By: Anthony Knolls

The interesting thing about the Internet is that it has magnified man’s nature to gossip and to reveal things that were meant to be kept secret and spread them all over its digital canvas. Case in point, Wikileaks. Yet still many people don’t know that Leonardo da Vinci did a nude painting of Mona Lisa (they keep it in one of the back rooms in the Louvre, guarded and protected, but they have to show it to you if you ask). I’m not really concerned with people’s ability to forget, though that shall come up soon within this article; but my main concern in regards to the topic I’m about to reveal—no stalling, obviously—is people’s grandiose denials when in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Now, as many of you who have seen the recent commercial made by IBM, which is called ‘Smarter Planet’, the program is the systemized monitoring and analyzing of such things that can be quantifiably tracked, in essence, to make networks “smarter” so as to eliminate, or diminish, information gridlock that could mean, for example, the difference between life and death for those needing medical supplies desperately in desolate countries. The project of course, according to Fortune Magazine, is reportedly going to bring in billions for the company. But similar methodic tactics used by IBM almost 80 years ago that brought in a similar profit for IBM helped in the annihilation of an entire culture: that’s right, IBM is behind the Holocaust!

For those of you who are relatively familiar with the story—it is out there on the World Wide Web—the story was uncovered by Edwin Black, an investigative journalist who’s based his career upon uncovering corporate and governmental scandals that were essentially swiped under the rug. It would be pointless of me to repeat the intricate details of Black’s book (plus it would be borderline plagiarism), but I thought that the example of IBM’s involvement in the Holocaust and subsequent denial of their participation would be a good jumping off point of engaging in conversation about how major corporations’ involvement, just like governmental involvement, can lead to cultural despair.

True, what IBM did could technically be qualified as innocuous and their present-day  ‘Smart Planet’ would possibly save lives. Let’s face it, they never did pull any sort of literal trigger, though a metaphorical trigger could be an appropriate analogy. IBM during the thirties was run by Thomas J. Watson, who had an uphill battle in pulling the company through the Depression, which led the Census-Bureau-like company to take on some relatively shady dealings with 1938’s Time Magazine Man of the Year, Adolf Hitler. Nazi Germany contracted IBM to just catalogue who was a Jew and who wasn’t—refer to Black’s book for a specific picture of exactly everything they did. That sort of information in the hands of a huge anti-Semite leading and brainwashing an entire country against Jews proved lethal, as the Gestapo used IBM’s info for the purposes of tracking down and labeling targets (i.e. Jews and other enemies) that would eventually be taken to Concentration Camps and executed. IBM claimed that they had no idea what the information would be used for, but that’s hard to believe when looking at the context of the situation. No, what it looks like is IBM knew that Jews would be a target of Hitler’s regime and, because they were getting too much money, they didn’t care.

What this equates to is this Faustian-like bargain, in which IBM literally traded in their soul, or their humanity, for money. As of today, the only acknowledgment that IBM has made of their sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust is the company’s donation of $3 million in the German Holocaust fund used to compensate those who suffered under the Nazi’s regime, a relatively pathetic sum when looking at how much IBM and its executives are worth. For a company whose recent goals is transparency in information with their whole ‘Smarter Planet’ project, there is still little to no recognition, and probably never will be, of how big of an influence they were in the Holocaust. And in preemptive response to what many of you might think, ‘Well, even if they do confess some guilt it won’t change anything,’ I have one thing to say to you: If we forget, or even deny, the events of tragic events in the past that have shaken the very core of humanity, then we open the door for it (i.e. greedy corporations praying on cultures for the purpose of funding their egos and lining their pockets with money) to happen again.

To further illustrate this point, I turn to the recent oil spills, as in plural. While many people easily recognize BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest in US history, it was certainly not the first. Before BP ever came out with their lame-brained excuses and apologies for destroying an entire eco-system, Exxon screwed up big, only slightly smaller than Deepwater Horizon (but only slightly), in their screw up in 1989 in Valdez, Alaska, which, like IBM’s involvement with the Holocaust, has received little, if any, recognition by popular media either at the time of the spill or recently—even the long-term effects haven’t been accurately transcribed. While I could be wrong, I never heard any parallels being examined between Exxon’s and BP’s respective screw ups, but rather BP was treated as if it was the first and only oil company to ever cause such a massive catastrophe to any population.

Actually, if you look back on it, oil companies’ hand in massive wars with major casualties, biological destruction to precious eco-systems, and having very little help in amending their destructive habits in order to conform to conscionable standards of most human beings, almost every major oil company has in some way left a path of destruction in their wake, whether directly or indirectly, just as IBM had. If perhaps more effort and attention was put in analyzing and preventing oil spills after Exxon’s stint in Valdez, then perhaps the vastness of BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill would not have been as devastating as it was. Yes, perhaps if attention and recognition is placed upon these historical disasters as a means to understand why and how they happened, then that data could be used in future incidents to downplay or entirely prevent such egregious corporate whoring for the purposes of amassing fortunes of the oily and bloody variety.

And why should corporate responsibility be such an abstract, foreign concept? Why shouldn’t we, as individuals, not only hold governments up to a high standard of moral practice but major corporations as well? Both government and corporations, in recent times, with all these bailouts happening, seem inseparable anyway. Why not take that plunge of highlighting social injustices being done by these corporations and asking for heavier penalties for the ‘messes’—or whatever euphemism you might use—that they create? It is time that IBM and others realize that their ‘Smart Planet’ project(s) and all the money in the world could not buy safe passage into Heaven, no matter what defunct propaganda they hear from their churches. It is time to exercise corporate logic and responsibility when having to deal with tragedy and accidents, because it is not a matter of if another Fortune 500 company will screw up but when.

Capitalist pigs to the rescue!