Split Historical Genocide - Derail From Sudan Massacre

[laughing dog]

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

You’re drawing a cleaner line there than real conversations actually have. Saying “I don’t understand” is one valid move, but saying “when you write X, it reads as Y” is also a perfectly legitimate way of engaging the text – it’s not me declaring a divine translation, it’s me telling Gospel how his words actually land. That still leaves plenty of room for clarification or correction; it just doesn’t pretend my interpretation came from nowhere. If writers only ever got “I don’t understand” and never “this is what your framing is doing,” they’d get a lot less useful feedback on how their language is functioning.

NHC

You genuinely believe that's how the exchange played out?

Yes, I do, because I’m not going off vibes, I’m going off the thread we both can scroll. You wrote “a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the ‘civilized world’” and “the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms,” then followed it with a whole explanation about modern race science, nationalism, and how Europe changed the logic of violence. I responded by saying, in substance, “when you stack those claims that way, it reads as you centering a Europe-origin story and downplaying Sudan’s own dynamics.” That is exactly the X → Y move I just described.

If you think I did something different, that’s easy to show, quote the line where I supposedly leapt from your words to a meaning I never tied back to them. So far your pushback is just “you really believe that?” with no actual example. I’ve put specific sentences from you and from me on the table; either engage those or admit the problem here isn’t my memory, it’s that you don’t like how your own framing looks when it’s read back to you.

NHC

Let me keep this simple. I made a statement. It was misinterpreted. I clarified it. People responded to that clarification with counter-arguments, and those counter-arguments were garbage. End of story.

You’re the one trying to turn this into some bizarre meta-debate where I’m obligated to accept other people’s bad interpretations because my obviously snarky original comment wasn’t spelled out like a legal contract. No thanks.

You’re telling the story like you’re a referee standing above the conversation: you “made a statement, it was misinterpreted, you clarified it, their replies were garbage, end of story.” But “it was misinterpreted” is not a neutral fact, it’s your own interpretation of what happened

Once you post something in public, two things are true at once. You control what you intended to say, but you do not control what your wording reasonably supports. People did not conjure a reading out of nowhere. They quoted “a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the ‘civilized world’” and “the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms,” then watched you ground that in race science and modern state logic. From that combination, it is a very normal inference that you were centering a Europe-origin colonial logic that Arabs had “learned” and were now carrying out. You are perfectly free to say “that’s not what I meant,” but you do not get to upgrade “not my intention” into “objectively a bad interpretation.”

A clarification can either sharpen what you already said, or partially walk back what your original wording actually implied. Everyone reading you is allowed to decide which one you did. Saying “no thanks, end of story” does not resolve that; it just signals that you do not want to own that your snarky shorthand carried more weight than you now like. And the rest of us are under no obligation to pretend your first framing never existed just because you have decided after the fact that only the cleaned-up version counts.

NHC

Unless one can definitely show that a statement literally does not mean what the writer says, then I disagree that it is not a neutral fact; it a fact it was misinterpreted. The misinterpretation may an honest one, but is a misinterpretation.

 

[Gospel]

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

 

[NoHolyCows]

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

You’re drawing a cleaner line there than real conversations actually have. Saying “I don’t understand” is one valid move, but saying “when you write X, it reads as Y” is also a perfectly legitimate way of engaging the text – it’s not me declaring a divine translation, it’s me telling Gospel how his words actually land. That still leaves plenty of room for clarification or correction; it just doesn’t pretend my interpretation came from nowhere. If writers only ever got “I don’t understand” and never “this is what your framing is doing,” they’d get a lot less useful feedback on how their language is functioning.

NHC

You genuinely believe that's how the exchange played out?

Yes, I do, because I’m not going off vibes, I’m going off the thread we both can scroll. You wrote “a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the ‘civilized world’” and “the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms,” then followed it with a whole explanation about modern race science, nationalism, and how Europe changed the logic of violence. I responded by saying, in substance, “when you stack those claims that way, it reads as you centering a Europe-origin story and downplaying Sudan’s own dynamics.” That is exactly the X → Y move I just described.

If you think I did something different, that’s easy to show, quote the line where I supposedly leapt from your words to a meaning I never tied back to them. So far your pushback is just “you really believe that?” with no actual example. I’ve put specific sentences from you and from me on the table; either engage those or admit the problem here isn’t my memory, it’s that you don’t like how your own framing looks when it’s read back to you.

NHC

Let me keep this simple. I made a statement. It was misinterpreted. I clarified it. People responded to that clarification with counter-arguments, and those counter-arguments were garbage. End of story.

You’re the one trying to turn this into some bizarre meta-debate where I’m obligated to accept other people’s bad interpretations because my obviously snarky original comment wasn’t spelled out like a legal contract. No thanks.

You’re telling the story like you’re a referee standing above the conversation: you “made a statement, it was misinterpreted, you clarified it, their replies were garbage, end of story.” But “it was misinterpreted” is not a neutral fact, it’s your own interpretation of what happened

Once you post something in public, two things are true at once. You control what you intended to say, but you do not control what your wording reasonably supports. People did not conjure a reading out of nowhere. They quoted “a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the ‘civilized world’” and “the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms,” then watched you ground that in race science and modern state logic. From that combination, it is a very normal inference that you were centering a Europe-origin colonial logic that Arabs had “learned” and were now carrying out. You are perfectly free to say “that’s not what I meant,” but you do not get to upgrade “not my intention” into “objectively a bad interpretation.”

A clarification can either sharpen what you already said, or partially walk back what your original wording actually implied. Everyone reading you is allowed to decide which one you did. Saying “no thanks, end of story” does not resolve that; it just signals that you do not want to own that your snarky shorthand carried more weight than you now like. And the rest of us are under no obligation to pretend your first framing never existed just because you have decided after the fact that only the cleaned-up version counts.

NHC

Unless one can definitely show that a statement literally does not mean what the writer says, then I disagree that it is not a neutral fact; it a fact it was misinterpreted. The misinterpretation may an honest one, but is a misinterpretation.

Author intent tells you what was in their head; it doesn’t overwrite what their words actually support on the page. If a reading is clearly compatible with the text in context, calling it “a misinterpretation” isn’t a fact, it’s just you choosing to side with the author against other reasonable readers.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

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

When your “scoreboard” is “uppity Negro = 1” and a fantasy about who feels “personally connected to whiteness,” you’re not defending a thesis, you’re working through your own projections. If it were actually a fact that ethnic cleansing is “a modern and European thing,” you’d be able to show it in the history instead of in my supposed identity.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

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.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Author intent tells you what was in their head; it doesn’t overwrite what their words actually support on the page. If a reading is clearly compatible with the text in context, calling it “a misinterpretation” isn’t a fact, it’s just you choosing to side with the author against other reasonable readers.

By your own logic, your emotional meltdown is just a perfectly valid “reader interpretation.” Author intent can’t overwrite what your words support, right? So if your posts read like someone spiraling, that’s not a “misinterpretation”, that’s simply what the text supports.

You’re almost there, but you skipped the part where interpretations have to be grounded in the actual text. When I talk about your framing, I quote your words and show how they support that reading. You, on the other hand, shout “emotional meltdown” without pointing to a single sentence that actually shows one. That’s not an interpretation, it’s just name-calling dressed up as theory.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

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 question isn’t “did anyone in 500 BCE build Auschwitz,” it’s whether identity-based attempts to destroy or permanently break a people existed before Europe’s race science and railroads. They clearly did. If you redefine the bar as “must closely resemble the Holocaust,” you’ve just guaranteed no pre-modern case will ever count – and you’ve quietly abandoned your original claim about ethnic cleansing to hide behind the one example nobody disputes is uniquely 20th-century.

NHC

 

[pood]

This discussion is a mixed historical bag, Rome often accepted assimilation of conquered peoples and did not try to eradicate them. OTOH, Rome razed Carthage to the ground,

After the Islamic conquest of Spain, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in relative comity for several centuries, putting the lie to the modern narrative that Muslims are vicious barbarians intent on jihad,

But one must consider all these cases separately. Sure, there is nothing in the historical record resembling the Holocaust, but then again there was nothing until the 20th century resembling “the lights of perverted science,” as Churchill put it, that technologically enabled Hitler to carry out his atrocities.

---

 

[Gospel]

Author intent tells you what was in their head; it doesn’t overwrite what their words actually support on the page. If a reading is clearly compatible with the text in context, calling it “a misinterpretation” isn’t a fact, it’s just you choosing to side with the author against other reasonable readers.

By your own logic, your emotional meltdown is just a perfectly valid “reader interpretation.” Author intent can’t overwrite what your words support, right? So if your posts read like someone spiraling, that’s not a “misinterpretation”, that’s simply what the text supports.

You’re almost there, but you skipped the part where interpretations have to be grounded in the actual text. When I talk about your framing, I quote your words and show how they support that reading. You, on the other hand, shout “emotional meltdown” without pointing to a single sentence that actually shows one. That’s not an interpretation, it’s just name-calling dressed up as theory.

NHC

The topic-shifting, the avoidance, and the fixation on tone instead of substance are all perfectly consistent with someone reacting emotionally rather than engaging the actual point.

Now, can we get back to the subject of ethnic cleansing in Sudan? I explained where the idea originated. You didn’t address that at all, you veered straight into defensive commentary and tried to steer the discussion into one of your therapy sessions instead of responding to the argument.

 

[laughing dog]

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

You’re drawing a cleaner line there than real conversations actually have. Saying “I don’t understand” is one valid move, but saying “when you write X, it reads as Y” is also a perfectly legitimate way of engaging the text – it’s not me declaring a divine translation, it’s me telling Gospel how his words actually land. That still leaves plenty of room for clarification or correction; it just doesn’t pretend my interpretation came from nowhere. If writers only ever got “I don’t understand” and never “this is what your framing is doing,” they’d get a lot less useful feedback on how their language is functioning.

NHC

You genuinely believe that's how the exchange played out?

Yes, I do, because I’m not going off vibes, I’m going off the thread we both can scroll. You wrote “a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the ‘civilized world’” and “the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms,” then followed it with a whole explanation about modern race science, nationalism, and how Europe changed the logic of violence. I responded by saying, in substance, “when you stack those claims that way, it reads as you centering a Europe-origin story and downplaying Sudan’s own dynamics.” That is exactly the X → Y move I just described.

If you think I did something different, that’s easy to show, quote the line where I supposedly leapt from your words to a meaning I never tied back to them. So far your pushback is just “you really believe that?” with no actual example. I’ve put specific sentences from you and from me on the table; either engage those or admit the problem here isn’t my memory, it’s that you don’t like how your own framing looks when it’s read back to you.

NHC

Let me keep this simple. I made a statement. It was misinterpreted. I clarified it. People responded to that clarification with counter-arguments, and those counter-arguments were garbage. End of story.

You’re the one trying to turn this into some bizarre meta-debate where I’m obligated to accept other people’s bad interpretations because my obviously snarky original comment wasn’t spelled out like a legal contract. No thanks.

You’re telling the story like you’re a referee standing above the conversation: you “made a statement, it was misinterpreted, you clarified it, their replies were garbage, end of story.” But “it was misinterpreted” is not a neutral fact, it’s your own interpretation of what happened

Once you post something in public, two things are true at once. You control what you intended to say, but you do not control what your wording reasonably supports. People did not conjure a reading out of nowhere. They quoted “a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the ‘civilized world’” and “the same colonial logic, in Arab uniforms,” then watched you ground that in race science and modern state logic. From that combination, it is a very normal inference that you were centering a Europe-origin colonial logic that Arabs had “learned” and were now carrying out. You are perfectly free to say “that’s not what I meant,” but you do not get to upgrade “not my intention” into “objectively a bad interpretation.”

A clarification can either sharpen what you already said, or partially walk back what your original wording actually implied. Everyone reading you is allowed to decide which one you did. Saying “no thanks, end of story” does not resolve that; it just signals that you do not want to own that your snarky shorthand carried more weight than you now like. And the rest of us are under no obligation to pretend your first framing never existed just because you have decided after the fact that only the cleaned-up version counts.

NHC

Unless one can definitely show that a statement literally does not mean what the writer says, then I disagree that it is not a neutral fact; it a fact it was misinterpreted. The misinterpretation may an honest one, but is a misinterpretation.

Author intent tells you what was in their head; it doesn’t overwrite what their words actually support on the page. If a reading is clearly compatible with the text in context, calling it “a misinterpretation” isn’t a fact, it’s just you choosing to side with the author against other reasonable readers.

NHC

Nope.

 

[pood]

I might suggest toning down the rhetoric and acrimony between two members who have both proved to be informed and excellent posters.

 

[Gospel]

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 question isn’t “did anyone in 500 BCE build Auschwitz,” it’s whether identity-based attempts to destroy or permanently break a people existed before Europe’s race science and railroads. They clearly did. If you redefine the bar as “must closely resemble the Holocaust,” you’ve just guaranteed no pre-modern case will ever count – and you’ve quietly abandoned your original claim about ethnic cleansing to hide behind the one example nobody disputes is uniquely 20th-century.

NHC

“Redefining the bar,”. You’re actually admitting that the modern, identity-based form of ethnic cleansing I’m describing simply did not exist in the ancient world. That’s not me dodging anything, that’s you confirming the distinction. Ancient civilizations committed mass violence, but their systems were assimilative: surrender or adopt the dominant culture and you lived. Modern European-style ethnic cleansing is eliminationist: your identity is fixed and nothing you do changes the category you’re being targeted for.

If isolating that difference results in only Europe fitting the criteria, that doesn’t mean the criteria are flawed, it means the historical record aligns with exactly what I’m saying.

So instead of shifting this into a debate about “interpretation theory,” address the actual argument: Can you provide a pre-European example of identity-based elimination where assimilation was impossible and the group was targeted simply for existing? Because so far, all you’ve shown is that the category I’m describing is unique to the modern period, which supports my point, not yours.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Author intent tells you what was in their head; it doesn’t overwrite what their words actually support on the page. If a reading is clearly compatible with the text in context, calling it “a misinterpretation” isn’t a fact, it’s just you choosing to side with the author against other reasonable readers.

By your own logic, your emotional meltdown is just a perfectly valid “reader interpretation.” Author intent can’t overwrite what your words support, right? So if your posts read like someone spiraling, that’s not a “misinterpretation”, that’s simply what the text supports.

You’re almost there, but you skipped the part where interpretations have to be grounded in the actual text. When I talk about your framing, I quote your words and show how they support that reading. You, on the other hand, shout “emotional meltdown” without pointing to a single sentence that actually shows one. That’s not an interpretation, it’s just name-calling dressed up as theory.

NHC

The topic-shifting, the avoidance, and the fixation on tone instead of substance are all perfectly consistent with someone reacting emotionally rather than engaging the actual point.

Now, can we get back to the subject of ethnic cleansing in Sudan? I explained where the idea originated. You didn’t address that at all, you veered straight into defensive commentary and tried to steer the discussion into one of your therapy sessions instead of responding to the argument.

You keep throwing around “topic-shifting” and “therapy” because that’s easier than fixing the holes in your story. You claimed ethnic cleansing is “modern and European,” then every time someone points to pre-European identity-based destruction you declare it “just conquest” by definition. That isn’t tracing an origin, it’s rigging the categories so your thesis can’t be falsified.

If you want to get back to Sudan, fine, nothing about the RSF’s campaign stops being ethnic cleansing if it sits on older Arabization, slave hierarchies, and local center–periphery politics as well as modern racial ideology. The violence in Sudan is overdetermined. Your insistence that it only really counts once you can stamp “European origin” on it is exactly what I’m rejecting, and so far you haven’t shown that in the history,you’ve just repeated it and tried to psychoanalyze anyone who pushes back.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

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

 

[Gospel]

I might suggest toning down the rhetoric and acrimony between two members who have both proved to be informed and excellent posters.

I’m perfectly fine with how this is going, thanks. It’s the visitor from an alternate universe who seems unable to grasp the role assimilation plays.

 

[NoHolyCows]

“Redefining the bar,”. You’re actually admitting that the modern, identity-based form of ethnic cleansing I’m describing simply did not exist in the ancient world. That’s not me dodging anything, that’s you confirming the distinction. Ancient civilizations committed mass violence, but their systems were assimilative: surrender or adopt the dominant culture and you lived. Modern European-style ethnic cleansing is eliminationist: your identity is fixed and nothing you do changes the category you’re being targeted for.

If isolating that difference results in only Europe fitting the criteria, that doesn’t mean the criteria are flawed, it means the historical record aligns with exactly what I’m saying.

So instead of shifting this into a debate about “interpretation theory,” address the actual argument: Can you provide a pre-European example of identity-based elimination where assimilation was impossible and the group was targeted simply for existing? Because so far, all you’ve shown is that the category I’m describing is unique to the modern period, which supports my point, not yours.

You’ve got my point exactly backwards. When I said you’re redefining the bar, I wasn’t “admitting” your category is real, I was describing how you built it, you define ethnic cleansing as “identity-based elimination where assimilation is literally impossible and the group is targeted simply for existing,” then announce that only modern Europe and whatever you plug into that model qualify. That doesn’t prove anything about history; it just proves your criteria were written to fit the Holocaust and then back-projected onto Sudan.

On your own terms, your standard doesn’t even cleanly fit the modern cases. Under the Nazis, some Jews survived in mixed marriages, in hiding, under forged papers, in exile. In Armenia, some survived by conversion or being absorbed into other communities. In Rwanda and Bosnia, there are survivors, people who “passed,” people who fled and later returned. In Sudan, some of the targeted groups are being killed, some driven out, some enslaved, some forcibly married and absorbed. If the mere existence of assimilation, escape, or survival means “it wasn’t identity-based elimination,” then your definition quietly disqualifies the very cases you keep waving around. You’ve defined “assimilation impossible” in a way that no real-world campaign can meet, then claimed the historical record supports you when you fail to find pre-European examples.

And no, I’m not going to pretend that “can you show me an ancient Holocaust clone where assimilation was literally impossible” is a serious historical test. The actual question is whether attempts to destroy or permanently break a people because of who they are existed before European race science and railroads. They did; you’ve just decided in advance to label every pre-European instance “just conquest” so your “modern and European” slogan can stay intact.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

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

Assimilation didn’t get deleted, it’s exactly what blows up your distinction. The Nazis, the Young Turks, the Interahamwe, and the Sudanese militias all mix killing, expulsion, and various forms of absorption or passing. The existence of assimilation doesn’t prove “no ethnic cleansing,” it just proves your all-or-nothing definition has nothing to do with how real-world campaigns actually work.

NHC

 

[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.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

Instead of arguing about whether there was ethnic cleansing before the twentieth century or prior centuries of European colonization, can someone provide actual cases, with specific details? If not then Gospel is right. Although, given human nature, it would be strange if there wasn't any. There are certainly fictional examples such as those in the Bible.
Carthage has been mentioned, but that was just the city, not the people of rural areas, so it was more about destroying the city (plus 50,000 city dwellers survived).

 

[pood]

I might suggest toning down the rhetoric and acrimony between two members who have both proved to be informed and excellent posters.

I’m perfectly fine with how this is going, thanks. It’s the visitor from an alternate universe who seems unable to grasp the role assimilation plays.

OK. On reflection, don’t want to be tone policing.

I would say this, though, that there are different kinds of assimilations — voluntary, done by gradual osmosis as it were, or forced. None of this is as bad as ethnic cleansing or genocide, but forced assimilation is not good either. The natives in the U.S. were either ethnically cleansed (see Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) or forced to assimilate via cultural destruction and compulsion to attend Christian schools.