Split Historical Genocide - Derail From Sudan Massacre

[Gospel]

Even when Caesar massacred entire groups, survivors, remnants, and related tribes still ended up being absorbed into Rome over time. Some rose in rank, integrated into Roman society, and became part of the political, military, and cultural elite. The violence was catastrophic, but the imperial system still allowed incorporation.

Caesar's brutality had a strategic purpose tied to total war (bellum Romanum): crushing resistance, seizing wealth and slaves to fuel his political rise, and terrorizing other tribes into surrender and eventual Roman integration.

So ask yourself: is that what the Sudanese militias are doing? Are they using violence to force surrender and then incorporate the targeted population? Or are they using rigid racial categories to eliminate a group that has no pathway to assimilation at all?

Edit: That's Ancient Europeans I'm talking about there.

 

[Gospel]

I've been disagreeing with one particular aspect of your argument, Gospel. Not the entirety of it. You made that ancient groups of people didn't engage in extermination on the basis of identity, and that they always included some means for integration and assimilation, and that ancient people could change their identities to fit in to a different group. That's simply not true.

Those responses depended on which ancient empire you mean, because they didn’t all operate the same way. But none of them used identity-based violence for the sole purpose of eliminating a group simply because of who they were. Ancient mass killings were tied to things like rebellion, warfare, conquest, tribute, or political threat, not because of permanent, inescapable identity categories.

I’m not denying that the outcomes can sometimes look similar, as in the case of Caesar. I’m saying the underlying purpose was completely different. The modern modus operandi of racialized, bureaucratically fixed identity slaughter, the kind we see in Sudan, in the Holocaust, or in the late Ottoman Empire against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontic Greeks, simply did not exist in antiquity.

Even harsh ancient systems like slavery or caste did not function like modern racialized identity or modern ethnic cleansing. Modern ethnic cleansing targets groups defined as permanently and biologically “other,” and treats that identity itself as the reason they must be removed or destroyed.

I wouldn’t classify the trans-Atlantic slave trade as genocide or ethnic cleansing, but the death tolls are enormous enough that they can resemble those categories. I admit, I'm guilty of using the phrase Trans Atlantic Genocide rhetorically. The point is that a similar scale of death does not mean the same underlying logic is at work. Ancient mass killings might match modern genocides in numbers, but the reasons and identity frameworks behind them were fundamentally different from genocide or ethnic cleansing as we define those today.

 

[NoHolyCows]

It’s already stated in the context of my position. I admit one of my flaws is not restating my entire argument in every post before replying to something specific. When I respond to a particular point, that reply is anchored to the comment I’m addressing. If you take a single sentence out of that context, both the rest of my post and what I was responding to, it can easily be seen to say something entirely different.

This suggests that your point is not that germans used genetics to try to justify the same basic identity-based violence that has been around for a really long time, but rather that the entire concept of using identity itself as the basis for violence was the new”colonial” idea.

Identity-based violence existed in antiquity, but the way identity is defined, enforced, and made inescapable in modern ethnic cleansing is fundamentally different because it relies on modern, colonial-era identity structures and there is no assimilation.

What I pushed back on was the earlier “did not exist in antiquity / modern and European thing” framing, which you now admit was badly put.

That part you’re calling ‘earlier’ actually came much later. If you looked at the context of what I was responding to, and the full comment, you’d see my argument never changed.

Context matters, but it doesn’t do the magic trick you’re asking it to do. Saying “fixed identity did not exist before colonial modernity” or “this logic did not exist in antiquity” doesn’t suddenly mean something else because it was written in reply to a specific person. You can absolutely say “I was trying to talk about the modern, bureaucratic, racialized form of identity” and your later paragraph about “the idea vs the infrastructure” does that much better. But when you wrote “did not exist before colonial modernity” and “modern and European thing,” you weren’t just describing different infrastructure, you were tying the logic itself to that break. That’s why people pushed on it.

On the substance, your “identity-based violence existed in antiquity, but the way identity is defined, enforced and made inescapable now is different” is basically the narrow claim I’ve been saying I’m fine with. Modern states racialize, codify and surveil identity in ways older empires couldn’t. Where I disagreed and still do is with the stronger version that treats that change in machinery as proof that the underlying identity logic “did not exist” before and belongs, as such, to a modern European moment. That’s the overreach I flagged.

If what you’re saying now is “I always meant the form is new, not the idea,” then great that’s a position I can mostly agree with, and we can leave it there. But you can’t seriously expect everyone to ignore the places where you literally wrote “did not exist in antiquity / did not exist before colonial modernity / modern and European thing” and then blame them for not reading past those words to the version you only phrased cleanly later. That’s the only thing I’ve been refusing to pretend about.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

I still stand by it being just a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the “civilized world.”

 

[NoHolyCows]

I still stand by it being just a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the “civilized world.”

And that’s exactly the sentence that started this mess, because it compresses way more than you say you believe into one glib line.

If “just a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the civilized world” is all you mean, then either:

1. you are downplaying Sudanese and regional agency, or
2. “learned from” and “civilized world” are doing a ton of work you keep trying to disown after the fact.

By your own clarifications, you don’t actually think Sudanese militias are idiots copying Europe like kids copying homework. You’ve said repeatedly they have full agency, local motives, local history, and that identity-based violence long predates Europe. You’ve also clarified that what’s modern and colonial is the infrastructure and the racialized state categories, not the idea of targeting a group as such. Once you concede that, “just doing what they learned from the civilized world” stops being a harmless shorthand and becomes exactly what people heard in it, a line that shoves the underlying logic, and half the blame, back onto some vague external “civilized world” while the actors on the ground are reduced to mimics.

And “civilized world” is doing you no favors either. If you mean “European colonial modernity,” then say that. If you mean a wider history of imperial violence, then Arabs, Ottomans, Mamluks and so on are inside that story, not standing outside “the civilized world” taking notes. You can’t simultaneously insist that ethnic cleansing isn’t uniquely European and then sum Sudan up as “Arabs doing what they learned from the civilized world” without implying exactly the Europe-centred script you’ve spent half the thread denying.

You’ve already got a clearer, more defensible version of your point on the table, modern Sudanese actors using a colonial state framework and racialized identity to do something humans have done in uglier, less bureaucratic forms for a very long time. If you “still stand by” that one-liner, fine but then own the baggage that comes with it instead of blaming everyone else for reading it the way it’s written.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

I said ‘civilized world’. I didn’t say umran or hadara. I have no idea how that phrase is being retroactively tied to the ancient Arab world, given the completely different language and concepts involved. What’s really happening is that you’re uncomfortable with the line ‘Arabs doing what they learned from the civilized world’, because you and others read it as some kind of ‘blame the white man’ statement. And you still do even after knowing everything I've said about my actual argument. I wonder why?

 

[Gospel]

own the baggage that comes with it instead of blaming everyone else for reading it the way it’s written.

I take responsibility for what I intended, not for whatever your interpretive imagination turned it into. The most I can offer is, I understand where it's coming from.

 

[Gospel]

I also don’t understand how the phrase ‘Arabs doing’ supposedly erases their agency. If they’re the ones doing it, how exactly are they not acting with agency? I hope you're not in the business of translating languages.

Edit: Worse yet, if you're using a LLM I hope it's free.

 

[Gospel]

What I pushed back on was the earlier “did not exist in antiquity / modern and European thing” framing, which you now admit was badly put.

I haven’t changed my position at all. I clarified what I meant because your quote-mining stripped my comments of their context. I’ve already acknowledged that I could have expanded my argument more clearly in the original post, but I didn’t, partly because I mistakenly assumed the audience would understand the point without additional elaboration. I also underestimated how rigid some people here are about accepting clarifications, since they treat tightening arguments as a bad move somehow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Gospel]

Can you explain what you mean by the following?

• modern racial bureaucracy
• state-enforced ethnic classifications
• racialized, state administered system

This had better lead to an actual discussion rather than the rubbish NoHolyCows keeps dragging this into. I’m perfectly willing to admit where I’m wrong, as long as the critique addresses my actual argument and not a misunderstanding of it. Because I swear to the Mighty Talos (who's probably licking a bubblegum popsicle stick in Sovngarde), if someone twists this into me talking about governments after major reforms like the end of slavery, I’m going to lose my shit.

Modern racial bureaucracy: is a governmental framework where the state systematically employs administrative and legal mechanisms to establish, document, and enforce fixed identity categories among its population. Essentially, the government translates complex human identity into paperwork and law. This system relies on official documentation like passports, identity cards, birth certificates, and census categories. It also includes specific racial registration laws, segregated legal codes, and centralized state archives that maintain official lists of who belongs to which designated "group." Identity is transformed from a social, fluid, or negotiable status into a state-administered, recorded, and legally-enforced fact.

Historical Context:

The Holocaust (Nazi Germany), using a detailed racial registry to distinguish "Aryans" from "Jews."
The Apartheid regime in South Africa, with its strict racial classification bureaucracy.
Rwanda's ethnic ID cards (Hutu/Tutsi), originally introduced by Colonial Belgian authorities.

State-enforced ethnic classifications: are identity labels that the government legally mandates, imposing them on individuals and treating them as immutable, fixed categories. These categories are inherently linked to a person's legal standing, determining their rights, restrictions, or disabilities. The classifications are officially documented, generally unchangeable, and carry concrete legal consequences. They determine access to resources such as land, movement, or protection. These fixed identities are used as a basis for taxation, conscription, segregation, policing, or even actions leading to extermination. A person's identity becomes a government decree rather than a flexible, self-determined, or situational matter.

Examples of Application:

The legal definition of who was considered "Jewish" under Nazi German law.
The British Raj in India's designation of "Martial vs. Non-Martial Races."
Myanmar's classification of the Rohingya ethnic group as "non-citizens."


Racialized, State-Administered System: A racialized, state-administered system exists when race or ethnicity is the fundamental organizing principle dictating virtually all state policy, encompassing a wide range of actions from citizenship to military strategy. The system is enforced through a matrix of laws, military policy, administration, taxation, land confiscation, population registries, policing, and rules of citizenship and deportation. The state uses race as the exclusive basis for deciding, who is a legitimate citizen and who is an outsider. Whose life is valued, and who is subject to displacement, removal, sterilization, or killing. Violence and state action are decoupled from behavior (such as rebellion or criminal acts) and become inextricably tied to identity itself.

Historical Atrocities:
The Holocaust (targeting Jews, Roma, and others based on identity).
The genocides in Bosnia (targeting Bosniaks) and Sudan (the racialized "Arab vs. African" conflict in Darfur).
The late Ottoman genocides against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.
China's current policies targeting Uyghurs under the guise of "counter-terrorism."

 

[Gospel]

British racialized administration in Sudan didn’t disappear when they left in 1956. It effected the political, ethnic, and racial landscape for decades afterward in ways that directly contributed to:

the North–South civil wars
the creation of a rigid Arab vs. African political identity
marginalization of groups like the Nuba and Fur
the Darfur crisis going on since early 2000's and recently resurfacing
center–periphery inequalities that still exist today

Just to be clear, when I bring up history it’s going to sound like I’m pointing at the ‘white man’, a concept I don’t even subscribe to, but that’s not the direction I’m taking this. I get why some folks assume that, but that’s not what I’m arguing.

 

[Gospel]

Sudan Government Gazette No. 402 (11 Oct 1922) literally enacts the ‘Passports and Permits Ordinance,’ consolidating laws governing Closed Districts, internal travel permits, and racialized passport categories like ‘Europeans’ and ‘Foreigners.’ This is a modern colonial identity regime, bureaucratic, documented, territorial, and rigid. Nothing like this existed in antiquity. Sudan inherited this administrative structure, and the ethnic cleansing happening today is operating within that identity framework, not ancient Arab custom.

Jalava

Image of Page one.


That is actual evidence from the Sudan Government Gazette (1922). These are primary documents produced directly under British rule. They show that the British created a strict identity system inside Sudan that separated regions, tribes, and populations into legally fixed categories.

The Gazette establishes several facts:

1. The British imposed a passport and permit regime that applied inside Sudan itself. Sudanese could be refused entry, denied re-entry, or even expelled from Sudan. That is not an ancient Arab practice. That is colonial identity control.
2. The British declared entire ethnic regions as “Closed Districts.” These included Darfur, Bahr el Ghazal, Mongalla, Upper Nile, the Nuba Mountains, the Fung, and Kassala. These categories line up with the same groups targeted in ethnic cleansing today. This shows the British froze fluid identities into rigid administrative boundaries.
3. Entry into these districts was restricted by tribe, region, and administrative category. Movement between them required special permits. That is a race-based territorial system built by the colonial government.
4. The British made identity inescapable. A Sudanese subject could lose the right to travel, to trade, or even to re-enter the country based on their assigned category. That is the modern logic of identity as fixed and bureaucratically enforced.

This supports my argument exactly. Pre-colonial Arab identity was assimilative. People could enter Arab identity through culture, language, religion, or allegiance. The entire historical process of Arabization proves this. Modern Sudanese ethnic cleansing does not follow that older Arab pattern.

The rigid, inescapable identity categories used in Sudan today match British colonial law, not Arab history. The British created the Closed Districts system, froze identities, and turned entire populations into administrative castes. Sudan inherited these structures, and they are the backbone of the identity logic driving violence now.


Now do you understand this statement?

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.

Or are we really going to keep marching out NoHolyCows’ sacred cow of an argument..... 'framing'?

 

[Gospel]

Also, I'd like to point out that this thread isn’t about the entire history of genocide. Every comment I’ve made has been directly tied to what’s happening in Sudan, so I genuinely don’t understand why my arguments are being treated as a derail. And looking back at the thread it was split from… the conversation there is about Israel. How does that make sense?