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Corporations Rule
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Other 196's:
While it's not wrong to be cynical about it, this isn't exactly the right reason. The Nazis would just take over companies and install new leadership if they were inadequately supportive.
It's not even "if I don't do it, someone else will, so I may as well do it". A lot of people did refuse to do it and were arrested or fired.
Beyond that, everyone involved in the decision is dead now. They could have all been Nazis and that would have little bearing on if the people who work there now were.
The reason to be cynical is because companies can't care about things, so if they say they do it's a lie.
People inside the company might care, and might find a way to get the company to do something good, but that's a person finding a way to use the company for good, not the company caring or being good.
Unlike the Nazis, no one is forcing them to embrace pride. They do it because they think it's a profitable demographic.
The family that still owns large parts of BMW had multiple members in the NSDAP and other Nazi organisations. They made a fortune with selling military equipment to fuel world war 2 and they kept most of that fortune after the war.
They were absolutely deliberate in what they did and the only thing that coerced them was their greed.
Oh, I'm not defending BMW or any company in specific regarding Nazism. I'm saying the actions and beliefs of dead people who used to run the company are the wrong reasons for cynicism, particularly in the context of a violent and coercive regime.
A company doesn't have opinions so it can't support anything, good or evil. It makes as much sense to be cynical of "posters" because there have also been evil posters.
on the other hand, bmw didn't really exist outside germany at that time, like most companies pre-globalization. if the choice was between "collaborate" and "stop existing" it becomes murkier.
I assume it is by ignorance of the history, but you should be very careful not to make apologies for Nazi collaborators unless you know for sure that they were coerced. BMW and the Quandts went way beyond what would be explicable by coercion. The reason why you didnt hear more of it is because the UK and US protected Quandt like they protected many other Nazis in order to quickly build up a right wing bulwark against the "communist threat" in Europe. Claiming to have been coerced is the typical excuse and repeating this narrative is helping fascists and their allies to revision history.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quandt_(Familie)
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deepl:
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no i know. i was generalizing. bmw in particular is not easily defended.
No it doesn't. We already established how much of a defense 'just following orders' allows, and that's exactly as much defense these companies deserve: none.
You're confusing a personal and moral decision with an economic one.
A company, the legal entity, is not a person (despite what some people say) and it can't make any moral decisions. For a company the decision between "collaborate" and "stop existing" isn't murky nor is it a hard one. Corporations exist to continue operating and to continue making money. They are machines built to do that one thing.
Now the people who run the company, are different. They are humans and they are capable of making moral decisions.
BMW is also an interesting example because they didn't really make cars before hand. They made one model which was more or less of a failure until they were nationalized by the Nazi party to make aircraft engines and other vehicles. So the people who owned it did decide to jump ship when the company was taken over.
I'm not confusing them, I'm refusing to accept a moral dodge that a corporation (which is just a bunch of people hiding behind a legal piece of paper) and the people making the decision should be held to different standards.
It's like saying that a leadership position can't commit crimes, but the person elected to that position can. The person is still making the call, but it's somehow different because reasons.
i mean i agree, and i'm not saying that the owner family should be absolved for supporting the nazis, but companies are not people and in a capitalist world, especially in a country where "useless eaters" are vilified like in nazi germany, shutting down and thereby putting hundreds of thousands of workers out of a job would have huge consequences for the own population no matter the allegiance of a particular company.
however, it is also true that bmw in particular was very happy to collaborate and employed actual slave labor from concentration camps so that point is eroded somewhat...
That's kinda my point. This isn't 'oh no, we have to collaborate or die', this is 'oh, we have to collaborate? Cool, fuck those subhuman rats'.
Nazi collaboration companies killed people and contributed to countless human rights violations. Being 'forced' to collaborate is just a convenient excuse to wave away their crimes and how some of the people behind the companies were spared by justice because capital is convenient to capture.
yeah it was a bad decision to generalize on my part.
Maybe it’s just liberalism Stockholm syndrome talking, but I find it somehow comforting that communicating support for LGBT+ issues is considered a good business move.
It’s an important bell-weather. Hate might be increasingly popular, but it’s still not a good way to make money.
So yeah, rainbow capitalism is crass and self serving and shallow. But it also means the global economic elite aren’t quite ready embrace full on queer killing Nazis just yet.
It's precisely a good bell-weather! It means that the cold money monsters think gay people and their supporters have more money, and hate doesn't have the power to punish them. It also means that good people who work for the company feel safe saying "donating resources to LGBT teen suicide prevention would be great.... Advertising?" And the money monsters don't disagree, and the bad people don't have enough sway to squash it.
Rainbow capitalism is a parasite that feeds on social tolerance. It's gross that it showed up, but it couldn't unless society was in an at least moderately healthy place.
Just don't fall into the trap of personifying the companies that do many people do.
BMW didn't exactly need to be forced, they were directly involved in the Holocaust.
Or in BMWs case
"I'll do it".
Fair. Not intending to convey sympathy for companies and the people in them that supported Nazism, to be clear.
They're not people that can have opinions to flip-flop. They're legal fictions made of people who are now dead.