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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Comparing anything right-wing to Nazism is an overused cliche, but it fits here: AFAIK Nazis initially planned to just deport the Jews somewhere (Madagascar), but ended up brutally overworking and exterminating them, because their end goal was to get rid of them and that was easiest.

Per Scott's post, the First Solution was convincing the Jews to emigrate (to Palestine and elsewhere, and by normal peacetime means like commercial passenger ships) by making life in Germany shitty for them (and seizing money from rich Jews to pay for the tickets of poor Jews). This failed because everybody else refused to take the German Jews (note that this was before decolonisation, so this mostly means the Western governments - they, after all, set the immigration policies of their colonies).

The supposed Second Solution was deporting all the Jews to Madagascar (forcibly, and by extraordinary means). This made no sense, because by then Germany was at war with Britain (which controlled the Suez, Gibraltar and the North Atlantic), and thus couldn't possibly get the Jews to Madagascar. Most people think this was just a fake plan as a cover story for the Final Solution (there was at least one other - the Wannsee Conference mentions "evacuation to the East" i.e. Poland/Russia).