"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."*That quote comes to mind because of a lengthy story in the Washington Post concerning the number of American and other Western technology companies that are eagerly selling repressive regimes the tools necessary to track down dissidents.**
Cisco is apparently one of the biggies when it came to the Chinese construing their Great Firewall. Other facilitators of repression include Blue Coat Systems, NetApp and TeleStrategies (U.S.), Gamma International and Cobham (U.K.), Digitask and Elaman (
Buyers of this stuff include such peace-loving and democratic regimes as Libya under Ghaddafi, Egypt under Mubarak, Syria and Iran. The nations where Arab Spring protests have taken place have been buying this gear and software to help them target dissidents and protestors.
Our government is a huge buyer of this stuff, as well.
Can you name an American corporation that would not willingly cooperate with the destruction of our freedoms if they thought they could make a buck out of it? If corporations are people,****, then corporations are about as amoral a bunch of psychopaths as you might find, outside of a Supermax prison.
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* OK, maybe Lenin didn't say that.
** Those regimes already had the tools for torturing and murdering them well in hand. What they needed to do was be able to find them.
*** Wikileaks has a boatload of company brochures for you to peruse at your leisure.
**** The Supreme Court has so held.
Cisco is the 800 pound gorilla of network hardware companies. The others are corporations I hadn't heard of, mostly.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, publicly held corporations have only one real duty in America - to make profits. If they decline to sell systems to countries that would misuse them, and those sales wouldn't run afoul of U.S. law, then it's quite likely their shareholders will sue them.
Something about that situation needs to change.
Seems to me that Neocon corporations sold Sadaam Husein the chemical weapons that those same Neocons told him to use. Then wanted to depose him for that same use.
ReplyDeleteThe Shapiro translation is of a quote attributed to Lenin (in a notebook or note) in Анненков Ю. Дневник моих встреч. Цикл трагедий. В 2-х томах. Т. 1. Л.: Искусство, 1991.
ReplyDeleteThe original of the quote is: "Капиталисты всего мира и их правительства в погоне за завоеванием советского рынка откроют кредиты, которые послужат нам для поддержки коммунистической партии в их странах и, снабжая нас недостающими у нас материалами и техниками, восстановят нашу военную промышленность, необходимую для наших будущих победоносных атак против наших поставщиков. Иначе говоря, они будут трудиться по подготовке их собственного самоубийства!"
So, there is no direct confirmation that the citation in its popular form can be traced to Lenin.