NoHolyCows
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How I went about making my argument was wrong. What I'm trying to say isn't. Ethnic cleansing isn’t unique to Europe or colonialism. Civilizations have been eliminating or relocating populations based on identity since the earliest empires, Assyrian deportations, Chinese frontier purges, Mongol massacres, and Ottoman relocations all fit the pattern. What changed with Europe wasn’t the idea but the infrastructure, modern states turned ethnic dominance into formal policy, justified by race science and nationalism rather than raw conquest.
The massacres in Sudan differ from Mongol or early Ottoman atrocities in motive and structure. The Mongols’ violence was a military strategy to enforce surrender, not ethnic purity. The Ottomans began as conquerors too, but by their decline were already showing the modern and learned logic of homogenizing populations, culminating in the Armenian Genocide.
What’s happening in Sudan today ain't a god damn conquest, it’s internal ethnic cleansing. It’s about erasing specific groups, not expanding rule. The pattern of mass killing repeats through history, but the ideology behind it has evolved, from imperial dominance to ethnic purification.
But if the story stops at ‘this is just the latest stage of a Europe-invented logic,’ it still relies on a big abstraction that downplays Sudan’s own history and the concrete choices of Sudanese actors in favor of a neat intellectual timeline.
NHC