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The I.G. Farben/Bayer complex near Auschwitz, where enslaved Jews worked on products including the nerve gas used to execute them. (Wikipedia Photo)
What could be a more fitting ceremony for our entertainment during these last days of the industrial age than the joining in unholy patrimony of two of the most evil corporations in the history of humankind? And what could be more symptomatic of the state of knowledge during our present Twilight of the Mind than the fact that the nature of their evil is not only not mentioned in the reporting of their union, but is relatively difficult to discover even if you Google it. I refer of course to the announced intention of Bayer, the aspirin company, to buy Monsanto, the Roundup company.
Monsanto’s crimes are familiar, especially to those who have been hanging around these pages. See, for example;
Bayer has been far more successful in sanitizing its record, which is far longer and far worse. It was a founding member of the German chemical giant I.G. Farben, not in 1925 as Wikipedia and other sources say in some places, but in 1893. The significance of that laundering of the historical record will soon become apparent.
If aspirin didn’t cure you, back before WWI, you could have tried this. (Wikipedia photo)
Before World War I, Bayer brought to market not only aspirin and phenobarbital (a treatment for epilepsy), but heroin — marketed as a cough suppressant and later a treatment for morphine addiction. Later, Bayer would introduce any number of trailblazing pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, birth control pills and pregnancy tests for when the pill didn’t work.
As World War I approached, I.G. Farben and Bayer, under the leadership of the mad genius Fritz Haber, discovered how to fix nitrogen from the air in a synthetic ammonia that made possible a) unlimited industrial agriculture with synthetic fertilizers and b) manufacture of explosives and ammunition without limitation by available supplies of saltpeter. Gunpowder was the goal, by the way, fertilizer was a byproduct that won Haber the Nobel Prize.
Next the companies, again led by Haber, not only developed, but supervised the deployment of, the modern world’s first weaponized chemicals, beginning with chlorine gas, whose deployment he personally oversaw at the Second Battle of Ypres, in 1915. Later the companies developed mustard gas, and several flavors of nerve gas, from which research came insecticides and Zyklon-B, the Nazis’ preferred agent of genocide at such places as Auschwitz. The civilized word was so revolted by the use of chemical weapons that they have almost never been deployed since; synthetic fertilizer, on the other hand, has caused untold suffering and death around the world and continues to do so.
Farben’s and Bayer’s war crimes in World War II went far beyond simply supplying chemicals for the execution of Jews; Farben built a huge industrial complex next door to Auschwitz, and Bayer chief executive Carl Duisburg advocated and implemented the widespread use of slave labor not only there but throughout German industry — eventually, more than eight million people were thus enslaved. After the War, Bayer as a company was condemned by the International War Crimes Tribunal and 12 Farben executives were convicted at Nuremberg for mass murder and enslavement.
Despite many reorganizations and sanitations designed to obscure Bayer’s past — even the fact that this all-American brand is actually German — the company continues to evidence an affinity for crimes, scams, deceptions and abuses. Corporate Watch has a list. If you are a victim of any of the above-mentioned crimes, understand that you have the right to protect your rights. You can consult a lawyer from a reputed criminal defense law firm, who will represent your interest legally and fight for you.
So it is entirely fitting and proper that these two corporations from hell be united in time for them to preside over the decline and fall of humanity. Perhaps when they do they can drop the pretenses and name the new company “Extinction Inc.”
This is a selective argument about the impact of corporations on the operation of the economies in the pursuit of money regardless of the social and ecological cost. They are selected because of their extreme deleterious impact but corporations as a whole have engaged in this type of activity. In the past it resulted in a widespread improvement in material standard of living at the cost of divestment of natural material wealth. But it has gone too far and all levels of society will now have to try and cope with the inevitable powering down. climate disruption and ocean pollution, acidification and warming is only one of the unintended consequences of this malfeasance.
Great essay, Mr. Lewis! And astute comment, Denis Frith, except there won’t be any “coping” – humanity will go extinct as all species have on the planet (from loss of habitat).
We can take it a step further and include Wall Street (as a representative of all global financial “markets”), global banking, and “insurance” companies to this same narrative. The entire edifice of commerce is rigged to allow for the funneling of resources into capital that flows to the top members (those with the most political connections, power/influence and wealth) of civilization.
How did they think this was going to turn out? That all the great unwashed would be their slaves while the planet just went along with their program? Well, being people, they didn’t think it through and this is what we are left with – rampant toxic pollution of all kinds throughout the entire biosphere that’s killing off ALL LIFE on the planet, if not by design, then by unintended consequence. From plankton to pollinators to large mammals and plants of all kinds, all of it is succumbing to HUMAN driven effects on their habitat. Radiation in the air and water from (atomic testing to) Chernobyl and Fukushima (as well as all the other nuclear plants and cooling ponds) is mutating DNA and causing birth problems, if not outright killing sea life (like starfish, whales, dolphins, etc. either directly or via lack of food). Plastic is causing birds and sea life to die from its ingestion. Fertilizer is causing anoxic dead zones that are becoming larger. Meanwhile Monsanto keeps selling poison to farmers.
The sea is rapidly turning into a cesspool spewing methane and hydrogen sulfide in ever increasing amounts as the ice melts and the ocean heats up. Trees are already besieged by air pollution such as ozone and nitrogen (and the other noxious gases wafting around the planet, thanks to humans and civilization) and are slowly but surely dying at the roots. Without trees and the sea, we’re done.
Our predicament is so pervasive that it has changed the Earth’s climate, once predictable, in such a way that it’s become ever harder to grow food crops of any kind. We’ve also triggered earthquakes, sink holes, tornados, super storms, flooding, and volcanic activity (as the ice melts), not to mention sea level rise, hail and lightning (which have recently become deadly in the extreme) because of climate change.
The situation continues to grow worse as more effects surface that hadn’t been thought of or planned for by “the masters of the universe.”