From Genocide to Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel’s Formative Years

Here’s a 2005 documentary that omits mentioning that Peter Thiel’s father, who apparently feared the 1968 anti-Nazi student movement, fled Germany to raise his son within the residual white-supremacist enclave (German genocide) of Namibia.

Described by the BBC as the story of Germany’s forgotten genocide. This powerful documentary by David Adetayo Olusoga took a sensitive and uncompromising look at the tragic circumstances leading to the massacre of three quarters of the Namibia population in German concentration camps built in Africa.

Systematic extermination of the local population is still being researched, yet little of the work seems to connect to Peter Thiel’s statements about being raised as a German boy escaping anti-Nazism to grow up instead in Hitler-loving Swakopmund.

Over time, Imperial Germany refused to tolerate the independence and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. In 1904, after a military victory against an Ovaherero force at Waterberg, the German general Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order against all men, women, and children of the Ovaherero. Those who survived the waves of violence that followed the orders were rounded up at ‘collection points’ across the colony and taken to concentration camps, where they were subjected to brutal conditions and forced labour.

Swakopmund was so racist, so directly aligned with support for Hitler, that even the South African government warned about the extremist enclave there in 1939.

Source: The Argus (Melbourne), 8 Mar 1939, p. 1

The decision to move there after Hitler was defeated, in other words, should be framed entirely in the context of “early apartheid” that turned into the overt support for Nazism through the 1970s.

Source: “Genocidal Empires: German Colonialism in Africa and the Third Reich”, Klaus Bachmann

How strong were the post-WWII ties to Hitler that drew the Thiel family to relocate there, fleeing the end of Nazism?

Here is the news from 1976, as Peter Thiel was placed by his father into a school “More German than Germany“.

SWAKOPMUND, South‐West Africa —’Heil Hitler!” said the black gas station attendant matter‐of‐factly to the department customer, raising his right arm to the traditional height.

Extreme.

Notably, while Peter Thiel was raised in this environment to invest family “fortunes” into the unregulated American tech industry and become a billionaire, museums of the genocide cite a lack of funding.

One of the smallest museums in Africa might be its most important: A curator’s battle to commemorate Germany’s forgotten genocide in Namibia

While survivors of the genocide have tried to pursue officials, like the Germans who erected monuments celebrating genocide, perhaps Peter Thiel should be investigated more thoroughly as a living monument to genocide?

The Marine Denkmal (Marine Memorial) in Swakopmund, Namibia, commemorates the German imperial soldiers who fought against Indigenous Namibians in the Herero Wars (1904-1908). […] Opposition to removing the monument stems from the ideological reservations of German-speaking communities in Swakopmund, as well as fears about its economic consequences, mainly in terms of the memorial’s appeal to tourists.

If we investigate monuments promoting German genocide, shouldn’t we investigate the Germans today who directly benefited from and continue to advocate for the ideologies those monuments represent?

…I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt, so I mustered the courage to go to his room to ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise for me, a Black woman.

To put it another way, more investigative work should go into the “economics” Peter has claimed his family’s success was based upon:

…when Peter proudly entered Stanford he bragged to at least two classmates that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”. He clearly was referring to his father’s work in apartheid-era Namibia

What kind of economic activity is available to Nazis fleeing post-WWII Germany to flourish in a post-genocide apartheid enclave?

What does ‘economically sound’ mean to Peter Thiel when the foundation is extermination orders and forced labor camps?

And what connections exist between this family history and his current ACTS 17 political organizing – particularly its funding sources and ideological framework?

UK Tesla Kills One Pedestrian

Police say they are looking for answers why a Tesla killed a teen.

We are investigating an incident after a pedestrian died following a collision on the junction between the M60 and M66 last night (16/11/2025).

The man was struck by a vehicle travelling southbound on the M66 as it meets the M60 at Simister Island at around 9:40pm. …on foot along the motorway, leading to a collision with a Tesla, where a 19-year-old man sadly died.

Cloudflare Boots Aisuru Botnet and Suddenly Gets Hammered Offline

Cloudflare has gone offline for a couple hours today after reporting a huge traffic spike.

Source: Cloudflarestatus.com

Yesterday, the big news was that Microsoft revealed a nearly 16 terabit/second attack from the Aisuru (Mirai-based) botnet flooding a single target in Australia with UDP packets from over a half-million systems.

Azure was hit by the “largest-ever” cloud-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, originating from the Aisuru botnet and measuring 15.72 terabits per second (Tbps), according to Microsoft. On October 24, the Windows giant’s cloud DDoS protection service auto-detected and mitigated the traffic tsunami – nearly 3.64 billion packets per second – so no customer workloads experienced any service interruptions, Microsoft’s Sean Whalen said in a Monday blog.

This was a notable event because, going back to the start of the month, Cloudflare said they gave Aisuru the boot.

For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at Cloudflare says Aisuru’s overlords are using the botnet to boost their malicious domain rankings, while simultaneously attacking the company’s domain name system (DNS) service.

Cloudflare has now clarified that the root cause of today’s massive outage was…

Many of Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services. To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.

Cloudflare internal chat contemplates root cause. Source: Cloudflare

So, a threat traffic management file grew so big that it crashed the network, not because of any threat.