Siemens has already paid reparations to the families of victims of the Holocaust. But now that the revered New York publisher Little, Brown has brought out Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust, it's the turn of the world's largest computer company to be pilloried for its past.
Actually the 'news' about IBM isn't new at all. In 1985 Verso published Kees van der Pijl's The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, which contained a picture of Thomas Watson Snr, the founder of IBM, shaking hands with top Nazi finance chief Otto Schacht.
What strikes me as unhealthy about passing judgement on IBM is that it indicates a polarised view of the events. The assumption is that those on the periphery of the Holocaust were somehow as guilty as those at the centre.
Although my aunt Veronica died in a concentration camp, I feel little special resentment toward IBM. What I resent much more is the way in which Clinton, Spielberg and Blair have stripped the Holocaust of its economic and political causes and portrayed it as merely a titanic struggle between evil and its victims  a struggle, we are told, that continues in plenty of new holocausts around the world today. In the Hollywood tableau, evil is part of the human condition. Even IBM is not exempt from this timeless law.
This misanthropic premise has a bearing on many other matters, including the world of IT and its management.
First, when IT is not upheld in the manner of PT Barnum, it is apprehended in the most negative terms. The Internet is fingered as a medium through which rogue child adopters grab babies, paedophiles grab innocent children, chatroom stalkers grab women and electronic fraudsters rip off consumers. IT at work enslaves us to stress, or to employer surveillance. The pace of development of IT undoes us, since it makes yesterday's IT skills irrelevant.
Right away this conception of IT users as either villains or victims opens the way to state intervention, the law, or at least the Human Resources police.
Second, the tasks set for IT shift from organising human subjects to offering human victims compensation for being the objects of something bad. In an Oprah Winfrey world of abuse, and survival despite it, the purpose of IT becomes helplines, virtual community support groups and every kind of therapy. The emphasis is less on what you can do in the future with IT, more on how IT can alleviate what has been done to you in the past.
That's bad news. It's funny how one rarely hears that old buzzword 'empowerment' nowadays. But nor does one hear about its much more real opposite, disempowerment. The outing of IBM's role in the Holocaust celebrates the fatalistic dogma of the Fall of Man. That dogma disempowers us. It is an emotionally correct lament not so much against a corporation as against size (universally a bad thing) and the Deadly Sin of Greed (universal, period).
Poor old Big Blue. It can still make money from B2B and B2C, but has also, ironically, fallen victim to the coming trend on the Web, as in the rest of society: T2V, or Therapy-to-Victim.
I agree that IBM should pay but lets not forget Volkswagen, Porsche and Hugo Boss....