Split Historical Genocide - Derail From Sudan Massacre

[Gospel]

If you want to defend the modest claim that colonial modernity hardened and formalized older identity patterns and built a state machinery around them, I’m not fighting you.

Here’s where I need to be clear, because you keep attributing positions to me that I never stated. I never denied identity existed in ancient times. I never denied ancient violence was brutal. I never claimed Europeans invented violence. I never said Sudanese groups lack agency. I never said ancient systems were peaceful or morally superior. I never claimed ancient people didn’t kill entire communities. I never said ancient identity didn’t matter. And I definitely never said outcomes could not look similar. What I said, consistently, is that ancient identity was situational and flexible, whereas the identity logic driving modern ethnic cleansing is fixed, racialized, and structured by a modern state order. You keep responding to arguments I never made, twisting my words into a version of my position that exists only in your shit reinterpretation. I’m absolutely done talking to people who keep adding unnecessary nonsense to the discussion. I’d rather go touch grass.

 

[NoHolyCows]

And what exactly makes Sudan different then? The scale? The tools? The region? The reason? Come on man. The point was never that the Holocaust is some entrance exam. The point is that the Holocaust shows the modern structure where identity is treated as fixed and elimination is justified inside that framework. Sudan is working off that same logic today. That is why I brought it up. You keep acting like I am saying nothing counts unless it looks exactly like 1940s Europe. I am not. People gave examples and I did not say “it doesn’t count.” I explained why those situations were different. You just keep adding arguments I never made bruh.

Sudan isn’t “different” in the sense that it doesn’t fit a modern, racialized identity logic. I’ve said multiple times that it does. Where we actually differ is over how far you try to make that logic historically unique and European in origin, and what you do with everything that doesn’t fit that template.

The Holocaust absolutely shows a modern structure where identity is treated as fixed and elimination is justified in those terms. Sudan today is clearly using a hardened Arab/African divide that borrows from that kind of racialized thinking. None of that is in dispute. What I pushed back on is you treating that structure as something that “did not exist before colonial modernity” and as “a modern and European thing” in your own words, and then reclassifying anything earlier that looks too similar as “a completely different system” so it doesn’t spoil the clean break.

When I say you’re turning the Holocaust into an entrance exam, I don’t mean you’re demanding gas chambers and rail timetables. I mean you’re using it as the model for what “real” modern ethnic cleansing is supposed to look like,fixed, inescapable identity plus elimination justified as racial necessity. Cases that share that basic pattern but lack the full 20th-century toolkit you treat as “different” in kind rather than degree, especially if they’re pre-European. That’s exactly what you’ve been doing every time someone offers an older example, you don’t say “it doesn’t count at all,” you explain it away as “conquest” or “situational identity” so that the category you care about stays pinned to modern Europe and its aftershocks.

So no, I’m not claiming you literally said “nothing counts unless it looks exactly like 1940s Europe.” I’m saying that when you call ethnic cleansing “a modern and European thing” and insist that the fixed, inescapable identity framework “did not exist before colonial modernity,” you are, in effect, defining the pattern around the Holocaust/Sudan type and pushing structurally similar premodern cases out of the frame by definition. My argument isn’t that Sudan doesn’t share that logic; it’s that the logic itself is older and broader than the modern European moment you keep trying to quarantine it in.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

In a lot of premodern systems, violence absolutely was about control and rebellion, but there were also identities treated as permanently tainted or inferior in exactly the way you say “did not exist.” Caste hierarchies, slave lineages, “stained blood” regimes like limpieza de sangre in Iberia, despised outcast groups whose status followed descent for generations, all of those involved people being born into a category that was, in practice, extremely hard to escape and carried collective stigma regardless of individual loyalty. Were there margins and loopholes? Of course. But that mix of inherited stigma plus limited, messy mobility is precisely what we see later too.

And how does any of that relate to the ethnic cleansing in Sudan?

Caste systems and inherited stigma, are oppressive, but they are not examples of groups being targeted for eradication because their identity is defined as permanently unchangeable. Identity in those systems was harsh, but it was still possible to move, convert, intermarry, or be absorbed depending on context. That is not the same logic as modern ethnic cleansing.

The question I’m asking is simple:

Where in premodern history do we see a state or militia trying to kill an entire population because their identity is treated as fixed and inescapable? That is what is happening in Sudan today. That is what happened in the Holocaust. Ancient caste stigma is not the same thing, and it did not operate on that kind of eliminationist identity logic.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Here’s where I need to be clear, because you keep attributing positions to me that I never stated. I never denied identity existed in ancient times. I never denied ancient violence was brutal. I never claimed Europeans invented violence. I never said Sudanese groups lack agency. I never said ancient systems were peaceful or morally superior. I never claimed ancient people didn’t kill entire communities. I never said ancient identity didn’t matter. And I definitely never said outcomes could not look similar. What I said, consistently, is that ancient identity was situational and flexible, whereas the identity logic driving modern ethnic cleansing is fixed, racialized, and structured by a modern state order. You keep responding to arguments I never made, twisting my words into a version of my position that exists only in your shit reinterpretation. I’m absolutely done talking to people who keep adding unnecessary nonsense to the discussion. I’d rather go touch grass.

Most of what you just listed are claims I never attributed to you in the first place. I’ve never said you denied identity existed in antiquity, or that you said Europeans invented violence, or that you called Sudanese actors puppets, or that you thought ancient systems were peaceful. Those are strawmen you’re knocking down for free.

What I have pointed to, every time, are your own stronger formulations. You wrote: “No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity.” You wrote that the kind of inescapable identity you care about “simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world.” You wrote that ethnic cleansing is “a modern and European thing,” and that the logic Sudan is using “did not exist in antiquity.” And you’ve repeatedly summarized your distinction as “ancient identity was situational, modern identity in these conflicts is treated as fixed.”

If all you meant was the modest claim you tuck into the last sentence here, that modern ethnic cleansing is fixed, racialized, and structured by a modern state order in a way ancient systems generally weren’t we wouldn’t be arguing. I’ve said more than once that colonial modernity hardened and formalized older identity patterns and built a state machinery around them. Where we disagree is on the extra weight you keep putting on “did not exist before colonial modernity” and “modern and European thing.” That goes beyond “different structure and tools” into “different kind of phenomenon,” and once you say that out loud, it’s fair game for people to push back.

You’re free to go touch grass and leave it there. But you don’t get to walk away saying the only problem was that I kept inventing positions for you. I’ve been quoting your own words and arguing with the implications of those, not with the list of denials you just wrote down.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

Here’s where I need to be clear, because you keep attributing positions to me that I never stated. I never denied identity existed in ancient times. I never denied ancient violence was brutal. I never claimed Europeans invented violence. I never said Sudanese groups lack agency. I never said ancient systems were peaceful or morally superior. I never claimed ancient people didn’t kill entire communities. I never said ancient identity didn’t matter. And I definitely never said outcomes could not look similar. What I said, consistently, is that ancient identity was situational and flexible, whereas the identity logic driving modern ethnic cleansing is fixed, racialized, and structured by a modern state order. You keep responding to arguments I never made, twisting my words into a version of my position that exists only in your shit reinterpretation. I’m absolutely done talking to people who keep adding unnecessary nonsense to the discussion. I’d rather go touch grass.

Most of what you just listed are claims I never attributed to you in the first place. I’ve never said you denied identity existed in antiquity, or that you said Europeans invented violence, or that you called Sudanese actors puppets, or that you thought ancient systems were peaceful. Those are strawmen you’re knocking down for free.

What I have pointed to, every time, are your own stronger formulations. You wrote: “No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity.” You wrote that the kind of inescapable identity you care about “simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world.” You wrote that ethnic cleansing is “a modern and European thing,” and that the logic Sudan is using “did not exist in antiquity.” And you’ve repeatedly summarized your distinction as “ancient identity was situational, modern identity in these conflicts is treated as fixed.”

If all you meant was the modest claim you tuck into the last sentence here, that modern ethnic cleansing is fixed, racialized, and structured by a modern state order in a way ancient systems generally weren’t we wouldn’t be arguing. I’ve said more than once that colonial modernity hardened and formalized older identity patterns and built a state machinery around them. Where we disagree is on the extra weight you keep putting on “did not exist before colonial modernity” and “modern and European thing.” That goes beyond “different structure and tools” into “different kind of phenomenon,” and once you say that out loud, it’s fair game for people to push back.

You’re free to go touch grass and leave it there. But you don’t get to walk away saying the only problem was that I kept inventing positions for you. I’ve been quoting your own words and arguing with the implications of those, not with the list of denials you just wrote down.

NHC

I’m not going “beyond different structures and tools” by pointing out where the modern identity framework comes from. You can’t talk about fixed, inescapable identity categories operating inside a modern state without acknowledging the historical processes that created those categories in the first place. Who built the census systems, the racial classifications, the border regimes, the colonial administrative identities, and the bureaucratic machinery that the modern Sudanese state inherited? Those structures didn’t fall out of the sky. They were produced through colonial modernity, and the current actors are using them with full agency.

 

[NoHolyCows]

And how does any of that relate to the ethnic cleansing in Sudan?

Caste systems and inherited stigma, are oppressive, but they are not examples of groups being targeted for eradication because their identity is defined as permanently unchangeable. Identity in those systems was harsh, but it was still possible to move, convert, intermarry, or be absorbed depending on context. That is not the same logic as modern ethnic cleansing.

The question I’m asking is simple:

Where in premodern history do we see a state or militia trying to kill an entire population because their identity is treated as fixed and inescapable? That is what is happening in Sudan today. That is what happened in the Holocaust. Ancient caste stigma is not the same thing, and it did not operate on that kind of eliminationist identity logic.

It relates to Sudan because you built your whole distinction on the claim that “fixed and inescapable” identity didn’t exist before colonial modernity. The caste, slave-lineage, and “tainted blood” examples show that long before race science, there were already systems where people were born into a status they could not realistically shed, and where stigma followed descent, not just behaviour. That undercuts the premise that modern Sudanese militias are drawing on something wholly new in kind, rather than on an old pattern that has been re-articulated with modern racial language and state tools.

Your question is also doing a lot more work than you admit. “A state or militia trying to kill an entire population because their identity is treated as fixed and inescapable” sounds sharp, but taken literally it doesn’t even fit the cases you’re using as your touchstones. In the Holocaust, the ideology was total destruction, but in practice there were survivors, people who passed, people who fled, people who were absorbed into other populations. In Sudan today, you have mass killing and terror campaigns against specific groups, but also flight, rape, enslavement, forced displacement, forced marriages and people being folded into other communities. In both cases, the intent is to smash the group “as such” in its own territory and social form, not to guarantee that literally every body who shares that ancestry dies and none are ever absorbed.

That’s why I keep pushing back on your standard. The real question isn’t “can we find a premodern case that meets your idealized, 100 percent elimination test,” because no historical case, including the Holocaust or Sudan, perfectly does. The real question is whether premodern actors ever tried to destroy or permanently break a people as a people, targeted as who they are rather than just as rebels of the week. The answer to that is yes, you see campaigns against named peoples, sects, and lineages where killing, deportation, enslavement and forced absorption are all used to make sure that group, under that name and status, no longer exists as a coherent “us.” The mechanics look different without railroads and race science, but the core move of going after a group “as such” is there.

So when you say “ancient caste stigma is not the same thing,” what you’re really doing is tightening your definition until only the modern, European-flavoured cases fit inside it. Once you’ve decided ahead of time that “same logic” means “must look like Holocaust/Sudan under colonial-era race categories,” it’s no surprise that nothing earlier will satisfy you. That doesn’t prove the logic didn’t exist; it just proves you’ve written the earlier history out of your frame.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

You're focusing on outcomes rather than the identity logic behind them. The Holocaust absolutely treated identity as fixed and inescapable. That is exactly what the Nuremberg racial laws did: they made Jewishness a hereditary and permanent category that no amount of conversion, assimilation, or loyalty could change. People survived because the Nazis lost the war, not because the ideology allowed mobility or escape. Survival does not negate ideological intent.

 

[NoHolyCows]

I’m not going “beyond different structures and tools” by pointing out where the modern identity framework comes from. You can’t talk about fixed, inescapable identity categories operating inside a modern state without acknowledging the historical processes that created those categories in the first place. Who built the census systems, the racial classifications, the border regimes, the colonial administrative identities, and the bureaucratic machinery that the modern Sudanese state inherited? Those structures didn’t fall out of the sky. They were produced through colonial modernity, and the current actors are using them with full agency

You’re arguing against someone who doesn’t exist again.

Nobody is denying who built the censuses, racial taxonomies, borders, “native” categories and administrative machinery that Sudan later inherited. Obviously those are products of colonial modernity. Obviously the postcolonial state is working inside a state form and paperwork regime that were shaped by European rule. That’s just baseline history.

That’s not where our disagreement is.

The disagreement is not “did colonialism build the modern identity infrastructure?” It’s what you keep stacking on top of that, that the framework of fixed, inescapable identity “did not exist before colonial modernity” and that ethnic cleansing is “a modern and European thing.” Those are your words, and those go beyond “different structures and tools” into “different kind of phenomenon,” where everything that looks too similar outside that framework gets pushed into a separate conceptual box.

I’m not contesting the genealogy of Sudan’s censuses or ID papers. I’m contesting the idea that once those are in place, the logic of going after a group “as such” suddenly belongs only to a modern European lineage. Colonial modernity gave states more precise tools and categories to do it with; it did not conjure the underlying pattern out of nothing. That’s the only point I’ve been making, and nothing in what you just wrote about censuses and borders actually answers it.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You're focusing on outcomes rather than the identity logic behind them. The Holocaust absolutely treated identity as fixed and inescapable. That is exactly what the Nuremberg racial laws did: they made Jewishness a hereditary and permanent category that no amount of conversion, assimilation, or loyalty could change. People survived because the Nazis lost the war, not because the ideology allowed mobility or escape. Survival does not negate ideological intent.

You’re right that survival doesn’t cancel ideological intent. I’m not claiming “some Jews lived, so Nazi identity wasn’t fixed.” The point I’m making is narrower, your claim isn’t just that Nazi ideology treated Jewishness as fixed, it’s that this kind of “fixed, inescapable identity” logic did not exist before colonial modernity and is therefore a modern European thing. That’s the part your own examples don’t actually prove.

The Nuremberg laws are a good illustration of how far the Nazis pushed the idea, but they’re also a reminder that the line they were drawing had already been blurred by centuries of real assimilation. They needed that kind of ancestry-obsessed legal machinery precisely because Jews in Germany had already integrated in language, professions, public life and culture. The regime was using law to re-harden a boundary that social reality had already softened. That dynamic, people crossing an identity line in practice, power stepping in to freeze and weaponize that line isn’t uniquely 20th-century or uniquely European; it’s a modern, extreme version of something older.

And this is where the asymmetry creeps in. When you talk about the Holocaust or Sudan, you say, ignore the fact that some people survived or were absorbed, look at the intent to destroy a group whose identity is treated as fixed. But the moment someone points to premodern campaigns that look similar at the level of intent and targeting, you flip around and say, since some people were absorbed, enslaved, or folded into the conqueror’s society, it doesn’t count as the same identity logic, it’s “just” conquest or stigma. You’re happy to read modern cases by their ideology even when outcomes are messy, but you refuse to read older cases the same way.

So yes, the Holocaust is a paradigmatic modern, racialized genocide, and Sudan’s killers are drawing on that kind of hardened identity logic. I’m not disputing that. What I’m disputing is the leap from “this is a particularly developed instance” to “this kind of group-as-such targeting under a fixed identity framework did not exist in any meaningful form before colonial modernity.” Nuremberg shows how far the Nazis codified it; it doesn’t prove they were the first humans to try to turn inherited identity into an inescapable death category.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

And this is where the asymmetry creeps in. When you talk about the Holocaust or Sudan, you say, ignore the fact that some people survived or were absorbed, look at the intent to destroy a group whose identity is treated as fixed. But the moment someone points to premodern campaigns that look similar at the level of intent and targeting, you flip around and say, since some people were absorbed, enslaved, or folded into the conqueror’s society, it doesn’t count as the same identity logic, it’s “just” conquest or stigma. You’re happy to read modern cases by their ideology even when outcomes are messy, but you refuse to read older cases the same way.

Historians of Rome, Persia, and imperial China all describe conquest plus incorporation as a standard pattern: conquered peoples could be absorbed, given graded citizenship, or Sinicized if they submitted. Assimilation was a built-in imperial strategy, not only a desperate side effect of survival. By contrast, Nazi racial law explicitly defined Jewish identity as hereditary and inescapable and rejected assimilation as a solution. That’s the difference I’m talking about when I say ancient identity systems were situational and modern ones, like the Holocaust or Sudan’s current ethnic cleansing, treat identity as fixed & inescapable.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Historians of Rome, Persia, and imperial China all describe conquest plus incorporation as a standard pattern: conquered peoples could be absorbed, given graded citizenship, or Sinicized if they submitted. Assimilation was a built-in imperial strategy, not only a desperate side effect of survival. By contrast, Nazi racial law explicitly defined Jewish identity as hereditary and inescapable and rejected assimilation as a solution. That’s the difference I’m talking about when I say ancient identity systems were situational and modern ones, like the Holocaust or Sudan’s current ethnic cleansing, treat identity as fixed & inescapable.

You’re smuggling in a way sharper contrast than your own examples can support. Yes, Rome/Persia/China built assimilation into their imperial toolkit. That doesn’t mean identity was “situational” in some soft, harmless sense; it means elimination and incorporation were two options applied to groups that were already being treated as coherent, inheritable “peoples.” The fact that some were upgraded to “citizen” or “Sinicized” is not evidence that the underlying identity logic was fluid, it’s evidence that the conqueror reserved the right to decide who was killable, who was enslaveable, and who was convertible.

Once you admit that, your neat modern/ancient split collapses. Nazi law is the extreme case where the regime explicitly codifies “no assimilation” for Jews, but plenty of modern ethnic projects mix both moves at once: massacre the men, rape and reclassify the children, forcibly rename and relocate communities while declaring their old identity extinct. Sudan actually proves that point, not your exception, you have explicit targeting of groups as groups, alongside forced displacement and forced incorporation into a dominant category. That’s not a different “kind” of identity logic from earlier empires; it’s the same basic structure running on different technology and paperwork.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

You keep trying to fold everything into one “identity logic” so you can claim the ancient and modern cases are basically the same, but that is not what the historical record shows. Ancient empires absolutely had categories, hierarchies and brutal conquest. None of that is in dispute. What I am talking about is how identity functioned, not whether the violence was harsh.

In ancient systems, identity was not a sealed category. Rome, Persia and China did not treat conquered groups as biologically unchangeable. People shifted categories through marriage, service, language, adoption, class mobility or allegiance. Even when the violence was extreme, the identity boundary itself was not locked. The whole reason assimilation existed as a built-in imperial strategy was because identity was a thing you could move between.

Modern ethnic cleansing operates differently. It treats identity as fixed and non-negotiable. You cannot marry out, convert out or “earn” your way out of the target category. You are marked because you are defined as something permanent. That is the shift I am pointing to, and that shift required the modern state apparatus and the racialized identity categories that come with it. Sudan today fits that pattern: groups are being targeted because their identity is treated as inherited and inescapable. That is not how ancient systems worked.

You keep collapsing intent, method and identity logic into a single bucket so you can claim there is no distinction. But the distinction does not disappear just because you want to frame every empire as using the exact same identity model. Ancient systems combined elimination, absorption and conversion because the boundaries were not rigid. Modern ethnic cleansing uses fixed categories defined by the state, and the violence enforces those categories. That is not “the same structure with different paperwork.” It is a different identity framework entirely.

That is the point you keep sidestepping.

 

[Gospel]

in some soft, harmless sense

Quote were I claimed anything was soft or harmless or STFU about it.

The fact that some were upgraded to “citizen” or “Sinicized” is not evidence that the underlying identity logic was fluid, it’s evidence that the conqueror reserved the right to decide who was killable, who was enslaveable, and who was convertible.

The fact that ancient systems had assimilation built into them, while modern systems involved in ethnic cleansing and genocide do not, is exactly the difference I’m pointing out.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You keep trying to fold everything into one “identity logic” so you can claim the ancient and modern cases are basically the same, but that is not what the historical record shows. Ancient empires absolutely had categories, hierarchies and brutal conquest. None of that is in dispute. What I am talking about is how identity functioned, not whether the violence was harsh.

I’m not saying “everything is the same” or that Rome and 20th-century Europe are interchangeable. I’ve been very specific about the difference that modern states have race science, censuses, passports, and a level of bureaucratic reach that ancient empires simply didn’t. Where I’ve pushed back is on how far you stretch that difference. When you say the kind of fixed, inescapable identity you care about “did not exist before colonial modernity” and that ethnic cleansing is “a modern and European thing,” you’re not just talking about tools, you’re claiming a different kind of identity logic altogether. That’s the part I don’t think your own examples actually sustain.

In ancient systems, identity was not a sealed category. Rome, Persia and China did not treat conquered groups as biologically unchangeable. People shifted categories through marriage, service, language, adoption, class mobility or allegiance. Even when the violence was extreme, the identity boundary itself was not locked. The whole reason assimilation existed as a built-in imperial strategy was because identity was a thing you could move between.

Right, big empires absolutely used assimilation as strategy and had ways for some people to move “up” over time. But that doesn’t mean they had no serious version of fixed, inherited identity. Long before colonial modernity you already see people born into statuses that are, in practice, almost impossible to shed and that follow descent hereditary slave lineages, caste orders, “stained blood” regimes, permanently despised out groups. Even in Rome and China, there were stigmas and statuses that clung across generations no matter how much loyalty or language changed. The fact that some people could move between categories doesn’t erase that; it just means, exactly as in modern systems, there is a mix of hard boundaries and messy, contingent mobility. So yes, assimilation existed. That doesn’t mean premodern identity was simply “situational” while modern identity is the first time anyone tried to make it stick to the body and the blood.

Modern ethnic cleansing operates differently. It treats identity as fixed and non-negotiable. You cannot marry out, convert out or “earn” your way out of the target category. You are marked because you are defined as something permanent. That is the shift I am pointing to, and that shift required the modern state apparatus and the racialized identity categories that come with it. Sudan today fits that pattern: groups are being targeted because their identity is treated as inherited and inescapable. That is not how ancient systems worked.

Modern ethnic cleansing talks as if identity is absolutely fixed and non negotiable, and you’re right that modern states are much better at writing that into law and paperwork. But even in the cases you’re using as your own touchstones Nazi Europe, late Ottoman Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, people do sometimes marry, pass, convert, hide, get adopted, or get absorbed across those supposedly sealed lines. The ideology says “you can’t ever get out”; the social reality is always more compromised than the slogan.

Sudan clearly fits a modern, racialized pattern, I’ve never argued otherwise. My pushback is against treating that pattern as if it literally did not exist in any form before colonial modernity and must therefore be “a modern and European thing.” Colonialism and the modern state make identity harder, more formal, more surveilled. They don’t magically introduce the idea of going after a group as such because of what they are, rather than what they did.

You keep collapsing intent, method and identity logic into a single bucket so you can claim there is no distinction. But the distinction does not disappear just because you want to frame every empire as using the exact same identity model. Ancient systems combined elimination, absorption and conversion because the boundaries were not rigid. Modern ethnic cleansing uses fixed categories defined by the state, and the violence enforces those categories. That is not “the same structure with different paperwork.” It is a different identity framework entirely.

That is the point you keep sidestepping.

I’m not collapsing everything into “one bucket,” I’m separating two levels that you keep fusing together. On one level, yes modern ethnic cleansing is bound up with fixed state categories, censuses and racial science. On that level it absolutely looks different from Rome or Han China. On another level, though, the structure is recognisable, a named group is targeted “as such,” attacked, scattered, killed, and partly absorbed until it no longer exists in the same form. Ancient empires also mixed elimination, absorption and conversion; modern regimes do too. The paperwork and rhetoric are different; the underlying move is not as alien to the past as you’re making it sound.

So I’m not saying “every empire used the exact same identity model.” I’m saying the jump from “modern states made identity harder and more bureaucratic” to “this is a different identity framework entirely that did not exist before colonial modernity” is where you’re overreaching. That’s the point I’ve been addressing from the beginning, and quoting your own lines about “did not exist in antiquity” and “modern and European thing” isn’t sidestepping it, it’s staying right on top of it.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Quote were I claimed anything was soft or harmless or STFU about it.

“Soft, harmless” was my description of how narrow your revised claim is, not a quote from you. You said ethnic cleansing is “a modern and European thing” and that fixed, inescapable identity “did not exist before colonial modernity.” When I say you’ve walked that back to a “soft, harmless sense,” I mean:

Now you’re basically saying, “modern states hardened identity and gave it more paperwork,” which everyone already agrees with. I’m not accusing you of calling anything soft or harmless; I’m saying that once you strip out the “did not exist in antiquity / modern and European thing” part, what you’re left with is a much smaller, more ordinary claim than the one you started with.

The fact that ancient systems had assimilation built into them, while modern systems involved in ethnic cleansing and genocide do not, is exactly the difference I’m pointing out.

Ancient systems absolutely had assimilation built in, and modern genocidal systems absolutely don’t offer “assimilation” as a safe, official pathway out for the target group as a group. On that much we agree. But “no assimilation built in” is not the same as “no absorption or category crossing happens,” and that’s where your clean line blurs.

In the modern cases you keep citing, there is always some combination of killing, expulsion and coerced absorption. Nazi Europe had people surviving in mixed marriages, under forged identities, or as children taken in and raised as non-Jews. The Armenian genocide had women and children absorbed into Muslim households and losing Armenian identity over time. Sudan today has mass killing and displacement, but also rape, forced marriage, enslavement and people being folded into other communities. None of these systems advertise assimilation as a solution for the group, but in practice they still sort people into “kill, expel, absorb” just like ancient empires did, only with different tools and language.

So yes, modern ethnic cleansing doesn’t say “submit and join us” the way Rome did. But that doesn’t mean the underlying logic of deciding who is killable, who is removable and who can be swallowed into the dominant identity “did not exist” before colonial modernity. It means the modern state has taken an older pattern and stripped out the honest promise of assimilation while still using elimination and selective absorption to break a people.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

Right, big empires absolutely used assimilation as strategy and had ways for some people to move “up” over time. But that doesn’t mean they had no serious version of fixed, inherited identity.

I never said ancient societies didn’t have inherited identity. I said they didn’t have anything like the modern system, where identity is treated as fixed, inescapable, and enforced by a state apparatus. That’s the difference you keep flattening, and it’s the only point I’ve been making the entire time.

You keep cherry-picking isolated phrases and turning them into claims I never made. Every time I clarify what I actually said, you sidestep it and go right back to “well, that’s not what you wrote.” I don’t care what you imagined I meant. Respond to the argument I actually made.

 

[Gospel]

“Soft, harmless” was my description of how narrow your revised claim is, not a quote from you.

Your description is wrong, so any argument built on it needs to be thrown out.

 

[NoHolyCows]

I never said ancient societies didn’t have inherited identity. I said they didn’t have anything like the modern system, where identity is treated as fixed, inescapable, and enforced by a state apparatus. That’s the difference you keep flattening, and it’s the only point I’ve been making the entire time.

You keep cherry-picking isolated phrases and turning them into claims I never made. Every time I clarify what I actually said, you sidestep it and go right back to “well, that’s not what you wrote.” I don’t care what you imagined I meant. Respond to the argument I actually made.

I never said you denied inherited identity existed in antiquity; the sentence you’re replying to literally starts by agreeing that big empires had inherited statuses and assimilation strategies. I’m not arguing with that. I’m arguing with your own stronger lines, like:

“No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity.”

and:

“the identity categories they are using… operate under a colonial logic that did not exist in antiquity.”

and:

“ethic cleansing is a modern and European thing.”

Those aren’t “isolated phrases,” they’re the spine of your position. They go beyond “modern systems add a state apparatus” to “this kind of fixed, inescapable identity didn’t exist before colonial modernity and that’s why ethnic cleansing is a modern and European thing.” You can’t now say your “only point” was about the apparatus when you explicitly framed the identity logic itself as something that “did not exist” in earlier periods.

I am responding to the argument you actually made in writing. If what you now want to defend is the narrower claim that modern states enforce identity more rigidly and bureaucratically than ancient empires, then we barely disagree. But that’s not what “did not exist in antiquity” and “modern and European thing” say on the page, and it isn’t “cherry-picking” to quote those lines back to you and treat them as part of your argument.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

Those aren’t “isolated phrases,” they’re the spine of your position. They go beyond “modern systems add a state apparatus” to “this kind of fixed, inescapable identity didn’t exist before colonial modernity and that’s why ethnic cleansing is a modern and European thing.” You can’t now say your “only point” was about the apparatus when you explicitly framed the identity logic itself as something that “did not exist” in earlier periods.

I’ve clarified this multiple times, and you keep ignoring those clarifications so you can nitpick wording instead of addressing the argument itself. At this point it’s obvious you’re hanging onto a loose phrase because you can’t refute the actual distinction. Every time I explain what I meant, you call it “walking it back,” even though I’ve repeated the same clarification over and over.

Jimmy tried pointing this out to you earlier, but you were too busy insisting I must forever stand by the clumsiest version of my wording. I didn’t factor in that you’d latch onto a minor phrasing issue just to dodge the only argument I’m actually making.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Your description is wrong, so any argument built on it needs to be thrown out.

Nothing in my argument depends on you having used the words “soft” or “harmless,” so there’s nothing to throw out.

That line was me characterizing how modest your revised claim is compared to what you actually wrote earlier. The core of what I’ve been pushing back on isn’t that label, it’s your own statements like:

“No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity.”

“the identity categories they are using… operate under a colonial logic that did not exist in antiquity.”

“ethic cleansing is a modern and European thing.”

Whether you like my shorthand or not doesn’t touch the substance, you did frame fixed, inescapable identity as something that “did not exist” before colonial modernity and ethnic cleansing as “a modern and European thing.” Me pointing out that this goes beyond “modern states enforce identity more tightly” is not an error in description; it’s just taking your own wording seriously.

NHC