Sudan Massacre

[TSwizzle]

Indeed, they don’t give a shit about darkies killing each other, particularly when those darkies are Christian darkies.

Muslim darkies are being killed too.

They aren't being killed by jooooos though.

Does that make the killings better to you? I don't get why you're saying this.

I thought it was obvious but unless it's Jews, it isn't news.

 

[Derec]

Does that make the killings better to you? I don't get why you're saying this.

TSwizzle is clearly parodying the western fauxgressives who protest against Israel (even going as far as praising Hamas and 10/7) but ignore much worse things happening elsewhere. Despite UAE's involvement in Sudan Civil War, BDS is not calling to boycott, divest from and sanction the Emirates for example. There are no Sudan-related campus occupations either.

 

[Gospel]

You are certainly grading Europeans on a different scale.

That’s just how you feel, because you haven't offered any evidence outside of your feelings to back up the claim.

 

[Gospel]

Neither are the cultures for whose sins you always blame Europeans "you".

Oh wow, so either you're making the claim that ethnic cleansing didn’t originate with Europeans or history shouldn’t be mentioned when it involves Europeans because Derec stops feeling warm and cozy inside. Got it.

 

[DBT]

Tribal warfare is as old as humankind. Even the Chimps do it.

 

[laughing dog]

Indeed, they don’t give a shit about darkies killing each other, particularly when those darkies are Christian darkies.

Muslim darkies are being killed too.

They aren't being killed by jooooos though.

Does that make the killings better to you? I don't get why you're saying this.

I think he is trying to point out perceived double standards/ antisemitism because of all the coverage in Gaza.

It’s the kneejerk response of Israeli apologists to fling accusations of antisemitism either aggressively or passive aggressively.

 

[Elixir]

Prokaryotes probably fought like hell (and mostly lost) trying to keep eukaryotes and that hellish oxygen stuff out of their territory.
Not much has changed since.

 

[Emily Lake]

How I went about making my argument was wrong. What I'm trying to say isn't. Ethnic cleansing isn’t unique to Europe or colonialism. Civilizations have been eliminating or relocating populations based on identity since the earliest empires, Assyrian deportations, Chinese frontier purges, Mongol massacres, and Ottoman relocations all fit the pattern. What changed with Europe wasn’t the idea but the infrastructure, modern states turned ethnic dominance into formal policy, justified by race science and nationalism rather than raw conquest.

India had formal caste systems in place for about 3000 years, not based on conquest but on ancestry. The idea itself isn't somehow uniquely european. Egyptians enslaving the Levites was similarly 3000 years ago or so. Ethnic or Caste dominance is a really, really old thing, and it's been pretty formal in many cultures for a really long time.

The massacres in Sudan differ from Mongol or early Ottoman atrocities in motive and structure. The Mongols’ violence was a military strategy to enforce surrender, not ethnic purity. The Ottomans began as conquerors too, but by their decline were already showing the modern and learned logic of homogenizing populations, culminating in the Armenian Genocide.

I genuinely think you've got this backwards, Gospel. I don't think that homogenizing the population was a learned behavior - diversifying it was learned. For a massive amount of human development, we lived in small isolated tribes that were highly homogeneous. Learning to not kill "outsiders" was a developmental step.

What’s happening in Sudan today ain't a god damn conquest, it’s internal ethnic cleansing. It’s about erasing specific groups, not expanding rule. The pattern of mass killing repeats through history, but the ideology behind it has evolved, from imperial dominance to ethnic purification.

I don't think it's changed as much as you think it has. It's sucky stupid poor human behavior across the board, yes. But genuinely, this isn't some newfangled thing that white folks came up with. Varieties of ethnic cleansing have existed pretty much for as long as we have records, and very likely before then - bear in mind that "kill that tribe" is essentially the same mechanism of us-vs-them behavior.

FWIW, many other species do the same thing - they kill other tribes or groups, they exterminate those that are similar-but-different, often with enormous hostility. Some of it is competition for resources, perhaps. But at the end of the day, it still boils down to eliminating competition for a different genetic line.

I'm not excusing the behavior mind, I'm very much opposed to it. But in order to effectively oppose it, you've also got to understand it.

 

[Emily Lake]

Just a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the “civilized world.” And don’t come at me with “violence is just part of human history”, this isn’t simply that. What’s happening here is the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms.

The Arabs were fighting each other long before Mohammed ever arrived. They did not learn it from anyone else. All self-taught, just like everybody else.

Our favourite pastime is fighting each other.

Great, if what’s happening in Sudan has supposedly been going on ‘forever,’ then you should be able to name an empire that completely wiped out everyone for being a specific "race" in the lands they conquered. I’m sure there would be plenty of examples if that were true.

The reality is that pre-modern empires absolutely conquered, killed, and displaced people, but that’s not the same as modern ethnic cleansing. Ancient and medieval powers didn’t exterminate entire populations simply for being the ‘wrong race’ the way we define race (a European standard btw) today. Their violence was usually tied to resistance, tribute, or power, not to erase specific groups from existence. It didn't matter to them who resisted FFS.

I kind of feel like you're pretending jews don't exist at all. Or ancient chinese for that matter, who perpetrated war and attempted extermination of other groups more than once.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

India had formal caste systems in place for about 3000 years, not based on conquest but on ancestry. The idea itself isn't somehow uniquely european. Egyptians enslaving the Levites was similarly 3000 years ago or so. Ethnic or Caste dominance is a really, really old thing, and it's been pretty formal in many cultures for a really long time.

Its interesting that you mention the Levites because according to the Bible they were the one Jewish group the Egyptians didn't enslave.
Actual historians say that there is no evidence that the Egyptians enslaved any specific group. It is also well known that the Exodus is entirely mythical, and one of the reasons is that whereas the story had them escaping from Egypt to Canaan, Canaan was actually part of Egypt.

 

[Derec]

Prokaryotes probably fought like hell (and mostly lost) trying to keep eukaryotes and that hellish oxygen stuff out of their territory.
Not much has changed since.

Eukaryotes did not invent molecular oxygen. That would be cyanobacteria. And the only reason some eukaryotes can photosynthesize is that they "enslaved" those bacteria as endosymbionts. Just like all eukaryotes can use O₂ as the terminal electron acceptor because we "enslaved" another bacterium a long time ago to become mitochondria.

 

[Gospel]

Just a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the “civilized world.” And don’t come at me with “violence is just part of human history”, this isn’t simply that. What’s happening here is the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms.

The Arabs were fighting each other long before Mohammed ever arrived. They did not learn it from anyone else. All self-taught, just like everybody else.

Our favourite pastime is fighting each other.

Great, if what’s happening in Sudan has supposedly been going on ‘forever,’ then you should be able to name an empire that completely wiped out everyone for being a specific "race" in the lands they conquered. I’m sure there would be plenty of examples if that were true.

The reality is that pre-modern empires absolutely conquered, killed, and displaced people, but that’s not the same as modern ethnic cleansing. Ancient and medieval powers didn’t exterminate entire populations simply for being the ‘wrong race’ the way we define race (a European standard btw) today. Their violence was usually tied to resistance, tribute, or power, not to erase specific groups from existence. It didn't matter to them who resisted FFS.

I kind of feel like you're pretending jews don't exist at all. Or ancient chinese for that matter, who perpetrated war and attempted extermination of other groups more than once.

It’s impressive how my explanation of the difference between pre-modern conquest (which was about power, tribute, and rebellion) and modern ethnic cleansing (which is built on racial ideology and nation-state logic) somehow became, in your reading, a claim that Jews and ancient Chinese never existed. That’s a bold reinterpretation, just not one supported by anything I actually said.

 

[Gospel]

There’s an important distinction being missed here. Ancient empires, whether Roman, Chinese, or anyone else, absolutely conquered, killed, and displaced people, but their violence wasn’t identical to modern racial ideology. It was political, territorial, or tied to rebellion. Groups could convert, assimilate, or pay tribute and be absorbed. Modern ethnic cleansing is different: it’s based on racial theories, nationalism, and the idea that certain groups must be removed or eliminated because of who they are, not what they did. That ideology didn’t exist in the ancient world. So pointing to ancient conflicts doesn’t actually contradict the point I’m making, it describes a completely different system of how identity and violence operated.

Jews in ancient times were persecuted, killed, or expelled, yes, but not because of “race” or biological identity, because that concept did not exist yet.

 

[Gospel]

India had formal caste systems in place for about 3000 years, not based on conquest but on ancestry. The idea itself isn't somehow uniquely european. Egyptians enslaving the Levites was similarly 3000 years ago or so. Ethnic or Caste dominance is a really, really old thing, and it's been pretty formal in many cultures for a really long time.

Caste hierarchies and ancient forms of forced labor aren’t the same thing as modern ethnic cleansing.

The Indian caste system was a social and religious hierarchy within a single ethnic population, not an ideology about eliminating whole groups based on biological race. Likewise, ancient Egypt didn’t operate with racial categories at all, their conflicts were political, religious, or tied to rebellion. Modern ethnic cleansing is a product of racial theory, nationalism, and the idea of fixed, unchangeable identities. Pointing to ancient or caste-based systems doesn’t contradict that, because they’re entirely different frameworks.

Your whole ‘others did horrible things too’ routine isn’t an argument, it’s just a coping mechanism people use when they feel personally tied to a historical group because of their race.

 

[NoHolyCows]

How I went about making my argument was wrong. What I'm trying to say isn't. Ethnic cleansing isn’t unique to Europe or colonialism. Civilizations have been eliminating or relocating populations based on identity since the earliest empires, Assyrian deportations, Chinese frontier purges, Mongol massacres, and Ottoman relocations all fit the pattern. What changed with Europe wasn’t the idea but the infrastructure, modern states turned ethnic dominance into formal policy, justified by race science and nationalism rather than raw conquest.

The massacres in Sudan differ from Mongol or early Ottoman atrocities in motive and structure. The Mongols’ violence was a military strategy to enforce surrender, not ethnic purity. The Ottomans began as conquerors too, but by their decline were already showing the modern and learned logic of homogenizing populations, culminating in the Armenian Genocide.

What’s happening in Sudan today ain't a god damn conquest, it’s internal ethnic cleansing. It’s about erasing specific groups, not expanding rule. The pattern of mass killing repeats through history, but the ideology behind it has evolved, from imperial dominance to ethnic purification.

But if the story stops at ‘this is just the latest stage of a Europe-invented logic,’ it still relies on a big abstraction that downplays Sudan’s own history and the concrete choices of Sudanese actors in favor of a neat intellectual timeline.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

aaiight look. I’m aint out here trying to cram Sudan’s whole history into some fucking Europe-made blueprint.

What I said was simple: modern ethnic cleansing ain’t the same thing as old-school conquest, even if the body count looks similar. Sudanese folks are acting inside their own politics, land, resources, old beefs, but they’re also operating under a modern mindset where identity is treated like it’s locked in stone and the only ‘solution’ is wiping the other group out, not absorbing them.

You got Sunni Muslims killing other Sunni Muslims strictly because those Sunni Muslims are black bruh. How you explain that? If that ain’t modern racial logic, I don’t know what the fuck is. And me pointing out where that ideology came from don’t erase Sudanese agency, it just shows how today’s nation-state thinking changed the way people define territory, identity, and who gets to live. Both things can be true at once.

Anyway, my original point was hella straightforward: what’s happening in Sudan right now ain’t medieval conquest, it’s modern ethnic cleansing, the kind where your skin tone becomes the target. That distinction matters because it explains the violence, not because I’m blaming any civilization for the violence.

But instead of clocking that and moving on to Sudan itself, folks turned this thread into a side quest because some people heard ‘Europeans’ and started defending their racial in-group like I was talking about them personally.

 

[Gospel]

Tribal warfare is as old as humankind. Even the Chimps do it.

So you're seeing chimps running around the jungle checking each other’s fur color like, ‘Nah, you too dark for this side of the canopy,’ setting up little vine-cut checkpoints, making birth registries out of mud, and dragging whole families out the trees because they came from the ‘wrong’ troop three generations back?

Whatever you're smoking. don't share it with anyone else.

 

[NoHolyCows]

aaiight look. I’m aint out here trying to cram Sudan’s whole history into some fucking Europe-made blueprint.

What I said was simple: modern ethnic cleansing ain’t the same thing as old-school conquest, even if the body count looks similar. Sudanese folks are acting inside their own politics, land, resources, old beefs, but they’re also operating under a modern mindset where identity is treated like it’s locked in stone and the only ‘solution’ is wiping the other group out, not absorbing them.

You got Sunni Muslims killing other Sunni Muslims strictly because those Sunni Muslims are black bruh. How you explain that? If that ain’t modern racial logic, I don’t know what the fuck is. And me pointing out where that ideology came from don’t erase Sudanese agency, it just shows how today’s nation-state thinking changed the way people define territory, identity, and who gets to live. Both things can be true at once.

Anyway, my original point was hella straightforward: what’s happening in Sudan right now ain’t medieval conquest, it’s modern ethnic cleansing, the kind where your skin tone becomes the target. That distinction matters because it explains the violence, not because I’m blaming any civilization for the violence.

But instead of clocking that and moving on to Sudan itself, folks turned this thread into a side quest because some people heard ‘Europeans’ and started defending their racial in-group like I was talking about them personally.

Nobody here is denying this is ethnic cleansing or that racialized anti-Black hatred is central. “Sunni killing Sunni because they’re Black” is exactly the kind of thing that shows how deep the racial hierarchy runs in Sudan and the Sahel. You don’t need to convince me that skin tone and perceived “Arabness” matter; that part is obvious.

Where I’m not buying your frame is when you slide from “this is modern ethnic cleansing, not old-school conquest” (which is fair as a rough distinction) to “and we know where that ideology came from,” as if the key explanatory layer is a Europe-invented racial logic that Sudanese actors are now “operating under.” Anti-Black hierarchies in Sudan and the wider region come out of a long tangle of trans-Saharan slavery, Arabization, Ottoman categories, British border-drawing, local caste systems, and post-independence state politics. Europe’s race science and nation-state norms absolutely fed into that, but they didn’t arrive as a clean software update that suddenly turned conquest into “ethnic purification.” What’s happening now is over-determined: local history, militia economies, Gulf money, gold, state collapse, and racial ideology are all fused together. Saying “this is modern ethnic cleansing, not medieval conquest” adds something; claiming the crucial lens is a Europe-origin story about identity being “locked in stone” is a lot more speculative than you’re treating it.

And on the “people heard ‘Europeans’ and got defensive” bit: disagreeing with that part of your story isn’t the same as protecting a racial in-group. It’s just noticing that once you center “where the ideology came from,” you risk flattening Sudanese history into a chapter in your world-systems morality play. I can agree with you that the violence is modern, racialized ethnic cleansing and still say: you don’t actually need the “this ultimately comes from Europe” move to explain it, and when you insist on that extra step, that’s where the argument stops being tight and starts leaning on a just-so origin story.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

Geez Louise. Where did I ever explicitly say Sudan has no internal history or that Europe did everything? Quote it. You can’t, because I never said it. That claim isn’t coming from my words, it’s coming from how you felt reading my words. Your reply basically agrees with what I said, then invents some wild interpretation just so you can disagree with something I never said. Impressive.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Geez Louise. Where did I ever explicitly say Sudan has no internal history or that Europe did everything? Quote it. You can’t, because I never said it. That claim isn’t coming from my words, it’s coming from how you felt reading my words. Your reply basically agrees with what I said, then invents some wild interpretation just so you can disagree with something I never said. Impressive.

I never claimed you literally wrote “Sudan has no internal history.” I’m saying that when you call it “the same colonial logic in Arab uniforms” and focus on “where the ideology came from” without naming any Sudan-specific dynamics, you effectively make the Europe-origin story do most of the explanatory work. That’s the part I’m disagreeing with.

NHC