The unsigned blog post on Microsoft’s corporate website appears to be the company’s first public acknowledgement of its deep involvement in the war, which started after Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel and has led to the deaths of tens of thousands in Gaza.
It comes nearly three months after an investigation by The Associated Press revealed previously unreported details about the American tech giant’s close partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, with military use of commercial AI products skyrocketing by nearly 200 times after the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The AP reported that the Israeli military uses Azure to transcribe, translate and process intelligence gathered through mass surveillance, which can then be cross-checked with Israel’s in-house AI-enabled targeting systems and vice versa.
History has been very kind for all military business.
Here the first few lines from the wiki page.
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American companies that had dealings with Nazi Germany included Ford Motor Company,[2][3] Coca-Cola,[4][5] and IBM.[6][7][8] Ford Werke and Ford SAF (Ford’s subsidiaries in Germany and France, respectively) produced military vehicles and other equipment for Nazi Germany’s war effort. Some of Ford’s operations in Germany at the time were run using forced labor. When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they found “destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire.”[9]
Like Swiss banks, American car companies deny helping the Nazi war machine or profiting from forced labor at their German subsidiaries during World War II.[9] “General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland,” according to Bradford Snell. “The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM.”[9]
We didn’t have internet or the means to properly educate ourselves (at least to today’s standards) for much of the 20th century. And now, we’re finally at the point where laypeople anywhere can simply look this stuff up with relative ease. Though, few do or are aware that common corporations are responsible for atrocities.
Thanks for doing your part in spreading that awareness, even if that’s not the point you were trying to make.