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His
exhaustive mapping of IBM's corporate intrigues is sufficiently
damning that one cannot find fault with Black's argument
that Dehomag "designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable
technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish
what had never been done before--the automation of human
destruction". ...Black is scrupulously exact in building
his case. There are more than 60 pages of footnotes and
source listings. ... Black's book becomes truly terrifying
in its implications. Because it demonstrates, with chilling
clarity, the ease with which a multinational company's reach
supersedes even a national government's. This book not only
unearths an important part of history, but it also ought
to make every thinking reader reconsider seriously the ominous
undertones to the soundbite of "Think global, act local"
when applied to multinational behemoths.
Ong
Sor Fern
Book Editor
The Straits Times, Hong Kong
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Some
years back, while browsing through the Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington DC, I was struck by one exhibit that
somehow stood out from the macabre exhibits of mutilated
bodies, mass graves, firing squads, and gas chambers. It
was a computer machine with the name so familiar in the
modern business world, yet totally unexpected to be associated
with the Nazi era: IBM. As an IT professional, it was quite
disturbing to see that one of the earliest and most "effective"
IT applications was used as a key component in the torture
and murder of six million innocent people. ... Computer
technology may be a trillion dollar industry. It may make
people rich beyond their wildest dreams. But when it comes
to IT and integrity, we need to ask ourselves one hard question:
Do we want to get rich by having our names and our companies'
names forever written in blood and tears for generations
to see? It was a question that Thomas John Watson Sr apparently
never asked himself.
Ping
na Thalang
Bangkok Post
The
Hollerith practically played a thousand and one uses for
Nazi Germany. And for 12 years of Hitler, IBM facilitated
in the identification and roundup of millions of Jews. Hollerith
was more than just a punch card and tabulating machine.
Its other critical functions: facilitating the first racial
census to purify the "master race;" and helping to organize
deportations and concentration camps. Black accused Watson
of having been aware that IBM's technology was in effect
making it easy for Hitler to carry on his campaign of "ethnic
cleansing." IBM's know-how was indispensable in such efforts
as social expulsion and expropriation, directing trains
to run on time from one city to another, and to concentration
camps.
Elinando
Cinco
Manila Bulletin
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Edwin
Black's book is both a vista to a nauseating past and a
profound eye-opener for the future inhabitants of the planet
that inculcating zero tolerance for genocide is simply not
enough. What is also needed is zero tolerance for the technology
of genocide.
Sreeram Chaulia
Asia Times
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IBM's
development of automated punch card technology was tailor-made
for the Nazis, bent as the latter were on hunting down both
religious and so-called "ancestral" Jews as well as other
"undesirables." ...Black has done a major service to the history
of this awful period. What it tells us about the amorality
of one of America's major players in the darkest episode
in modern history and the way it has finally been uncovered
is, in my view at least, yet another argument for the free
flow of information.
David Jardine
Jakarta Post
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