The other night I lay awake staring at the stars, contemplating Peter Thiel being catastrophically wrong about history. He was selling a giant bag of fraud, as people literally pay to hear his backwards history in talks, but why… why lie about Churchill?
His framing was so completely backwards, so obviously wrong, it had to be Thiel practicing intentional disinformation.
It got me thinking about the complexity of the 1943 Bengal famine, since Churchill is sometimes accused of unilaterally mishandling it, meaning he personally gets blamed for 3 million deaths.
It’s unfair to blame him entirely, but if someone wants to criticize Churchill for errors, Bengal is the most obvious avenue because it’s complicated, morally ambiguous, and shows how even “good” leaders can be complicit in systemic catastrophe.
Instead, Thiel went with a well known Stalinist statement and attributed it to Churchill, which either shows profound ignorance or… something else.
It would be like hearing that Thiel give an exclusive paid speech about Apple’s first computer being the Radio Shack TRS-80, as if such history errors are worth price of admission.
Gibberish. And probably intentional.
It’s also unfortunate, because the 1943 Bengal catastrophe is actually very relevant today, with direct parallels to the dangerous economics of Big Tech billionaires.
In short, bureaucratic rationality (efficiency metrics, cost control) and market-driven predation (hoarding, speculation) created a perfect storm in history. Churchill was hugely implicated in millions being killed not from an absolute supply shortage, but from what the economist Amartya Sen called an “entitlement failure” system, where people were gated to prevent access to food that exists.
Bengal is a case study of systems optimized for everything except human welfare, and how “rational” decision-making at every level can produce catastrophic outcomes. A decade ago I said this about Big Data platforms; these days it clearly applies to the AI industry, and very much applies to Thiel.
There were two fundamental, interrelated pathologies underlying the catastrophe of Bengal:
- Rent Seeking — Artificial Scarcity for Power and Profit: The Famine Inquiry Commission concluded that “a large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved” and noted that “corruption was widespread throughout the province and in many classes of society.” Gandhi has even been implicated in a calculated failure to act, using famine to undermine his political opponents. Enormous profits were made through speculation, war profiteering, hoarding, and corruption by the calculation that “profits for some meant death for others.” Food was deliberately stockpiled in village stores of wealthy landlords and tradesmen who were waiting for inflation to cause price increases. The beneficiaries were big farmers, merchants, and rice mill owners, whose incomes soared while the poor starved. Bengal’s Minister of Civil Supplies gave the import monopoly to his friend and political ally who had a large grain trading business. This was highly profitable when selling at black-market prices, as long as shortages continued. The extremely inelastic demand for food meant traders would lose money if they increased imports.
- Efficiency as Status/Virtue: After Temple’s “excessive” spending and immediate response had saved lives in 1873-74, he was criticized rather than celebrated. The subsequent British relief efforts implemented stricter standards with the justification that “excessive pay might promote dependency.” Lord Lytton had opposed famine relief reforms in the belief they would stimulate “shirking by Indian workers,” substantively ordering “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food” and instructing district officers to “discourage relief works in every possible way.”
The Toxic Synergy
What makes this particularly devastating is how these two pathologies reinforced each other in a vicious cycle.
Efficiency doctrine provided moral cover for profiteering. When officials invoked “market discipline” and “non-interference,” they justified refusing to disrupt the hoarding and speculation that was killing people. War Cabinet reports noted the Government of India was “unduly tender with speculators and hoarders”—the reluctance to “waste” resources on aggressive intervention meant the corrupt could operate with impunity. Meanwhile, the massive profits from artificial scarcity validated the efficiency ideology: markets were “working,” just not for human welfare.
Both prioritized abstract principles over human lives. Whether it was market efficiency, fiscal responsibility, or profit margins, the actual suffering and death became normalized for these systemic imperatives.
And that sounds to me a LOT like Palantir.
It also sounds like the SRE who forgets the R stands for reliability, and keeps causing outages by forcing “efficiency” in cloud systems by generating artificial scarcity.
Just as 3 million Bengalis died while food existed but was made inaccessible by system operators, Big Tech is building systems where resources, opportunities, and even basic rights may exist in aggregate while systematically withheld through centralized and optimized distribution failures.
The Bengal famine shows that you don’t need malicious intent, only the right combination of profit motive, efficiency ideology, institutional inertia, and a willful blindness to complexity.
That last one is a particular worry in tech these days. The privileged techbro “move fast and break things” ethos—prioritizing velocity over human cost—echoes the kind of oppressive bureaucratic rationality metrics that enabled the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Thiel preaching lies about history while building systems that replicate its worst pathologies isn’t just ironic, it’s structurally necessary for him to avoid accountability. Accurate historical analysis indicts his entire life’s work.
- Concentration of compute resources creating artificial scarcity
- “Alignment” framed as efficiency problem rather than power question
- Regulatory capture via lobbying and government contracts
- Suffering externalized and rendered invisible by optimization metrics
- Rhetoric of “inevitability” and “market forces” preventing intervention
Palantir literally is in the business of sophisticated gating—determining who gets surveilled, who gets flagged, who gets deported, who gets targeted. The “food” (resources, freedom, safety) exists, but access is algorithmically controlled for very narrowly controlled profit.
That’s the Bengal famine system all over again, which Churchill criticized and opposed, yet ultimately still gets blame for because he was prime minister.
Where Bengal’s gatekeepers were corrupt officials and grain merchants (constraining options even for Churchill at the height of his power), today’s are engineers optimizing “engagement” and “efficiency” metrics that just happen to concentrate power and profit into Thiel’s pockets while externalizing harm.
Thiel’s confusion of Churchill and Stalin therefore is very revealing in proper context. Stalin intentionally engineered a famine (Holodomor). Churchill was complicit in systemic failure with multiple actors.
Thiel artificially conflates these two in a way that seems extremely self serving, beyond just historical malpractice:
- Obscures how systemic optimization can kill without individual malice
- Avoids the uncomfortable middle ground where “rational actors” produce catastrophe
- Prevents examination of how market fundamentalism enables mass harm
Because that’s his business model.
