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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide...

...Were largely civilians, waving machetes and operating under no military discipline whatsoever. Those Tutsi militias were veterans of several other brush wars in Tanzania and Uganda, and were led by a quite effective and battle-hardened leader (Kagame)

Just being brutal doesn't always translate to being more militarily effective...

It does if your objective is, as many allege, to simply depopulate an area through violence. The Rwandan genocide took a little over 3 months, during which mobs of civilians armed with blades and a few small arms killed a million people. It defies credulity that the IDF, armed with modern weapons, somehow is so incompetent at genocide as to only kill less than 10% as many over a period of time six times longer, especially when all the would-be victims are penned up in a tiny area like Gaza.

No, if the Israelis were actually the Nazis that so many here portray them as being, they could have just treated Gaza like the Warsaw ghetto and it would have been over inside a month.

It does if your objective is, as many allege, to simply depopulate an area through violence. The Rwandan genocide took a little over 3 months, during which mobs of civilians armed with blades and a few small arms killed a million people. It defies credulity that the IDF, armed with modern weapons, somehow is so incompetent at genocide as to only kill less than 10% as many over a period of time six times longer, especially when all the would-be victims are penned up in a tiny area like Gaza.

  1. Israel's modern weaponry is dependent on a complex international supply chain that could be interrupted at any moment by patrons dropping their support whereas Germany was, by design, autarchic and self sufficient.

  2. The IDF has nearly no tolerance for casualties, unlike the Hutus or Waffen SS. You can drop bombs or snipe people from a distance but to commit Rwanda-tier genocide you have to close in and closing in would expose Israeli fighters to a level of risk they aren't willing to take.

No, if the Israelis were actually the Nazis that so many here portray them as being, they could have just treated Gaza like the Warsaw ghetto and it would have been over inside a month.

Ironically, Nazis used this exact argument:

We executed orders very well, so I assure you if there had been an order to kill all Jews, there would be none left in Europe. Instead, there are millions of survivors. We would not have used an insecticide to do it either; Zyklon B was a fumigant that all nations used to kill lice, which cause typhus, which killed millions after the first war. The Americans called it DDT, so the Jews expect us to believe DDT was used to gas them. The Allies destroyed rail lines, bridges, roads, and airports so that no supplies could get to German cities or the camps. The prisoners got sick, withered away, and died, many times right when the Allies entered the camps. Many died even while under allied care, it took weeks to stop the outbreaks, and thousands of prisoners died. The Allies caused these deaths, although not intentionally. It was just easy to blame a policy of extermination instead of telling the truth.

General Ernst Remer 1987.

EDIT: Also they didn't "deal with the Warsaw Ghetto" by bombing it to rubble and then shooting everyone (except at the very end when people starting fighting back, and ironically those people had the best odds of survival) they transported people to concentration camps. If killing millions of people is as simple as you think then why did Hitler bother with the logistical hassle instead of just killing them on the spot like Genghis Khan?

Israel's modern weaponry is dependent on a complex international supply chain that could be interrupted at any moment by patrons dropping their support whereas Germany was, by design, autarchic and self sufficient.

Germany literally ran out of fuel, as well as several major metals necessary to build tanks, airplanes, and shells. And as for Israel, they produce quite a lot of their own gear; the Merkava tank, their own small arms, quite a lot of their drones, etc.

The IDF has nearly no tolerance for casualties, unlike the Hutus or Waffen SS. You can drop bombs or snipe people from a distance but to commit Rwanda-tier genocide you have to close in and closing in would expose Israeli fighters to a level of risk they aren't willing to take.

Neither the hutu militias nor the einsatzgruppen (of whom there were only a few thousand at any given time) were zerglings or mindless hordes; this is not a serious analysis.

We executed orders very well, so I assure you if there had been an order to kill all Jews, there would be none left in Europe. Instead, there are millions of survivors.

Extreme apples and oranges. Attempting to exterminate an ethno-religious group across an entire continent is a much different thing than attempting to destroy a single large city and kill the inhabitants - something the Nazis did do several times during WWII, most notably in Warsaw which went from a city of over a million to having only a couple thousand people left when the Soviets entered. Here, actually, the Japanese were significantly worse - they simply demolished dozens - potentially hundreds - of towns and villages, and killed all the inhabitants.

If killing millions of people is as simple as you think then why did Hitler bother with the logistical hassle instead of just killing them on the spot like Genghis Khan?

They did quite a lot of killing-on-the-spot - far more than the Israelis have done, with far fewer soldiers involved. Also, the Nazis extensively used prisoners - including jews in concentration camps - as slave labor in service of that autarkic fantasy you mentioned above.

Germany literally ran out of fuel, as well as several major metals necessary to build tanks, airplanes, and shells. And as for Israel, they produce quite a lot of their own gear; the Merkava tank, their own small arms, quite a lot of their drones, etc.

Most of Israeli military production concerns the top of the production chain, operating under the assumption that they can import the vast majority of their other needs; Israel doesn't even produce their own bombs. Trying to compare Israeli self sufficiency with that of Nazi Germany is a good joke, though; one Israeli general estimated that they would be entirely out of supplies in under a month if they stopped getting foreign support.

Neither the hutu militias nor the einsatzgruppen (of whom there were only a few thousand at any given time) were zerglings or mindless hordes; this is not a serious analysis.

You say, after claiming all Israel needs to do to win in Gaza is to "go full Genghis Khan".

Yes, they aren't "zerglings" but they were willing to take serious casualties to achieve their goals, something the IDF clearly isn't willing to do. What's actually "not serious analysis" is pretending that Israeli morality is a greater factor in their way of warfare than Israeli cowardice and Israeli incompetence on the ground.

Extreme apples and oranges. Attempting to exterminate an ethno-religious group across an entire continent is a much different thing than attempting to destroy a single large city and kill the inhabitants - something the Nazis did do several times during WWII, most notably in Warsaw which went from a city of over a million to having only a couple thousand people left when the Soviets entered. Here, actually, the Japanese were significantly worse - they simply demolished dozens - potentially hundreds - of towns and villages, and killed all the inhabitants.

They did quite a lot of killing-on-the-spot - far more than the Israelis have done, with far fewer soldiers involved. Also, the Nazis extensively used prisoners - including jews in concentration camps - as slave labor in service of that autarkic fantasy you mentioned above.

Yes, the Nazis used Einsatzgruppen, but the Nazis discovered pretty quickly that death squads don't kill people fast enough and also leave soldiers as psychological wrecks. Hence the invention of death camps and the Final Solution. They wouldn't impose the enormous logistical strain of the camp system on themselves if the job could be done just as easily by regular soldiers shooting people on the spot.

As to how much "killing-on-the-spot" has been committed by the IDF, I have no idea how you've made an estimate because the IDF has demonstrated they're perfectly happy to storm a house and kill unarmed elderly people for sport, to triple tap a WCK convoy, to slaughter rescue workers and then bury the evidence with bulldozers. These crimes are only ever acknowledged when they're caught on camera by bystanders/victims and even those incidents have yet to see a single perpetrator sentenced to prison time. We'll only know the true extent of the crimes years after the fighting stops, just like how the death toll of the Holocaust only became apparent years later: estimates in the immediate aftermath of the war actually put the Jewish population higher in 1948 than 1938.

Also, of course the Japanese probably killed more people that way but the Japanese were courageous to a nearly suicidal degree. You'll never in a million years see Israeli soldiers charging tanks with bombs on sticks. Not a great comparison.

You say, after claiming all Israel needs to do to win in Gaza is to "go full Genghis Khan".

I did not say that. What I actually said was that "Depopulating and securing an area is quick and easy if you're willing to adopt the ROE of Ghengis Khan," and thus the fact that Israel has not depopulated Gaza during two years of war isn't evidence of their incompetence, as suggested by @functor.