gray area.
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.
> I don't think eugenics by means of killing people was ever widely considered moral or even a gray area.
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).
Indeed, the US had their own camps that they filled with Japanese, Germans, Italians and a few others. Of course they were relatively nicer to the people placed in the camps.
I think McDonald's would condemn and distance itself from a high-profile customer or partner that was responsible for highly illegal activity like that. Like it did with Russia.
ISIS propaganda isn't a crime, and anyone can be smeared as an ISIS propagandist for questioning any military decision or explanation (it's almost exclusively how Anglo-American politics is done these days.) Using unwritten and unconstitutional speech crimes as the benchmark for criminality is scary. Call me when some military contractor is helping jihadists find targets in Syria.
For the past 1000 years, Jews have fled antisemitic Europe for the relative safety of Muslim countries. The British turning Palestine over to Europe's Jewish refugees and its subsequent transformation into an ethnostate eventually changed this, but ideological antisemitism in the Muslim world is almost entirely imported from Europe and translated European/American writings.
Europe may not have a deeper shared value than its antisemitism, extended from late Rome. Even with the Reformation, one of the main things Protestants were protesting (other than indulgences) was the Catholic church allowing Jews who refused to convert to remain alive. Whereas Islamic countries just imposed a tax on Jews and Christians alike.
Even during the run-up to WWII, America and Britain minimized and ridiculed the complaints of European Jews, and refused people running for their lives entry into their countries. It's psychologically obvious why Europeans and Americans collectively want to locate the source of antisemitism in the Middle East, rather than the continent Jews were forced to flee from.
The Romans weren't particularly antisemitic, unless you define antisemitic as "opposing Jewish interests." There was a lot of bad blood between them and the Jews in that sense.
In one of the Jewish-Roman wars, Kitos War[1], here's what happened:
> 32 Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Many they sawed in two, from the head downwards. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators. In all, consequently, two hundred and twenty thousand perished. In Egypt, also, they performed many similar deeds, and in Cyprus under the leadership of Artemio. There, likewise, two hundred and forty thousand perished. For this reason no Jew may set foot in that land, but even if one of them is driven upon the island by force of the wind, he is put to death. Various persons took part in subduing these Jews, one being Lusius, who was sent by Trajan. [2]
It's not intellectually honest to mention Roman "antisemitism" and not mention that the Jews were very deliberately genocidal. They were absolutely not just innocent victims.
Wait, so in another words, if a bunch of people from come on over from Europe, set themselves up in an aggressive manner, proceed to kick out Palestinians, and then also say that hey all Jews that still live outside of Israel are welcome to come, you are surprised that local Arab populations don't feel super happy about that?
What exactly did you expect would happen? You know that 12 Million Germans got kicked out post-WW2 out of the entirety of Eastern Europe for an analogous reason?
I say this as a Red Town Juhuri, some of the arguments used by Ashkenazis/Sephardics are beyond insane. Your original comment(to the GP) that you since edited literally suggests that the Holocaust(done by Europeans) gives Israel the right to do whatever the fuck it wants to protect "the last stand of Judaism".
I don’t think Israel has carte blanche to do whatever it wants. I think the point of GP’s comment is that the situation is substantially more complicated than the settler-colonial framing (although it does include settlers and political Zionists who have repeatedly ignored international law).
Concretely, Israel is the product of (1) both political and religious Zionist movements, (2) a massive refuge movement by Jews who could no longer live in Europe, (3) a similarly sized refugee movement of Sephardim and Mizrahim from the Middle East, and (4) people (both Muslim and Jewish) already living in the borders of Israel. These divisions deserve consideration for the same reason that the Palestinian people do not deserve collective punishment or blanket association with terror by Israel and its military.
(This is my viewpoint as a non-Zionist American Jew.)
>I think the point of GP’s comment is that the situation is substantially more complicated than the settler-colonial framing
Did you read his original comment? He was talking about how the Jews got chased out of their homeland by a "pedophile warlord" and how Jews have to make a last stand for Judaism. If they weren't both dead, it might as well have come from Baruch Goldstein or Meir Kahane themselves.
I don't disagree with anything you say, but if you look at his own numbers of Jews that had to flee Muslim countries after the establishment of Israel they are in the ballpark of what Palestinians went through with the Nakba. There were a lot of massive ethnic cleansings and deportation events post-WW2 based on the "ethnostates are good" / "minorities are the fifth column" ideas that were all fucked up and Sephardi/Mizrahi don't have a privilege in saying theirs was uniquely evil.
(If it was edited away from what you’ve said, then I’m not going to defend the original comment. And I agree that what happened to middle eastern Jews is not uniquely evil; only that it ought to color our understanding of the overall situation.)
>(2) a massive refuge movement by Jews who could no longer live in Europe
This one is a head-scratcher.
Europe, European crimes, European antisemitism, European pogroms, Europe Europe Europe. Also European double-dealing of the mandate of Palestine after Lawrence of Arabia, Sykes-Picot, all of that stuff.
A lot of the Middle East’s problems can be identified with European meddling (and domestic atrocities), yes. But that meddling is not a necessary or sufficient condition (there’s plenty of ancient religious and ethnic hate, irredentism, etc. to go around).
Well, equating IBM selling to Nazis with Google (or whoever) selling to Israel could be considered antisemitic. For some reason, people love to bring up Nazi comparisons with Israel, but not with other nations. I wonder why that is. Even people who hate the idea of Google doing business with the US government haven't(as far as I've read) used the comparison of IBM selling to Nazi Germany.
What do you imagine the outcome of the conversation would be?
If someone never explicitly said anything bad about black people, but always lamented the crime rate in America when black people came up, I would guess that the person is racist.
And I claimed that hyperbolic Nazi comparisons are far more common when dealing with Israel than with any other nation. That is not saying that people don't protest other nations.
You are giving too much credit to the "people". The "people" are stupid and parrot the garbage they consume. The organizations/nations that push that agenda are more interesting to look at and investigate.
I mean, FWIW, yes: internally and externally, people compared Project Maven to IBM doing business with Nazi Germany. There was significant concern among engineers that Google was going down a path of repeating the mistakes of a prior generation.
No one is quelling the conversation. You are omitting details in your comment to get readers to agree with a false premise. Workers faced consequences for illegally occupying their boss’s office and spending 10 hours screaming and refusing the leave after being trespassed.
Edit: the irony of ironies is you taking this stance, because this submission is now flagged, whereas the AI targeting submission was discussed on hn.
I know this topic resurfaced due to the Googler protest scandal but nothing really changed under the surface since then. A lot of western corporations are still active in Russia today after the invasion. Corporations don't heave a soul or moral compass, they don't care who they hurt or kill, they just follow the money.
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.
Actually things have changed for IBM. Speaking as an IBM employee, but not on behalf of IBM, my team (and I suspect all others) had to identify any work done by Russian IBM employees and then subsequently divested ourselves of those employees and offices during the start of the invasion of Ukraine.
Throwaway for obvious reasons. Do you mean that you've "divested" yourselves from the employees of Russian IBM branch or from anyone who's a Russian national?
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?
Not OP, but I believe for most companies including IBM the policy was "anyone residing within Russia who did not wish to or could not relocate outside of Russia" would be terminated. If you did relocate (and I believe some assistance was provided) then you were fine.
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.
> Corporations don't heave a soul or moral compass, they just follow the money.
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.
The business plot [1] was the potential inflection point in the USA where fascism could have enveloped the nation. (IMO). We got lucky. We STILL are getting lucky.
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.
It seems entirely possible that the business plot succeeded, just with someone other than Smedley Butler as the figurehead. Despite Smedley informing congress of the plot, it seems no disciplinary action was taken against the conspirators.
Yeah, the sanctions against Russia were among the most severe in history, and widely observed by Western corporations. That they failed is a different discussion. Meanwhile, BDS is a "hate crime".
BDS is not a hate crime, but the movement is hateful in the methods it employs. It assumes all Jewish entities are guilty by association, unless they make an effort to proclaim their ideological alignment with anti-Israel ideology. Jews are seen by this movement as Zionist-by-default until they declare otherwise, and it takes a very small amount of circumstantial evidence to be targeted for boycott.
We don’t treat other ethnic or religious groups this way. We shouldn’t treat anyone this way.
I think you are making things up; if not, can you give an example of a "Jewish entity" with no significant links to Israel that was explicitly targeted by BDS?
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 didn't investigate all of the obviously Jewish entities in the "Mapping Project", but I looked up half a dozen and all but one of them had explicit "we support Israel in their conflict with Palestine" language at least, and some were actively raising funds for that explicit purpose. (note that most of the list is non-Jewish organizations)
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.
They are targeting Zionists. That the most active Zionist actors are Jewish doesn’t make it a witch hunt based on religion. Also lol at the level of Main Character Syndrome involved in using a phrase like “the self-determination of the people of Israel” - I wonder if any other people in those parts could do with some self-determination?
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.
Others have brought up good points about why this is a weak example.
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.
Sanctions do work, but anyone claiming that they would single handedly crush the Russian economy in a matter of months were delusional, especially due to all of the avoidance going on through Turkey and Kazakhstan.
Nonetheless, it does add a lot of friction that slowly grinds away at the economy.
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 can't sustain autarky on their own, and especially not with their demographics
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?
> Do you think Ukraine's demographics are doing any better?
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.
Especially when your leaders, elites telling economically disenfranchised Ukranian men to a meat grinder while they themselves live abroad and have acquired German citizenship
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.
> even if everything he supposed about IBM were true, what IBM did wasn't unique
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.
He claimed in 2002, after the book was published, to have found additional evidence that IBM established a Polish subsidiary after Germany invaded Poland to sell machines to the Nazi government.
Though I also read the book, I don't remember the details of DEHOMAG control via Switzerland, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a paper trail of directives from Armonk, NY via the Swiss to maximize DEHOMAG's market.
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.
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."
The issue is, there isn't a paper trail - now TJ Watson wasn't a big leaver of paper either. He learned at working at NCR - but this was an era when international phone calling was prohibitive.
Google and Amazon are actively involved in the largest man-made famine since WWII, and we’re not even allowed to discuss it on HN (you know the conflict I’m talking about, every post about the genocide gets flagged immediately).
This is true, It was absolutely ridiculous to see even UN articles getting flagged to death. All the while absolute propaganda were still actively get promoted. An argument can be made that HN has to not keep discussions going to flamewar. I would acknowledge that I have learned much kore about the issues through HN. And it is much more clear to me that the responsibility almost completely lies on the west, both colonial and neo colonial entities there.
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.
While this is an important part of history to know, the story didn't stop there, and certainly not with IBM. Computers/primitive-databases were also used to manage Japanese internment in the US, also using Census data. The Stasi used improved technologies to their advantage until the 80s.
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.
If only those engineers at IBM had looked into their crystal ball and known that Adolf Hitler was a bad egg, then they wouldn't have done a census and then everything would be great today.
A genocide need not be a continent wide phenomenon. Systematically killing people with specific tags based on ethnicity, religion or regional markers are under the purview of it. And for a detailed explanation you can refer to the ICJ ruling on the current one.
Israel is killing fewer civilians per legal combatant than any other anti-terror war in the middle east, even by HAMAS's numbers.
In WW2, Germans suffered greatly when they were loosing the war, including malnutrition as resources got tighter and tighter. Germans starved because their country refused to make peace with their neighbors.
Palestine is no different. HAMAS is the internationally recognized government of Palestine, and they chose to target and murder 1200ish innocent civilians who were in Israel. When you do that to your neighbor, you should not be surprised when they shoot back.
Well, supposedly Palestinians are very supportive of targeting and murdering Israel civilians, so maybe that's why they don't stop HAMAS from doing so.
Losing a war is not genocide. When we firebombed the Japanese, or Nuked them, that was not Genocide. When millions of soviets died defending their homeland, that was not genocide, even though Hitler himself wanted to exterminate "slavs" eventually.
The plight of the Palestinians is truly awful, and in many ways Israel actively makes it worse. Things like their god awful "AI" BS system so that the IDF can pretend to not feel so bad about killing innocent Palestinians are atrocious. Things like the IDF being significantly made up of undertrained conscripts without the discipline to not steal shit from Palestinian homes is awful and unacceptable. Things like the stupid settlement bullshit on the West Bank, which is straight out of 1800s Europe or what Russia is trying to do right now with Ukraine and Georgia and other former soviet states, are unacceptable.
Protesting interaction with Israel for those reasons, like wanting to not support an authoritarian regime that does things like that is great, and commendable.
Carrying water for actual anti-semites using this situation to spread hatred of Jews and downplaying the holocaust is not great, and not commendable.
Be careful, while trying to be a good person, that you do not make accidental bedfellows with the kind of people who sent death threats to a local town for putting up a fucking star of David to celebrate Hanukah, as if simply being Jewish makes you guilty of Israel's bad actions. Thanks to people like that, Jewish people all over the world are experiencing hatred. Don't help the people doing that. They are the ones pushing "Fighting back is Genocide" and they are doing it because they don't like jewish people.
Losing a war is not Genocide. Blockades are acts of war, but not Genocide. Unrestricted submarine warfare was also intended to literally starve the British public to death, and that was not Genocide. Most war crimes aren't Genocide either. You can commit war crimes without committing genocide. Hell, even what Russia did with kidnapped Ukrainian citizens will probably never be recognized as genocide.
With respect, this is a myopic view. Gaza has been blockaded for a long time now. Sea, Air and Land. Not years, but more than a decade. Israel has restricted the calorie per citizen even before these recent events. Prevented them from collecting rainwater. Blowed up buildings hosting International media without scrutiny. It did not start with the recent events. And please do not compare with Germany, Britain or Japan, they had Large standing militaries, navies, and airforce. You simply can't say this is such a war.
Two things can be true at once. Jewish people and other groups were exterminated by the Nazi regime ~80 years ago, and now Palestinian peoples are getting exterminated by the Zionist regime.
If there is any "Holocaust inversion" being done, it's probably by Gilad Erdan who uses his privileged seat at the UN to wield a Nazi-era Star of David patch while rationalizing the bombing of schools and hospitals.
The far left hasn’t adopted Zionism. Are you saying that “Zionism” doesn’t exist, that it’s something in the imagination of the far left? Benny Morris (e.g.) would disagree.
Call me old fashioned, but I've only ever heard the term 'Zionism'/zionist bandied about by conspiracy theoriests of the antisemitic variety. I'm saying that the adherents of the far left are finding common cause with the scumbags on the right in their hatred of Jews and Judiasm. And personally, I find it alarming.
There’s so much Hamas support combined with rank antisemitism at every single “pro” Palestine rally in recent memory [1][2][3].
And it just gets swept under the rug by legacy media. Imagine the outrage if the same exact behavior was documented of anyone identifying as politically on the right.
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...
[2] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/