The program begins with recap of the adaptation of IBM’s Hollerith machines to Nazi data compilation. (We concluded FTR #1075 with discussion of this.): ” . . . . Germany’s vast state bureaucracy and its military and rearmament programs, including the country’s growing concentration camp/slave labor system, also required data processing services. By the time the U.S. officially entered the war in 1941, IBM’s German subsidiary had grown to employ 10,000 people and served 300 different German government agencies. The Nazi Party Treasury; the SS; the War Ministry; the Reichsbank; the Reichspost; the Armaments Ministry; the Navy, Army and Air Force; and the Reich Statistical Office — the list of IBM’s clients went on and on.
” ‘Indeed, the Third Reich would open startling statistical venues for Hollerith machines never before instituted — perhaps never before even imagined,’ wrote Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust, his pioneering 2001 exposé of the forgotten business ties between IBM and Nazi Germany. ‘In Hitler’s Germany, the statistical and census community, overrun with doctrinaire Nazis, publicly boasted about the new demographic breakthroughs their equipment would achieve.’ . . . .
“Demand for Hollerith tabulators was so robust that IBM was forced to open a new factory in Berlin to crank out all the new machines. At the facility’s christening ceremony, which was attended by a top U.S. IBM executive and the elite of the Nazi Party, the head of IBM’s German subsidiary gave a rousing speech about the important role that Hollerith tabulators played in Hitler’s drive to purify Germany and cleanse it of inferior racial stock. . . .”
In that same article, Yasha Levine notes that the Trump administration’s proposed changes in the 2020 census sound as though they may portend something akin to the Nazi census of 1933: ” . . . . Based on a close reading of internal Department of Commerce documents tied to the census citizen question proposal, it appears the Trump administration wants to use the census to construct a first-of-its-kind citizenship registry for the entire U.S. population — a decision that arguably exceeds the legal authority of the census. ‘It was deep in the documentation that was released,’ Robert Groves, a former Census Bureau director who headed the National Academies committee convened to investigate the 2020 census, told me by telephone. ‘No one picked up on it much. But the term ‘registry’ in our world means not a collection of data for statistical purposes but rather to know the identity of particular people in order to use that knowledge to affect their lives.’ Given the administration’s posture toward immigration, the fact that it wants to build a comprehensive citizenship database is highly concerning. To Groves, it clearly signals ‘a bright line being crossed.’ . . .”
In the conclusion to Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine notes how IBM computing technology facilitated the Nazi slave labor operations throughout the Third Reich. The epicenter of this was Mauthausen.
The systematic use of slave labor was central to Nazi Germany’s industrial infrastructure: ” . . . . But in the 1930s, Mauthausen had been a vital economic engine of Hitler’s genocidal plan to remake Europe and the Soviet Union into his own backyard utopia. It started out as a granite quarry but quickly grew into the largest slave labor complex in Nazi Germany, with fifty sub-camps that spanned most of modern-day Austria. Here, hundreds of thousands of prisoners–mostly European Jews but also Roma, Spaniards, Russians, Serbs, Slovenes, Germans, Bulgarians, even Cubans–were worked to death. They refined oil, built fighter aircraft, assembled cannons, developed rocket technology, and were leased out to private German businesses. Volkswagen, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Bosch–all benefited from the camp’s slave labor pool. Mauthausen, the administrative nerve center, was centrally directed from Berlin using the latest in early computer technology: IBM punch card tabulators. . . .”
Mauthausen’s IBM machines were, in turn, central to German industry’s use of slave labor: ” . . . . the camp had several IBM machines working overtime to handle the big churn of inmates and to make sure there were always enough bodies to perform the necessary work. These machines didn’t operate in isolation but were part of a larger slave labor control-and-accounting system that stretched across Nazi-occupied Europe connecting Berlin to every major concentration and labor punch card, telegraph, telephone, and human courier. This wasn’t the automated type of computer network system that the Pentagon would begin to build in the United States just a decade later, but it was an information network nonetheless: an electromechanical web that fueled and sustained Nazi Germany’s war machine with blazing efficiency. It extended beyond the labor camps and reached into the cities and towns, crunching mountains of genealogical data to track down people with even the barest whiff of Jewish blood or perceived racial impurity in a mad rush to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s drive to purify the German people, but they made the Nazi death machine run faster and more efficiently, scouring the population and tracking down victims in ways that would never have been possible without them. . . .”
In his book–one of the most important in recent memory–Yasha Levine sets forth vital, revelatory information about the development and functioning of the Internet.
Born of the same overlapping DARPA projects that spawned Agent Orange, the Internet was never intended to be something good. Its generative function and purpose is counter-insurgency. ” . . . . In the 1960s, America was a global power overseeing an increasingly volatile world: conflicts and regional insurgencies against US-allied governments from South America to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. These were not traditional wars that involved big armies but guerilla campaigns and local rebellions, frequently fought in regions where Americans had little previous experience. Who were these people? Why were they rebelling? What could be done to stop them? In military circles, it was believed that these questions were of vital importance to America’s pacification efforts, and some argued that the only effective way to answer them was to develop and leverage computer-aided information technology. The Internet came out of this effort: an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. . . .”
In this landmark volume, Levine makes numerous points, including:
1.–The harvesting of data by intelligence services is PRECISELY what the Internet was designed to do in the first place.
2.–The harvesting of data engaged in by the major tech corporations is an extension of the data gathering/surveillance that was–and is–the raison d’etre for the Internet in the first place.
3.–The big tech companies all collaborate with the various intelligence agencies they publicly scorn and seek to ostensibly distance themselves from.
4.–Edward Snowden, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jacob Appelbaum, the milieu of the Tor Network and WikiLeaks are complicit in the data harvesting and surveillance.
5.–Snowden and other privacy activists are double agents, consciously channeling people fearful of having their communications monitored into technologies that will facilitate that surveillance!
The program notes that counterinsurgency–the functional context of the origin of the Internet–is at the foundation of the genesis of Nazism. At the conclusion of World War I, Germany was beset by a series of socialist/Communist uprisings in a number of cities, including Munich. Responding to that, underground Reichswehr units commanded by Ernst Rohm (later head of the SA) systematically assassinated the leaders of the revolution, as well as prominent social democrats and Jews, such as Walther Rathenau. In Munich, an undercover agent for the political department of the Reichswehr under General Von Lossow infiltrated the revolutionaries, pretending to be one of them.
Following the crushing of the rebellion and occupation of the city by Reichswehr units, that infiltrator identified the leaders of the revolution, who were then summarily executed. The infiltrator’s name was Adolf Hitler.
After the suppression of the rebellion, Hitler, Rohm and undercover Reichswehr agents infiltrated a moribund political party and turned it into an intelligence front for the introduction of the supposedly de-mobilized German Army into German society for the purpose of generating political reaction. That front was the German National Social Workers Party.
The broadcast re-capitulates (from part of Miscellaneous Archive Show M11) Hitler’s speech to the Industry Club of Dusseldorf. This speech, which won the German industrial and financial elite over to the cause of the Nazi Party, equated democracy with Communism.
Manifesting a Social Darwinist perspective, Hitler opined that the [assembled] successful, accomplished were, by definition superior to others. If those, by definition, inferior people were allowed to control the political process, they would structure the social and economic landscape to their own benefit.
This, according to Hitler, would be counter-evolutionary.
Beginning a critically important series on a vitally important book titled Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, this program explores the genesis of high tech and data processing, an origin that is inextricably linked with eugenics, anti-immigrant doctrine and–as is characteristic of fascism, the fear of the ubiquitous, malevolent “other.”
Highlights of discussion and analysis include:
1.–The genesis of high tech was Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine. ” . . . . A few years earlier, working for the U.S. Census Bureau, Hollerith had developed the world’s first functional mass-produced computer: the Hollerith tabulator. An electromechanical device about the size of large desk and dresser, it used punch cards and a clever arrangement of gears, sorters, electrical contacts, and dials to process data with blazing speed and accuracy. What had taken years by hand could be done in a matter of months. As one U.S. newspaper described it, ‘with [the device’s] aid some 15 young ladies can count accurately half a million of names in a day.’ . . .’
2.–Hollerith’s machine found its (arguably) greatest application with the compilation of the census and the application of the pseudo-science of eugenics to it: ” . . . . Grasping about for solutions, many settled on various strains of race science quackery. So-called social Darwinists relied on a twisted version of the theory of evolution to explain why the poor and marginalized should remain that way while the wealthy and successful deserved to rule unchallenged. Taking this notion a step further, adherents of eugenics fervently believed that naturally superior Anglo-Americans were on the verge of being wiped out due to the high birth rates of ‘degenerate’ and immigrant stock. To head off this threat, they advocated strict controls on reproduction — breeding humans for quality in the same way that farmers did cows and horses. . . .”
3.–Hollerith’s machine was seen as the perfect vehicle for realizing eugenic practice through refining the census: ” . . . . The census had been a racial instrument from its inception, beginning with the original constitutional clause that instructed census officials to count black slaves separately from whites and to assign them a value of only three-fifths of a person. With each decade, new ‘racial’ categories were invented and added to the mix: ‘free colored males and females’ and ‘mulatto’ were counted, including subdivisions like including ‘quadroon’ and ‘octoroon.’ Categories for Chinese, ‘Hindoo,’ and Japanese were added, as were ‘foreign’ and ‘native born’ designations for whites. The census slowly expanded to collect other demographic data, including literacy levels, unemployment statistics, and medical ailments, such as those who were ‘deaf, dumb, and blind’ and the ‘insane and idiotic.’ All of it was broken down by race. . . .The census needed to improve drastically. What it needed was a talented inventor, someone young and ambitious who would be able to come up with a method to automate tabulation and data analysis. Someone like Herman Hollerith. . . .”
4.–Hollerith’s technology–when applied to the census, anticipated the mass surveillance technology of the internet: ” . . . . Overnight, Hollerith’s tabulator technology had transformed census taking from a simple head count into something that looked very much like a crude form of mass surveillance. To the race-obsessed political class, it was a revolutionary development. They could finally put the nation’s ethnic makeup under the microscope. The data seemed to confirm the nativists’ worst fears: Poor, illiterate immigrants were swarming America’s cities, breeding like rabbits, and outstripping native Anglo-American birth rates. Immediately following the census, the states and the federal government passed a flurry of laws that heavily restricted immigration. . . .”
5.–As discussed in FTR #279, IBM’s Hollerith machines (acquired when Thomas J. Watson bought out Hollerith) were fundamental to the operations of the Third Reich: ” . . . . ‘Indeed, the Third Reich would open startling statistical venues for Hollerith machines never before instituted — perhaps never before even imagined,’ wrote Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust, his pioneering 2001 exposé of the forgotten business ties between IBM and Nazi Germany. ‘In Hitler’s Germany, the statistical and census community, overrun with doctrinaire Nazis, publicly boasted about the new demographic breakthroughs their equipment would achieve.’ . . . Demand for Hollerith tabulators was so robust that IBM was forced to open a new factory in Berlin to crank out all the new machines. At the facility’s christening ceremony, which was attended by a top U.S. IBM executive and the elite of the Nazi Party, the head of IBM’s German subsidiary gave a rousing speech about the important role that Hollerith tabulators played in Hitler’s drive to purify Germany and cleanse it of inferior racial stock. . . .”
6.–The Trump administration’s framing of questions for the 2020 census appear aimed at creating a “national registry”–a concept reminiscent of the Third Reich’s use of IBM’s Hollerith-collected data: ” . . . . Based on a close reading of internal Department of Commerce documents tied to the census citizen question proposal, it appears the Trump administration wants to use the census to construct a first-of-its-kind citizenship registry for the entire U.S. population — a decision that arguably exceeds the legal authority of the census. ‘It was deep in the documentation that was released,’ Robert Groves, a former Census Bureau director who headed the National Academies committee convened to investigate the 2020 census, told me by telephone. ‘No one picked up on it much. But the term ‘registry’ in our world means not a collection of data for statistical purposes but rather to know the identity of particular people in order to use that knowledge to affect their lives.’ Given the administration’s posture toward immigration, the fact that it wants to build a comprehensive citizenship database is highly concerning. To Groves, it clearly signals ‘a bright line being crossed.’ . . .”
2014 could have been better for Bitcoin. After peaking near $1100 in December 2013, Bitcoin is currently under $250. 2014 was not a good year for Bitcoin.
But that doesn’t mean 2015 has to be the same. And if a slew of recent announcement involving some very big investors are any indication of what to expect, the mainstreaming Bitcoin is about to get a big boost. But that boost could come with a big price too. All those “microtransactions” of as little as 0.000000001 of one bitcoin (BTC) that much of the Bitcoin community hates so much is precisely what these deep pocketed interests are planning on promoting in a big way. And in order to make it all happen, they might have to become some of the biggest bitcoin miners around too. And that means the future of Bitcoin is increasing in the hands of ‘The Man’. Also, the microtransactions might be used to monetize how we access the web. And how the Internet of Things spies on us. It doesn’t actually sound very fun.
This ninth interview fills in the details concerning a mysterious cast of characters in Indonesia who were investigating the late president Sukarno’s Revolutionary Fund. That fund appears to have derived from large amounts of World War II wealth stolen by Japan and Germany. Dr. Sosro Husodo alleged in a book that a mysterious Nazi named Dr. Anton Poch was actually Hitler. That allegation has never been proved, however the stories of Poch, Husodo, Dr. Edison Damanik and an Indonesian arms dealer named Soeryo Goeritno are indicative of a massive, ongoing cover-up of the political and economic dynamics underlying their situations. Expanding the scope of the inquiry to the capital flows asssociated with the Third Reich, its postwar underground phase and institutions associated with and/or evolving from Nazism, the programs sets forth a number of considerations: the financing of the postwar German economic miracle by German corporations; the frustration of the de-Nazification of corporate Germany by the Third Reich’s prominent American economic backers; the enormous scale of the Nazi economic diaspora; the role of Klaus Barbie and his “Fiancees of Death” in ODESSA-related operations; Colonia Dignidad and its role in laundering ODESSA money.
IBM’s president and corporate leadership micro-managed the liquidation of European Jews in close partnership with the SS.
Significant overlapping of political and economic powers within the milieu of international fascism.
As the global energy industry is deregulated, energy corporations are crossing national boundaries.
IBM was central to the economic operations of Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.
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