IBM, Disney, Bush: Nazis?

[jbor]

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>From: Eric Rosenbloom <ericr at sadlier.com>
>

> It is often worth asking about someone or some company, what would they
> have done in Hitler's Germany.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

> (Few of us would have been brave enough
> to help save Jews et al.; most would have done what we could to survive;
> some would have embraced the new dispensation with gusto.)

I think this is the excruciating "reality" which _GR_ represents. Who knew
what? And just supposing "they" did "know", who could have done something?
Who would have? What, exactly? etc I'm thinking of Katje smelling out those
"crypto-Jewish families" while she was working undercover for the
Resistance, for example.

> World
> corporations had the power to choose, and what they did for Hitler says
> something about their business ethics.

As did world leaders, world governments. How does it go again? ... for the
people, by the people, of the people ....

>
> Which is why I agree that getting hung up about Nazis is a problem. They
> were just one especially destructive experiment in imperial corporatism.
> It didn't begin with them, and it didn't end with them. Which makes the
> evil of their corporate collaborators even worse, because it was not
aberration.

Isolating "corporate collaborators" alone misses the larger revelation I
think. (It is also a reflex of self-absolution.) As long as "we" can keep
saying it was someone else -- "They" -- that it was "Their" fault, "Their"
guilt, "They" who are the criminals (and not "Us"), then we can rest easy in
our own superiority and smugness (as we sit in that Orpheus Theatre and
watch the spectacle of historical evil and "Their" complicity unfold). But I
think that the culture of blame which is being perpetuated in these
so-called "reports" is also quite despicable, and that it is the same
"culture of blame" on which Nazism thrived, which they exploited,
manipulated. But I agree with most everything else you have said.

best