Peter Thiel’s family infamously fled Germany at the end of WWII to apartheid South Africa, where he could be raised in an ex-pat Nazi community. That’s a big part of why his Palantir company is so obviously and closely aligned with failed Nazi total surveillance objectives, as it reflects a continuation of thought.
Let me be more clear here for those unfamiliar with the Thiel doctrine behind Palantir.
- He glorifies monopolistic power and the denigration of competition, framing business in terms of domination rather than collaboration.
- He makes statements like “Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits”, which use language reminiscent of “struggle” rhetoric (kampf) symbolic of fascist ideologies.
- He emphasizes domination by an elite few who succeed while others fail, with little concern for those who don’t “escape competition” as if rationalizing the “Arbeit macht frei” of Auschwitz
- He focuses on selfish, secretive, conspiratorial thinking, such as when he spilled ink that “The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world”
- He is apparently very dismissive of democratic or inclusive systems in favor of concentrated power.
All in all, Thiel exhibits a life filled with language of “struggle,” “monopoly,” “secrets,” and “conspiracies” that intentionally invokes totalitarian concepts, framing business success as belonging only to those who achieve dominance over others.
It all apparently comes from Thiel’s unapologetic social Darwinist upbringing in fascist enclaves outside of Germany. And we have zero evidence he has ever in any meaningful way tried to stop or condemn Nazism.
We even have a case where Palantir was briefly brought into modern Germany… only to be found working with modern day Nazis to attack politicians.
Unidentified police officers in Hesse accessed the contact details of several politicians and prominent immigrants from official records and shared them with the neo-Nazi group, according to local reports.
For other German families who stayed and went through occupation after the fall of Nazism, it’s a very different story. They too became “mysteriously” wealthy after genocide yet, unlike the Thiel family efforts to simply relocate and then return as before, the details of Nazi roots were hidden by those who remained in Germany.
…siblings Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten own more than 40% of BMW and are worth about $38 billion [thanks to their family operating] …battery factories in Berlin, where, thousands of forced slave laborers were used, including female slave laborers from concentration camps, you learn nothing about [this] history.
A Spiegel article now highlights 80% admit wealth came from crimes against humanity, while 80% also think it must not have been their own Nazi family to blame.
Only 20 percent “strongly disagree” with the idea that the prosperity of many families is still based on crimes committed during National Socialism. Yet almost 80 percent “strongly disagree” with the notion that their own family’s prosperity can be traced to such crimes.
It seems as though there is an unspoken agreement that dealing with the Nazi period can be outsourced to the memorial sites and museums and that families themselves are absolved from doing so in all but the most drastic cases.
The whole Spiegel article is worth a read, not least of all because Spiegel is German for “mirror”.
