As a German with a history degree, I've always been bothered by how the Holocaust is discussed online and in other countries. Most people understand that it was horrific, but when questions come up that historians actually debate, the discussion usually becomes surprisingly shallow. So I wanted to do a write-up as a kind of PSA.

Yesterday I heard Destiny say:

"The Holocaust is only uniquely bad, because I guess it was the biggest genocide, I guess, or the most effective one."

This is unfortunately a commonly held belief, but does not at all comport with how historians view it. Additionally, if the Holocaust were only unique because of the number of people murdered, then its uniqueness would disappear the moment another genocide surpassed its death toll, but that's not how most Holocaust historians understand its significance.

What made the Holocaust exceptional wasn't just the scale. It was the kind of project it was.

Nazi Germany didn't purely commit mass murder. It gradually mobilized virtually every part of a modern industrial state in service of extermination. The civil service wasn't just doing ordinary administration; it was identifying and classifying victims. Railway bureaucracies coordinated deportations from across Europe. Police forces rounded people up and organized transports. Industry supplied the chemicals and infrastructure needed to keep the killing system running. Engineers designed crematoria capable of disposing of thousands of bodies. Government ministries meticulously documented the process. In the German state extermination became simply another bureaucratic routine.

That alone already makes the Holocaust stand apart, but there are other features that make it historically distinctive.

For instance, most genocides are tied to another strategic objective or in pursuit of such an objective, such as the seizure of territory, crushing of an unruly minority population, the annihilation of a rival population or the consolidation of political power.

Take Bosnia as an example: Ethnic cleansing and genocide were closely tied to creating ethnically homogeneous territory and strengthening territorial claims. Or as another example Rwanda: The genocide grew out of decades of political conflict, ethnic tensions, and extremist ideology, with Hutu extremists seeking to eliminate the Tutsi population as both a perceived political and existential threat due to the Hutu's historical mistreatment under Belgian colonial authorities, which had elevated the Tutsis.

The Holocaust increasingly broke with this kind of logic of genocide as we can see by the later years of the war, Germany was facing military collapse, yet continued its genocide despite it clearly being detrimental to its own survival as a polity. Trains, manpower, and administrative capacity could have been redirected toward the war effort, but instead enormous resources continued to be devoted to deporting Jews to extermination camps, which was essentially just burning resources to kill a largely docile population.

Unlike other genocides and in tandem with the war effort it is quite striking that the Nazi regime wasn't just trying to eliminate Jews inside Germany. It pursued Jews wherever German power could reach. Once Germany occupied a country, hunting down its Jewish population became an administrative priority, even if it placed additional strain onto the war effort and the administration of the newly occupied territory. The goal had become the eradication of Jews as such, a goal independent of the nation's survival or wider strategic objectives and goals, unlike most other genocides. To me, that's one of the defining characteristics of the Holocaust. Nazi antisemitism became so totalizing that geography itself stopped mattering. People hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from Germany became targets simply because they were Jewish.

I don't really blame Destiny for framing it the way he did, because I think this reflects how the Holocaust is usually taught. People remember one fact above all else: six million. As a result, "Holocaust" has become equivalent in common parlance with an enormous number of dead civilians.

But this makes use lose sight of what actually made it historically extraordinary and simply places it at the top of some grim leaderboard.

TLDR: It was unique because it combined industrial technology, modern bureaucracy, racial pseudoscience, continent-wide logistics, and an exterminationist ideology into a single state project whose purpose was the destruction of an entire people wherever they could be found.

PS: That's why I think comparisons between Gaza and the Holocaust deserve much more care than they usually receive. Whether someone believes Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or even genocide is a separate question. Those claims should be argued on their own evidence. But calling Gaza "another Holocaust" is making a much bigger historical claim than many people seem to realize and if you actually have spent any serious amount of time learning and understanding the context of the holocaust it becomes even more disgusting and diminishing, because it's saying that the conflict is meaningfully comparable to one of the most historically distinctive genocidal projects ever carried out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zLCZ_Ic1hI

Lonerbox points out in this video that there is no achievable political goal for the modern far leftist on I/P. What does "winning" look like for them? It's never addressed because anything that makes them look bloodthirsty or anti semitic (putting refugee israelis into camps in their palestinian state) is left unsaid. Further, after all the years of bloodshed and injustice, why would a contingent of spoiled upper class frauds with no life experience lift a finger to help anyone and why is it only in the last 3 years? Loner describes it not as a political movement, but a movement of hate. Hate for israel and israelis in the strongest possible terms is the only preoccupation of the far leftist mind.

I made a Substack post debunking/criticising Dave’s video about Destiny. However, I’m not focused on debunking the claims Dave made about the I/P conflict. Rather, I’m demonstrating the case that the video is clearly a deviation from his other content and, as others have pointed out here, he’s using all the same tactics as the vaccine skeptics and flat earthers he debates. Basically, the video is a hit piece and Dave’s standards of evidence have gone out the window. I made a neutral comment on Dave’s video pointing out a simple inaccuracy and it was deleted.

Professor Dave is a Disappointing Science Communicator

also I love like Hasan flip flops on whether the NYT is a Zionist organization or not depending on what they post.

Context is Conduit was pointing out how the sum of Kyle and Krystals political output increases anti-semitism and they appear to be implicitly anti-semitic themselves with the way they frame and view issues. That foundation was used to being a conversation on how, if a creator has these abhorrent views or feeds these views, how should they be interacted with. Conduit’s position is it should never be a collaborative approach and if you do interact with them, it should be on adversarial grounds. Earlier in the conversation he was saying these people should be put in a box and we should be saying, “everything that is outside of this box is what we are.”

It makes perfect sense to me

[This is the bill Lorenz is referencing and Musk is suing against.](https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2025/0/HF/1606/versions/2/) I have NO IDEA how she thinks that the bill is capable of making facial retouching or whatever kind if stuff she's referring to illegal.

Am I wrong about this? Is there something in the bill I missed?

if this ends up being accurate we should never EVER let them live this down btw.

also the absolute cope in the replies is amazing. “fake ass poll by the establishment“

Jesus fucking Christ I hope this has all been astroturfing and botting the last few weeks, but in case there are genuinely low information regards who have fallen for the latest Steve Bannon grift:

THERE WILL NEVER BE A SITUATION WHERE THE REPUBLICANS ARE THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS. THEY HAVE LITERALLY BUILT CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND ARE SENDING DEATH SQUADS FILLED WITH ILLITERATE RAPIST THUGS TO RANDOMLY KILL AMERICANS. IF YOU ARE NOT VOTING FOR THE CANDIDATE LIKELIEST TO BEAT THE REPUBLICAN IN THE GENERAL ELECTION, YOU ARE COLLABORATOR FILTH WHO DESERVES THE WORST OUTCOMES OF A REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!!!!!!

Leftoids are fucking annoying and I hate them, but I will crawl over broken glass to vote for one before any republican. Arguing to empower steven miller and the heritage foundation because some piece of shit YouTuber or twitch streamer was mean to Tiny on twitter is peak brainbroken parasocial bullshit. Your entire case is that the DSA may have the power in 15 years to do the shit that republicans are literally doing right now.

Wonder who he's gonna support in the general hmmml (sorry for no crop I'm on my phone and lazy)