07.29.20
Gemini version available ♊︎Declassified 6-8 Years Ago: Thomas Watson Jr. (Son of IBM Founder) as Politician Navigating Cold War Politics
Earlier this week: Meet the IBM Watsons: Sponsors of Richard Nixon and Abusers of Women (the brother)
Watson with Jimmy Carter, January 20th, 1978 (Public Domain)
Summary: While studying the full (and real) history of IBM we’ve stumbled upon interesting bits of diplomatic documents, declassified for public access only as recently as several years ago
LAST week we started researching a bunch of old material for a big piece or a short but very detailed series, which will be 100% factual. Accuracy is the priority. In our endeavour (slow research) we came across all that Holocaust stuff (sort of ‘old news’; there’s literature and films [1, 2, 3] about IBM’s role in Holocaust machinery/implementation). We don’t see the need to cover in depth issues that were already covered properly, as well as in great depth, before. A long time ago (two decades in the past) millions of people became aware of this dark chapter in IBM’s history. We don’t have additional or unique insight in that area.
“Shortly after the father (IBM founder) died Khrushchev decided to go to IBM of all places…”Conspicuously but not mysteriously, not much is said about IBM and “the bomb” (or bombs, as the US has loads of nuclear weapons now). IBM was the dominant force in technology throughout the Cold War era, but a lot of it was understandably shrouded in secrecy. It was — and still is — a sensitive subject (maybe more so because of the current administration). But now in 2020 we know that IBM, being a “patriotic” company in service of supremacist agenda (since its early days, even eugenics), also did nukes. One ought not be shocked that IBM profited a lot from nuke assessment/nuclear simulations, nukes C&C (they still used floppies last year; there are many reports like this one from last year, following up on embarrassing revelations [1, 2, 3] dated 3 years earlier), and nuclear munition recovery. As History.com put it (article updated this year): “Using an IBM computer, experts tried to calculate where the [nuclear] bomb might have landed, but the impact area was still too large for an effective search…”
“Perhaps it’s not too shocking that the ‘Watson sons’ of IBM both eventually entered politics, just like their father.”There’s more to be found regarding the trip of Nikita Khrushchev (Никита Хрущёв) to IBM (video here and here); “During his American tour in 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev toured the IBM factory in San Jose, California,” the latter says and there’s a lot of footage (photography and motion film). Shortly after the father (IBM founder) died Khrushchev decided to go to IBM of all places…
“This is not about ‘bashing’ IBM; it’s about understanding what we’re dealing with.”Perhaps it’s not too shocking that the ‘Watson sons’ of IBM both eventually entered politics, just like their father. That’s why he was getting to meet all sorts of people including Hitler. The military angle of it never helped IBM. IBM is still very close to the US Army and Red Hat's Chairman of the Board was introduced to GNU/Linux when it helped his 'regime change' in Haiti, by his very own admission. IBM now owns Red Hat, which is a close DoD and NSA partner. A match made in Heaven? IBM’s projects that deal with American nuclear arsenals (to this date) go beyond supercomputers; as noted before, many systems responsible for dealing with real nukes — not mere simulations — are IBM systems.
We recently studied documents about Thomas Watson Jr. (the son of the founder) as a US diplomat, representing the US in the Soviet Union (USSR) at a time the Cold War persisted but was no longer at its peak. Using these old documents, which were only declassified some years ago, we gain a slightly better understanding of IBM’s political gameplay and its role in ultimate power games (determining perhaps the fate of human civilisation as a whole; there are enough nukes in each superpower’s arsenal to wipe it all out). We’re going to show transcripts and originals; we’ll abstain from speculation. These documents aren’t easy to find, but they are searchable in Wikileaks and are catalogued sensibly enough for digestion.
This is not about ‘bashing’ IBM; it’s about understanding what we’re dealing with. Corporations and governments have long been connected. █
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