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Comment by zypher99 | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a lot prominent folks deriding the employees. It's well known that IBM played a key role in the Holocaust [1]. It's also clear at this point that Israel's offensive has reached or is close to 'Genocide' status [2]. It's incredibly poor taste to deride these employees for doing whatever means are in their disposal to prevent what happened with IBM. What would you do if you worked at IBM during the Holocaust?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/26/israel-not-complying-wor...

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There are people who think Israel is committing war crimes. There are also people who think that HAMAS/Houthis/anti-Israel Arab states are the ones committing these crimes. There are people who strongly feel that AI will destroy humanity. There are people who are pro nuclear power and people who are vehemently anti nuclear power. There are people who feel that advertising and social media are a cancer to society.

Google is involved in all of these causes (and lots more) one way or another. If they accommodated every employee protest and shut down projects as and when a random group of 20 was opposed to it, there would be no company left.

So no, they are under no obligation to stop selling cloud computing to Israel or the US DoD or anyone else. Whether they are judged to be the same as IBM during the holocaust or as the saviors of humanity will be decided by historians 50 years from now.

The holocaust cost 6 million lives before counting homosexuals, roma people, soviet pows and others.

The Gaza war amount of casualties according to hamas numbers, is currently 6% of the casualties in the syrian civil war, which happens 400km away from gaza and no one calls a genocide.

by comparing that war to real genocides or the holocaust you simply minimize the word which refers to systematic murder of a people.

by minimizing that word you deprive the real people that are being murdered all around the world from political protection as all war is now 'genocide'

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