Sudan Massacre

[DBT]

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.

I made no mention of colour. What about territory? Resources? Doesn't that come into it?

 

[Gospel]

To NHC: I think Gospel’s choice of the qualifying word “colonial” has been taken to mean “white European”, which is unfortunate. It was the logic he described as colonial, and I think it’s more like “human delusion” than “colonial logic” even if colonial refers to the universal proclivity of successful civilizations to “colonize”.

Exactly!!! ‘Colonial logic’ never meant ‘white European’ in my usage. I was talking about the structure of modern identity and domination, not the skin color of whoever’s applying it. Calling it ‘colonial’ refers to the framework: fixed identities, hard borders, population management, and the idea that certain groups are incompatible with the state. That logic is global now, anybody with power can pick it up.

If people read ‘colonial’ and automatically heard ‘white European,’ that’s their assumption, not my wording. I’m talking about the system, not the ethnicity of whoever’s running it. BTW, I don't believe there is any such thing as white people, that's some made up shit.

With all that said, where’s the ethnic cleansing before this colonial logic? Anyone? And no, I’m not talking about similar outcomes like the deaths from conquest or massacre. I’m talking about actual ethnic cleansing, eliminating a group specifically because their identity is treated as fixed and unchangeable. Who’s got an example?

You’ve got it backwards. Nobody asked you to defend something I “manufactured” I’ve been quoting your own lines back at you and pointing out how they actually read: “a bunch of Arabs,” “same colonial logic in Arab uniforms,” followed by a whole riff on where that ideology came from. That is the argument you put into the thread. If, after the fact, you decide you meant something tighter and more nuanced, cool, but that doesn’t magically turn earlier criticism of your published framing into a strawman. It just means your wording didn’t match what you now say you had in mind.

Oh absolutely, my big mistake was assuming people here wouldn’t immediately jump to ‘he’s blaming whitey.’ Then when I spelled out the actual point so folks would stop filling in the blanks with their own assumptions, that somehow became another blunder… because their choice to read it as me blaming whitey is apparently a fault of mine that I shouldn't attempt to undo after the fact..... but you're cool with it.

Moving forward, I’ll be sure to anticipate every wild assumption some dumbass on the internet might dream up before I post anything. Got it.

Lets start with whitey. I don’t believe ‘white people’ exist as a biological category, whiteness is a social construct, not some natural fact. Just putting that out there for those who may assume I think otherwise.

 

[TSwizzle]

With all that said, where’s the ethnic cleansing before this colonial logic?

In Africa or anywhere?

 

[Elixir]

With all that said, where’s the ethnic cleansing before this colonial logic?

In Africa or anywhere?

I’m no expert in the Bible, but as I recall it was reft with stories of extermination. Mostly by god, but people played too!

 

[Gospel]

With all that said, where’s the ethnic cleansing before this colonial logic?

In Africa or anywhere?

Take your pic.

 

[TSwizzle]

With all that said, where’s the ethnic cleansing before this colonial logic?

In Africa or anywhere?

Take your pic.

In Europe population purges were frequent, expulsion of jews, muslims during medieval times. I'm not even sure what you mean by "colonial logic". and "ethnic" can mean just about anything.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Oh absolutely, my big mistake was assuming people here wouldn’t immediately jump to ‘he’s blaming whitey.’ Then when I spelled out the actual point so folks would stop filling in the blanks with their own assumptions, that somehow became another blunder… because their choice to read it as me blaming whitey is apparently a fault of mine that I shouldn't attempt to undo after the fact..... but you're cool with it.

Moving forward, I’ll be sure to anticipate every wild assumption some dumbass on the internet might dream up before I post anything. Got it.

Lets start with whitey. I don’t believe ‘white people’ exist as a biological category, whiteness is a social construct, not some natural fact. Just putting that out there for those who may assume I think otherwise.

You keep trying to turn this into “people thought I was blaming whitey,” but nobody needed that shortcut, they just read you saying “same colonial logic in Arab uniforms” and then watching you center a Europe-origin story about “where the ideology came from.” Saying now that whiteness is a social construct doesn’t fix that framing, it just adds a side note; the basic issue is that when multiple people independently take your words the same way, that’s not a mass hallucination, it’s a signal that your wording carried those implications whether you intended them or not.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

center a Europe-origin story about “where the ideology came from.”

Quote me or that's just emotional talk.

your wording carried those implications whether you intended them or not.

Demonstrate how exactly. Here is what I said,

"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."

Which part of ‘Arabs doing’ magically translates to ‘white people doing’ in your head?
Which part of ‘Arab uniforms’ implies there are white folks hiding inside them instead of the Arabs I clearly named?
And what about ‘colonial logic’ automatically means ‘white Europeans’ instead of the global system I was talking about?

when multiple people independently take your words the same way, that’s not a mass hallucination

Yeah, it is. Folks on this forum hallucinate in groups all the time.

 

[laughing dog]

Oh absolutely, my big mistake was assuming people here wouldn’t immediately jump to ‘he’s blaming whitey.’ Then when I spelled out the actual point so folks would stop filling in the blanks with their own assumptions, that somehow became another blunder… because their choice to read it as me blaming whitey is apparently a fault of mine that I shouldn't attempt to undo after the fact..... but you're cool with it.

Moving forward, I’ll be sure to anticipate every wild assumption some dumbass on the internet might dream up before I post anything. Got it.

Lets start with whitey. I don’t believe ‘white people’ exist as a biological category, whiteness is a social construct, not some natural fact. Just putting that out there for those who may assume I think otherwise.

You keep trying to turn this into “people thought I was blaming whitey,” but nobody needed that shortcut, they just read you saying “same colonial logic in Arab uniforms” and then watching you center a Europe-origin story about “where the ideology came from.” Saying now that whiteness is a social construct doesn’t fix that framing, it just adds a side note; the basic issue is that when multiple people independently take your words the same way, that’s not a mass hallucination, it’s a signal that your wording carried those implications whether you intended them or not.

NHC

To be fair, while writers are responsible for their words, readers are responsible for their interpretations. When a writer responds with “I didn’t mean that” to a question and follows it with an explanation, IMO honest and fair readers should accept it and move on.

 

[NoHolyCows]

center a Europe-origin story about “where the ideology came from.”

Quote me or that's just emotional talk.

your wording carried those implications whether you intended them or not.

Demonstrate how exactly. Here is what I said,

"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."

Which part of ‘Arabs doing’ magically translates to ‘white people doing’ in your head?
Which part of ‘Arab uniforms’ implies there are white folks hiding inside them instead of the Arabs I clearly named?
And what about ‘colonial logic’ automatically means ‘white Europeans’ instead of the global system I was talking about?

when multiple people independently take your words the same way, that’s not a mass hallucination

Yeah, it is. Folks on this forum hallucinate in groups all the time.

You keep asking me to “quote you” as if the problem is a sentence I made up instead of the framing you actually used. You wrote that it’s “a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the ‘civilized world’” and that “what’s happening here is the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms,” then in your follow-up you spelled out how, in your view, the big shift came with European race science and modern nation-states. Nobody needs to hallucinate “white people inside Arab uniforms” to hear what that combination implies: Arabs cast as the local enforcers, the “civilized world” as the teacher, and a colonial logic whose key modern form you yourself locate in Europe. That’s exactly why multiple readers took you as centering a Europe-origin story because that’s what your own words, in that order, actually do. If you now want to say you meant a broader “global system,” fine, but that’s a revision on your end, not proof that everyone else was just too stupid or “hallucinating” to understand you.

NHC

 

[Emily Lake]

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.

Fair enough. All of my bible knowledge is pretty much pop-culture, so I'm not at all surprised I'm wrong on that.

Which doesn't actually invalidate my point though, so...

 

[NoHolyCows]

Oh absolutely, my big mistake was assuming people here wouldn’t immediately jump to ‘he’s blaming whitey.’ Then when I spelled out the actual point so folks would stop filling in the blanks with their own assumptions, that somehow became another blunder… because their choice to read it as me blaming whitey is apparently a fault of mine that I shouldn't attempt to undo after the fact..... but you're cool with it.

Moving forward, I’ll be sure to anticipate every wild assumption some dumbass on the internet might dream up before I post anything. Got it.

Lets start with whitey. I don’t believe ‘white people’ exist as a biological category, whiteness is a social construct, not some natural fact. Just putting that out there for those who may assume I think otherwise.

You keep trying to turn this into “people thought I was blaming whitey,” but nobody needed that shortcut, they just read you saying “same colonial logic in Arab uniforms” and then watching you center a Europe-origin story about “where the ideology came from.” Saying now that whiteness is a social construct doesn’t fix that framing, it just adds a side note; the basic issue is that when multiple people independently take your words the same way, that’s not a mass hallucination, it’s a signal that your wording carried those implications whether you intended them or not.

NHC

To be fair, while writers are responsible for their words, readers are responsible for their interpretations. When a writer responds with “I didn’t mean that” to a question and follows it with an explanation, IMO honest and fair readers should accept it and move on.

I agree that writers own their words and readers own their interpretations, but “I didn’t mean that” isn’t a magic eraser. If multiple people independently read the same implication out of what someone actually wrote, that’s not automatically bad faith, it’s feedback on how the point was framed. A clarification that genuinely tightens or corrects the original claim is one thing; a “clarification” that just disowns the obvious implications while keeping the same rhetoric is another. In that second case, it’s not dishonest to say “no, that’s still what your words are doing,” and it’s not unreasonable to keep engaging the text instead of pretending the initial framing never happened.

NHC

 

[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.

 

[Emily Lake]

When you aren't clear on what part of the "civilized world" these Arabs learned their "ethnic cleansing" from, don't get prissy when you get pressed on it.

Bruh, learn to read. I’m not getting pressed over which ‘civilized world’ they learned it from, I’m getting pressed over a claim I never even made. I never said Sudanese got no agency or that everything’s Europe’s fault. Y’all arguing with ghosts.

Anyway, to answer the question you didn’t ask, but that I have to pull out of your completely disconnected comment…

I’m not saying Europe invented Sudanese racism. I’m saying modern ethnic cleansing needs modern identity, fixed groups, censuses, borders, population management, eliminationist logic, and those systems didn’t exist anywhere before European modernity made them global. That’s why we don’t see ethnic cleansing before the modern era: the structure literally didn’t exist yet.

Look, I respect the strengths of the European model, but we can’t pretend it didn’t come with serious side effects, including modern identity systems that other groups, like Arab elites in Sudan, now use to justify ethnic cleansing. I mean, get real, Great Britain used this same framework for colonial genocide, and so did Spain, Portugal, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Russia. The modern identity system Sudan is using didn’t pop out of nowhere. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Gospel, I really do think the world of you, but I think you're framing this wrongly. Or perhaps you don't understand what other people are reacting to.

We're reacting to this:

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.

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.

In the beginning of the thread, you're asserting that ethnic cleansing, ethnic-based warfare and subjugation, is something that is european in origin. That Europe somehow uniquely embraced ethnicity into the reason for violence.

None of us are saying that european countries have NOT done that - they absolutely have. But it isn't something that is uniquely european, nor is it something that originated in europe. The middle east is the cradle of civilization, where the first recorded civilized world ever existed... and arabs have been engaging in ethnic-based warfare and violence pretty much since the dawn of civilization. The chinese have engaged in explicitly ethnic-based formal policies of violence for about 3000 years. So has india.

You're misattributing the origin of ethnic violence... and you're doing it based on ethnicity, bro.

 

[Emily Lake]

To NHC: I think Gospel’s choice of the qualifying word “colonial” has been taken to mean “white European”, which is unfortunate. It was the logic he described as colonial, and I think it’s more like “human delusion” than “colonial logic” even if colonial refers to the universal proclivity of successful civilizations to “colonize”.

It's exceedingly rare to find the term "colonial" these days meaning anything other than white european, so that's what pretty much everyone without ESP is going to assume. When that's followed up with a reference specifically to europe, it's very difficult to see how something else was meant.

 

[DBT]

I just wonder why a certain someone started this thread. Horrible shit goes on in Sudan. Horrible shit goes on all over the world. There is something new here?

Maybe — let me hazard a haphazard guess — maybe the OP is intended to excuse the atrocities of the West, and specifically the history of slavery and genocicde in the U.S., because, hey, everone does it.

And of course excuse the genocide in Gaza.

Just a guess.

There is no excuse for any of it.

 

[Elixir]

that's what pretty much everyone without ESP is going to assume.

I must have ESP.
Actually, because of context and familiarity with Gospel's general mastery of subtle meaning, I took it to mean what he intended it to, the first time. I was not disdainful of anyone who took it to refer specifically to the world's most infamous colonizers, but I understood (especially given the Arab uniform reference) that he was referring to a fairly universal human proclivity. Gospel is not that sloppy.

 

[laughing dog]

Oh absolutely, my big mistake was assuming people here wouldn’t immediately jump to ‘he’s blaming whitey.’ Then when I spelled out the actual point so folks would stop filling in the blanks with their own assumptions, that somehow became another blunder… because their choice to read it as me blaming whitey is apparently a fault of mine that I shouldn't attempt to undo after the fact..... but you're cool with it.

Moving forward, I’ll be sure to anticipate every wild assumption some dumbass on the internet might dream up before I post anything. Got it.

Lets start with whitey. I don’t believe ‘white people’ exist as a biological category, whiteness is a social construct, not some natural fact. Just putting that out there for those who may assume I think otherwise.

You keep trying to turn this into “people thought I was blaming whitey,” but nobody needed that shortcut, they just read you saying “same colonial logic in Arab uniforms” and then watching you center a Europe-origin story about “where the ideology came from.” Saying now that whiteness is a social construct doesn’t fix that framing, it just adds a side note; the basic issue is that when multiple people independently take your words the same way, that’s not a mass hallucination, it’s a signal that your wording carried those implications whether you intended them or not.

NHC

To be fair, while writers are responsible for their words, readers are responsible for their interpretations. When a writer responds with “I didn’t mean that” to a question and follows it with an explanation, IMO honest and fair readers should accept it and move on.

I agree that writers own their words and readers own their interpretations, but “I didn’t mean that” isn’t a magic eraser. If multiple people independently read the same implication out of what someone actually wrote, that’s not automatically bad faith, it’s feedback on how the point was framed. A clarification that genuinely tightens or corrects the original claim is one thing; a “clarification” that just disowns the obvious implications while keeping the same rhetoric is another. In that second case, it’s not dishonest to say “no, that’s still what your words are doing,” and it’s not unreasonable to keep engaging the text instead of pretending the initial framing never happened.

NHC

Engaging in the text by saying “I don’t understand” is different than “No, it means ______”. The former prompts clarification, the latter doesn’t.

 

[laughing dog]

To NHC: I think Gospel’s choice of the qualifying word “colonial” has been taken to mean “white European”, which is unfortunate. It was the logic he described as colonial, and I think it’s more like “human delusion” than “colonial logic” even if colonial refers to the universal proclivity of successful civilizations to “colonize”.

It's exceedingly rare to find the term "colonial" these days meaning anything other than white european, so that's what pretty much everyone without ESP is going to assume.

I didn’t. I don’t have ESP. I get the original statement could be taken as you and others have said.

 

[pood]

Ethnic cleansing goes back to antiquity but its modern form has become systematized and mass-scale by what Churchill called “the lights of perverted science.”

Hitler practically automated it. But before that there was the ethnic cleansing of natives by white settlers in the United States. Hitler admired that and said it would be his basis for ethnically cleansing Russians from the lands he planned to conquer up to the Urals.

Let’s not pretend anyone’s hands are clean.

What is the point of this thread?

Never mind. Rhetorical question.