Washington – Along with its more gruesome and horrific artifacts, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a mundane relic on display: a Hollerith data processing machine.
This banal card-sorting device, manufactured by a subsidiary of IBM, was used to expedite the murder of millions of Jews and other Holocaust victims. Hollerith machines kept the trains on time. The Gestapo used Holleriths in the death camps.
“We are recording the individual characteristics of every single member of the nation onto a little card” so that Adolf Hitler could calculate what “unhealthy conditions must be cured by corrective interventions,” bragged the head of IBM’s German subsidiary in 1934.
The museum’s Hollerith display offers a warning of how American scientists and businesses, following the trail of capitalist logic, can slide into the embrace of evil.
It is a particularly relevant lesson now, as the cream of the U.S. high- tech industry has been found cooperating with Chinese leaders to censor the Internet and jail dissidents.
The Chinese “system of forced labor camps is still full to capacity, with an estimated 6 million people,” Rep. Christopher Smith, R- N.J., reminded representatives from Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Yahoo! at a congressional hearing last month.
Smith also said, China’s “draconian one-child- per-couple policy has made brothers and sisters illegal and coerced abortion commonplace. … “Political and religious dissidents are systematically persecuted and tortured.”
Microsoft has shut down Chinese blogs. Google helped China build a censored search engine. Yahoo! surrendered data that led to the imprisonment of dissidents. Cisco offers security forces a 21st century Hollerith: a data system called PoliceNet.
These are no Old Economy cave-dwellers. These Internet companies are America’s pride, born with noble purpose, the supposed champions of individual freedom and creativity.
But China is “a big cake,” said dissident Harry Wu. The tech firms “want money. And the money is having the smells of blood.”
The companies argue, accurately, that they are obliged to comply with Chinese law. And they note how U.S. foreign policy, for four decades, has been centered on the belief that prolonged exposure to Western freedoms, free-market capitalism and subversive tools like the Internet will shatter China’s totalitarian regime.
As long as the Internet remains its rambunctious self, “we anticipate the Chinese government will find it very difficult, in fact perhaps an exercise in futility, to try to control the flow of information,” said James Keith, a senior State Department adviser.
Laws that crack down on U.S. firms doing business in China could prove counterproductive.
“A withdrawal from China of companies that were committed to building the Internet based on global standards would have the effect of potential balkanization of the Internet, and a closing down of information availability rather than an expansion of it,” warned Cisco vice president Mark Chandler.
And veteran China hand and business author James McGregor, at a sold-out conference on China at the American Enterprise Institute last week, said Americans should recognize the limits of U.S. power after our experience in Iraq.
“We can’t control anybody. Have we learned any lessons in the last five years?” McGregor said. “China is funding our budget deficit. When President Bush goes to China, he’s meeting with our biggest banker.”
More engagement, not less, is the answer, said McGregor. China may be too big to coerce, but its people can be converted.
“Think of yourself as a totalitarian dictatorship. It’s the last thing you want: a couple of hundred thousand American businessmen and grad students running around China making friends with your people,” he said. “The power we have is the power of nibbling.”
Nibbling takes years, and patience, and vigilance. And we will need to look to our own souls, lest we become, like the makers of the Holleriths, that which we fear.
“These companies tell us they will change China,” warned Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., the only Holocaust survivor in Congress. “But China has already changed them.”
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Comment at the Washington and the West blog () or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
