Sudan Massacre

[Gospel]

Yes, real campaigns mix killing, expulsion, and selective survival, that’s true across all eras. But that doesn’t erase the core distinction I’m making. In ancient systems, “absorption” meant you could actually stop being the target by surrendering, converting, or adopting the dominant culture. The identity marker was fluid, and political submission ended the threat. In modern ethnic cleansing, the Nazi model, the Young Turks, the Interahamwe, Sudan, “assimilation” doesn’t work the same way.

Jews could not assimilate under Nazi racial law.
Armenians could not assimilate under Ottoman nationalism.
Tutsis could not assimilate under Hutu Power ideology.
Black African tribes in Sudan cannot assimilate into the “Arab” identity the militias use to mark who lives and who dies.

The existence of a few individuals who “pass” or are temporarily spared does not undo the eliminationist logic. Selective survival is not assimilation, it’s exception. So nope, assimilation doesn’t blow up the distinction. It reinforces it: Ancient assimilation was systemic and expected. Modern ethnic cleansing makes assimilation impossible for the group itself, because the identity category is fixed and targeted. You treating “some individuals survived” as evidence of a non-eliminationist system, when in fact every genocide in history has survivors is just silly. Sorry.

You’re talking like you’ve found a clean fault line in history, but most of what you’re calling a “core distinction” is just how you’ve decided to label things.

Nobody here is denying that modern Europe added race science, census states, passports, all the stuff that lets you formalize and police identity in a new way. The question is whether that suddenly flipped a switch from “fluid, political, assimilative” to “fixed, racial, eliminationist” in the way you keep describing. When you get down to actual cases, including the ones you’re citing, it’s nowhere near that neat.

Take the Nazis. You’re saying “Jews could not assimilate under Nazi racial law” as if that proves your point. But the whole reason Nazi racial law had to be as technical and obsessed with ancestry as it was is that Jews in Germany had already assimilated in every ordinary sense: language, dress, education, military service, public life. The project was to drag people who had been absorbed into German society back into a racialized category and mark them as unchangeable again. That only makes sense against a background where “adopting the dominant culture” already had happened. You can’t turn that history into “assimilation was impossible” without quietly erasing the thing the Nazis were reacting against.

Armenia is similar. Alongside deportations and massacres there is a very well documented pattern of Armenian women and children being taken into Muslim/Turkish/Kurdish households, converted and raised under a different identity. That wasn’t one or two random flukes, it was part of how the violence worked. A chunk of the group was killed, a chunk was driven out, and a chunk was absorbed under the dominant category. Saying “that’s just a few exceptions” doesn’t make it go away, it just lets your theory ignore the parts that don’t fit.

Rwanda and Bosnia, Hutu and Tutsi weren’t timeless biological races. Those labels were hardened and politicized over time; people moved across them, intermarried, and got reclassified. The genocidal projects tried to freeze those lines and weaponize them, but they didn’t invent fixed identity out of a world where everything had been magically fluid the day before.

And Sudan is exactly the kind of messy case your story can’t digest. The “Arab” versus “African” line there is tied to language, claimed descent, class and region over centuries. “Arabness” in Sudan has been something people could claim, be denied, and sometimes grow into. Now you have militias using that hierarchy in a very modern, racialized way, but they’re doing it on top of a long history where “Arab” has been an aspirational and contested identity, not a genetic species. You don’t get to use that history when it helps your narrative, then suddenly treat “Arab” as a metaphysical essence no “Black African tribe” could ever cross, even in principle.

Once you admit that, your absolute contrast ancient systems as systematically assimilative, modern ones as making assimilation “impossible for the group”stops being a description and starts looking like a stack of definitions you’ve tailored around the Holocaust and then projected onto everything else. Both ancient and modern campaigns mix killing, expulsion, and different kinds of incorporation or erasure through absorption. Sometimes the path out of being a target is wide, sometimes it’s narrow, sometimes it’s only available to some slice of the group, sometimes it’s violently closed off. There isn’t a magic year on the timeline where that spectrum suddenly becomes a binary.

If you want to say “modern Europe made identity-based mass violence more systematic, more racialized, and more bureaucratically enforceable,” that’s a serious claim and there’s plenty of evidence you could use for it. But “ethnic cleansing is a modern, European thing, ancient stuff is just conquest with easy assimilation” asks way more than your own examples can deliver, and stamping “sorry, that’s silly” at the end doesn’t turn it into settled fact.

NHC

You are describing the long historical fluidity of “Arabness” in Sudan, and I agree with most of that history. Identity in Sudan was not a fixed genetic category in the premodern period. People could adopt Arabic language, intermarry, join different lineages, and be absorbed into new identities over time. That fluidity is well documented. But that history does not contradict the point I am making. It actually reinforces it. The fact that “Arab” and “African” were flexible categories for centuries is precisely why the current violence is operating under a modern racialized logic. What was once a negotiable identity is now being treated as permanent and elimination-worthy.

The RSF is not giving people the option to “become Arab” through language or culture the way that older systems allowed. The category has been hardened into something people cannot cross into for safety, even in principle. So I am not turning “Arab” into a metaphysical essence. The militias are. The shift from fluid identity to fixed, targeted identity is the entire point. It is exactly what makes this situation modern rather than ancient. You cannot take the older, flexible identity system and use it to claim that the current, rigid system is not racialized. The whole tragedy is that those older pathways of assimilation are no longer available.

I do not, have not, and will not remove Sudanese agency by acknowledging that shift. Sudan’s ethnic cleansing is carried out by Sudanese actors with their own reasons tied to their own history, with full agency, but it operates within a modern state system that was originally shaped by European colonial governance. The categories and infrastructure used to target groups today did not exist in the same way in premodern settings.

Again, Ancient violence punished resistance. Modern ethnic cleansing punishes existence. That distinction is not something I invented. It is literally how international law differentiates genocide** itself from other forms of mass killing. If the argument is that identity was always the same and operated the same way across history, then by that logic dolus specialis should not exist at all. But it does, because the modern form of identity-targeted destruction is fundamentally different from premodern conquest violence.

The Nazi example actually proves this. Jews had assimilated into German culture in every measurable way, language, politics, professions, and none of that mattered once racial identity became the criterion. That’s the shift I’m pointing out. Ancient massacres were brutal, but they didn’t operate on the modern logic of eliminating a group whose identity was defined as unchangeable. Pretending there’s no meaningful difference between “submit and join us” and “nothing you do can remove the target on your back” doesn’t erase the distinction; it just ignores why the distinction exists.

If your argument is that modern Europe industrialized, bureaucratized, and hardened identity categories, then wonderful, that’s exactly the point I’m making. But claiming ancient conquest operated on the same identity logic doesn’t line up with how ancient systems actually worked.



**No, I’m not switching the discussion from ethnic cleansing to genocide. I’m using the legal definition of genocide as an example to clarify the distinction.

 

[Emily Lake]

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.

Dude, the Chinese waged war for the express purpose of killing other tribes, even when they weren't trying to expand their territory. They viewed some of the other dynasties and clans as evil and in need of killing. the Indian caste system wasn't political or territorial - it was predominantly religious, and based on the idea that some people were definitionally of lesser value based on their ancestry. Dalits couldn't "convert" to Brahmin caste or assimilate into them.

The ideology you're calling out *did* exist in the ancient world. It wasn't invented by Europeans.

Good lord. I’m not saying identity-based violence didn’t exist in the ancient world , it clearly did. My point is that what’s happening in Sudan follows the modern, European-developed model of identity-based elimination.

Ancient violence operated under a completely different framework. Conquest-era brutality, including the Chinese example you mentioned, came with the possibility of absorption, assimilation, or integration into the dominant culture once a group submitted. You could change your status by adopting the ruling culture.

Modern ethnic cleansing offers no such path. The identity marker is treated as permanent and unchangeable. You’re targeted specifically because of who you are, and nothing you do can change that. That ideological shift, tying violence to fixed identity categories instead of political submission , is exactly what separates ancient conquest from modern ethnic cleansing.

That's what I'm saying is both Modern and European. I'm done with this shit, believe what you want.

Gospel, I understand what you're saying. I'm saying that your assumptions here are incorrect.

In the Chinese example, there genuinely was no option for absorption or assimilation or integration - the intention was extermination. It wasn't conquest, it was elimination.

Similarly, Indian castes couldn't be changed - you couldn't identify your way into Brahmin caste. If you were untouchable, you were permanently and forever untouchable, as was anyone you married, as were your children and their children forever.

Yes, what's going on in Sudan is identity-based elimination based on who the person is, 100%. It's not tied to political submission.

But that concept and that sort of behavior is neither modern nor particularly european. Hell, it predates european established civilizations - there really wasn't a "europe" in the way you imply 3000 years ago. But some chinese states were waging a war of extermination against other states with no objective of political submission, and with the express intention of extermination back then. Hindu untouchables were irrevocably untouchable 3000 years ago or more.

 

[Emily Lake]

Uppity Negro =1
Folks who feel personally connected to whiteness and took offence to my pointing out a fact that ethnic cleansing is a modern and European thing = 0

Dude, fuck your race card bullshit.

I like you Gospel, you're one of my all-time favorite poster here. I have an immense amount of respect for you. But this right here, this is some absolute horse shit.

Pointing out that your assumptions are factually incorrect isn't some "personal connection to whiteness". And you saying that is some racist crapola, as if the only possible reason anyone could object to you being flat out factually wrong is because we're a bunch of crybaby crackers who can't deal with a brother being right.

Come off it, bro. I don't feel any "connection to whiteness" bullshit. I just happen to know that identity-based extermination and oppression without the option of assimilation is older than europe. It's a sucktastically horrible thing for humans to do, but it's not unique to wypipo. Hell, I'm not even sure it's unique to humans!

 

[Emily Lake]

you’d be able to show it in the history instead

There are plenty of examples of ancient violence, sure, but can you point to anything in pre-European history that actually resembles the Holocaust?

I’ll wait.

The Aztecs outright murdered and sacrificed other precolumbian tribes. Not assimilated, not absorbed, just straight up made them extinct. Toltecs come to mind.

 

[Emily Lake]

OMG, what universe are we in right now? Did the concept of assimilation get deleted from this timeline?

There are pre-euopean cases of extermination that did NOT allow assimilation. None of that makes the crusades or the inquisition or the holocaust any less horrifically atrocious - all it means is that exterminating a group of people based on who they are isn't something that is uniquely european, nor uniquely modern.

 

[Emily Lake]

Jews could not assimilate under Nazi racial law.
Armenians could not assimilate under Ottoman nationalism.
Tutsis could not assimilate under Hutu Power ideology.
Black African tribes in Sudan cannot assimilate into the “Arab” identity the militias use to mark who lives and who dies.

Toltecs couldn't assimilate under Aztec rule
Dalits couldn't assimilate under Brahmin rule
Several chinese states couldn't assimilate under the rule of several other chinese states that were just outright determined to make the other states completely dead to the last child.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Yes, real campaigns mix killing, expulsion, and selective survival, that’s true across all eras. But that doesn’t erase the core distinction I’m making. In ancient systems, “absorption” meant you could actually stop being the target by surrendering, converting, or adopting the dominant culture. The identity marker was fluid, and political submission ended the threat. In modern ethnic cleansing, the Nazi model, the Young Turks, the Interahamwe, Sudan, “assimilation” doesn’t work the same way.

Jews could not assimilate under Nazi racial law.
Armenians could not assimilate under Ottoman nationalism.
Tutsis could not assimilate under Hutu Power ideology.
Black African tribes in Sudan cannot assimilate into the “Arab” identity the militias use to mark who lives and who dies.

The existence of a few individuals who “pass” or are temporarily spared does not undo the eliminationist logic. Selective survival is not assimilation, it’s exception. So nope, assimilation doesn’t blow up the distinction. It reinforces it: Ancient assimilation was systemic and expected. Modern ethnic cleansing makes assimilation impossible for the group itself, because the identity category is fixed and targeted. You treating “some individuals survived” as evidence of a non-eliminationist system, when in fact every genocide in history has survivors is just silly. Sorry.

You’re talking like you’ve found a clean fault line in history, but most of what you’re calling a “core distinction” is just how you’ve decided to label things.

Nobody here is denying that modern Europe added race science, census states, passports, all the stuff that lets you formalize and police identity in a new way. The question is whether that suddenly flipped a switch from “fluid, political, assimilative” to “fixed, racial, eliminationist” in the way you keep describing. When you get down to actual cases, including the ones you’re citing, it’s nowhere near that neat.

Take the Nazis. You’re saying “Jews could not assimilate under Nazi racial law” as if that proves your point. But the whole reason Nazi racial law had to be as technical and obsessed with ancestry as it was is that Jews in Germany had already assimilated in every ordinary sense: language, dress, education, military service, public life. The project was to drag people who had been absorbed into German society back into a racialized category and mark them as unchangeable again. That only makes sense against a background where “adopting the dominant culture” already had happened. You can’t turn that history into “assimilation was impossible” without quietly erasing the thing the Nazis were reacting against.

Armenia is similar. Alongside deportations and massacres there is a very well documented pattern of Armenian women and children being taken into Muslim/Turkish/Kurdish households, converted and raised under a different identity. That wasn’t one or two random flukes, it was part of how the violence worked. A chunk of the group was killed, a chunk was driven out, and a chunk was absorbed under the dominant category. Saying “that’s just a few exceptions” doesn’t make it go away, it just lets your theory ignore the parts that don’t fit.

Rwanda and Bosnia, Hutu and Tutsi weren’t timeless biological races. Those labels were hardened and politicized over time; people moved across them, intermarried, and got reclassified. The genocidal projects tried to freeze those lines and weaponize them, but they didn’t invent fixed identity out of a world where everything had been magically fluid the day before.

And Sudan is exactly the kind of messy case your story can’t digest. The “Arab” versus “African” line there is tied to language, claimed descent, class and region over centuries. “Arabness” in Sudan has been something people could claim, be denied, and sometimes grow into. Now you have militias using that hierarchy in a very modern, racialized way, but they’re doing it on top of a long history where “Arab” has been an aspirational and contested identity, not a genetic species. You don’t get to use that history when it helps your narrative, then suddenly treat “Arab” as a metaphysical essence no “Black African tribe” could ever cross, even in principle.

Once you admit that, your absolute contrast ancient systems as systematically assimilative, modern ones as making assimilation “impossible for the group”stops being a description and starts looking like a stack of definitions you’ve tailored around the Holocaust and then projected onto everything else. Both ancient and modern campaigns mix killing, expulsion, and different kinds of incorporation or erasure through absorption. Sometimes the path out of being a target is wide, sometimes it’s narrow, sometimes it’s only available to some slice of the group, sometimes it’s violently closed off. There isn’t a magic year on the timeline where that spectrum suddenly becomes a binary.

If you want to say “modern Europe made identity-based mass violence more systematic, more racialized, and more bureaucratically enforceable,” that’s a serious claim and there’s plenty of evidence you could use for it. But “ethnic cleansing is a modern, European thing, ancient stuff is just conquest with easy assimilation” asks way more than your own examples can deliver, and stamping “sorry, that’s silly” at the end doesn’t turn it into settled fact.

NHC

You are describing the long historical fluidity of “Arabness” in Sudan, and I agree with most of that history. Identity in Sudan was not a fixed genetic category in the premodern period. People could adopt Arabic language, intermarry, join different lineages, and be absorbed into new identities over time. That fluidity is well documented. But that history does not contradict the point I am making. It actually reinforces it. The fact that “Arab” and “African” were flexible categories for centuries is precisely why the current violence is operating under a modern racialized logic. What was once a negotiable identity is now being treated as permanent and elimination-worthy.

The RSF is not giving people the option to “become Arab” through language or culture the way that older systems allowed. The category has been hardened into something people cannot cross into for safety, even in principle. So I am not turning “Arab” into a metaphysical essence. The militias are. The shift from fluid identity to fixed, targeted identity is the entire point. It is exactly what makes this situation modern rather than ancient. You cannot take the older, flexible identity system and use it to claim that the current, rigid system is not racialized. The whole tragedy is that those older pathways of assimilation are no longer available.

I do not, have not, and will not remove Sudanese agency by acknowledging that shift. Sudan’s ethnic cleansing is carried out by Sudanese actors with their own reasons tied to their own history, with full agency, but it operates within a modern state system that was originally shaped by European colonial governance. The categories and infrastructure used to target groups today did not exist in the same way in premodern settings.

Again, Ancient violence punished resistance. Modern ethnic cleansing punishes existence. That distinction is not something I invented. It is literally how international law differentiates genocide** itself from other forms of mass killing. If the argument is that identity was always the same and operated the same way across history, then by that logic dolus specialis should not exist at all. But it does, because the modern form of identity-targeted destruction is fundamentally different from premodern conquest violence.

The Nazi example actually proves this. Jews had assimilated into German culture in every measurable way, language, politics, professions, and none of that mattered once racial identity became the criterion. That’s the shift I’m pointing out. Ancient massacres were brutal, but they didn’t operate on the modern logic of eliminating a group whose identity was defined as unchangeable. Pretending there’s no meaningful difference between “submit and join us” and “nothing you do can remove the target on your back” doesn’t erase the distinction; it just ignores why the distinction exists.

If your argument is that modern Europe industrialized, bureaucratized, and hardened identity categories, then wonderful, that’s exactly the point I’m making. But claiming ancient conquest operated on the same identity logic doesn’t line up with how ancient systems actually worked.



**No, I’m not switching the discussion from ethnic cleansing to genocide. I’m using the legal definition of genocide as an example to clarify the distinction.

You’re treating “modern, racialized ethnic cleansing” as if naming it in the 19th–20th century is the same thing as inventing it there. Those aren’t the same claim.

On Sudan, we actually agree on the basics, “Arab” and “African” in Sudan were historically flexible categories tied to language, lineage and status, and the current violence is using a much harder, racialized line. Same with your Nazi example, Jews had already assimilated in every normal sense language, professions, public life and Nazi racial law’s entire function was to drag assimilated people back into a fixed, persecuted category. That’s not a world where assimilation was “impossible,” that’s a world where assimilation had happened and was violently revoked. Armenia works the same way alongside killing and deportation, there is a well-documented pattern of Armenian women and children being taken into Muslim households, converted, and raised under a different identity. That isn’t a cute outlier; it’s part of how the group is broken and partially dissolved into the dominant category.

In other words even in your showcase “modern” cases, the real pattern isn’t “no assimilation in principle,” it’s a mix of killing, expulsion and coerced absorption. Modern ideology says “nothing you do can remove the target on your back”; social reality is messier. And in earlier eras, you get the mirror image, empires also killed, deported and enslaved whole communities in ways that shattered them permanently as a people, even if some survivors were absorbed into the conqueror’s population. That’s not “just punishing resistance,” it’s using violence and forced movement to erase a group as a group.

That’s why your slogan “ancient punishes resistance, modern punishes existence” overshoots the evidence. It’s a neat contrast, not a law of history. Dolus specialis doesn’t rescue it either. The legal definition of genocide talks about intent to destroy a group “as such”; it does not say “only after European race science and modern states enter the chat.” The law is naming a kind of intent that has existed in many guises; it isn’t retroactively proving that the underlying logic is uniquely European.

So yes Sudan today is a modern, racialized ethnic cleansing carried out by Sudanese actors in a state system shaped in part by European colonial governance. That’s all true. What doesn’t follow is the extra step you keep trying to smuggle in, that this kind of identity-targeted destruction is therefore “a modern and European thing,” and anything pre-European must, by definition, be downgraded to “just conquest.” That last move is where your argument stops being history and starts being a circle.

NHC