Part 1 of this series of articles looked into the imperial crimes of Google. This second installment is looking at the oldest company of the Imperial Six: IBM.

IBM has roots in U.S. imperialism dating back well over a century. The forerunner of IBM was the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company founded in 1911 by Herman Hollerith based largely on punch-card innovations he made for the 1890 U.S. Census. This census, perhaps the most notorious in U.S history, alleged for the first time that the Western frontier was “closed” — that the genocide of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island had been geographically completed. These calculations, foundational to the myth that Indigenous resistance had ceased, were made with the technology that would become IBM.

IBM played a remarkably similar role in the Nazi Holocaust. Then-CEO Thomas Watson accepted an award from Hitler in 1937, even after many Western business leaders had stopped publicly supporting the Nazis. IBM punch cards helped the Nazis scientifically extend their genocide from communists to people deemed “genetically inferior.”

In “IBM and the Holocaust,” Edwin Black writes that on punch cards, “under nationality, 2 represented ‘Jew’ and 12 represented ‘Gypsy’ [Roma].” IBM would continue to do business in Nazi-occupied areas even after Watson returned his medal, continuing to profit from genocide.

With the global imperialist project now led by the U.S., NATO and their regional proxies, IBM has continued to play a guiding role. It signed a $31 million contract with NATO in January 2023 and another undisclosed contract in December of the same year. It announced a $200 million investment in Saudi Arabia in 2024, strengthening an extractive monarchy that serves as a key bulwark against the Axis of Resistance.

It should come as no surprise that IBM has a decades-long, highly-profitable relationship with the most infamous outpost of fascism and imperialism today: Israel. IBM has been serving the Zionist entity since at least 1975, when it began providing Israeli police with software.

Decades later, much of the Zionists’ hardware and software have become fully dependent on IBM, largely through IBM’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Red Hat Israel, which counts the Israeli Occupation Forces as its largest customer. Among the countless ways in which IBM profits from Zionist colonization are via contracts and training around population tracking, border and immigration surveillance, military-oriented cloud computing and artificial intelligence, including the notorious 2021 Project Nimbus.

U.S. imperialism stretches beyond IBM and the other members of the Imperial Six.

Nonetheless, by targeting these core outposts in solidarity with freedom fighters in Iran, Palestine and around the world, we make concrete our commitment to a better world.

Long live humanity, and down with IBM!