Split Historical Genocide - Derail From Sudan Massacre

[Gospel]

downgraded to “just conquest.

That downgrade is something you invented in your own head.

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

Still responding to an argument I am not making. I never said identity-based violence was “invented” in Europe. I said the modern form of racialized, fixed-identity elimination used in ethnic cleansing today comes from the identity systems built during the colonial and postcolonial periods. That is not the same thing as claiming Europe created all violence. It is pointing out where the modern framework came from. You keep blasting on about Arabs and “Africans were flexible categories in Sudan historically. I have agreed with that from the beginning. The problem today is that those older flexible identities have been hardened into rigid categories that people cannot cross for safety or survival. That is precisely what makes the current violence modern. It is not the same identity logic as ancient conquest, where surrender or assimilation could change your position in the social order.

And no, I’m not downgrading conquest, so stop putting words in my mouth. It’s that kind of bullshit that pisses me off, and I am not going to smile through it. If that makes me ‘uncivilized’, go ahead and slap the label on. That kind of nonsense only supports what I said about the defensiveness being tied to whiteness anyway.

Again, your examples of ancient absorption do not contradict my argument. Ancient systems mixed killing, expulsion and incorporation. That is exactly why they are not the same as modern identity-targeted destruction. Ancient identity was situational. Modern identity in these conflicts is treated as fixed. That is the distinction you keep sidestepping.

And no, I am not calling Sudanese actors puppets of Europe. Good grief dude. That interpretation is all yours homie. Clearly I have to state the obvious or your next bullshit will be "well.. you still won't explicitly state..... herp derp" Sudanese groups are fully responsible for their own actions. The point is that the identity categories they are using, and the racial hierarchy they are enforcing, operate under a colonial logic that did not exist in antiquity. Pointing that out does not erase agency. It explains the context in which this modern form of ethnic cleansing is happening for the umteenthmillionthtrillionthmuthafuckintime.

 

[Gospel]

Are you confusing me with someone else here, Gospel? Your insinuation is unwarranted.

Nope and nope.

 

[Elixir]

Dude, fuck your race card bullshit.

Fuck the defensive attitude you break out whenever it appears that whiteness is being criticized.

Whiteness doesn’t scare me. White people do. And I’m one of “them”. Pretty much the same with other colors, but more so with Murkin white people.
I think I’d like it in Australia, other than everything trying to kill you. Their white people seem generally less scary.

 

[NoHolyCows]

That downgrade is something you invented in your own head.

You didn’t have to literally write the words “just conquest” for the move to be there. Every time a pre-European case is raised, you declare it a “completely different system” and shove it out of the category you reserve for “modern, European ethnic cleansing.” Calling that a downgrade is just me naming what you’re doing with the labels, not inventing a thought you never had.

Still responding to an argument I am not making. I never said identity-based violence was “invented” in Europe. I said the modern form of racialized, fixed-identity elimination used in ethnic cleansing today comes from the identity systems built during the colonial and postcolonial periods. That is not the same thing as claiming Europe created all violence. It is pointing out where the modern framework came from. You keep blasting on about Arabs and “Africans were flexible categories in Sudan historically. I have agreed with that from the beginning. The problem today is that those older flexible identities have been hardened into rigid categories that people cannot cross for safety or survival. That is precisely what makes the current violence modern. It is not the same identity logic as ancient conquest, where surrender or assimilation could change your position in the social order.

You’re focusing on the one claim nobody is disputing, that modern race science and colonial identity systems are European products and skipping the bit I’m actually arguing with. I’ve never said you claimed “Europe invented violence.” I’m saying you go further and treat fixed, inescapable identity as something that didn’t meaningfully exist before colonial modernity. That’s the part that isn’t just “pointing out where the framework came from,” it’s you drawing a much sharper break than your own examples support.

On Sudan yes, we agree the current violence uses a hardened Arab/African line. We also agree those categories were historically flexible. Where we differ is that you talk like “identity hardened and became elimination-worthy” is a uniquely modern, European-coded move, instead of a familiar pattern where fluid boundaries get frozen and weaponized whenever power, fear and ideology line up including in premodern settings.

And no, I’m not downgrading conquest, so stop putting words in my mouth. It’s that kind of bullshit that pisses me off, and I am not going to smile through it. If that makes me ‘uncivilized’, go ahead and slap the label on. That kind of nonsense only supports what I said about the defensiveness being tied to whiteness anyway.

I don’t care whether you call it “downgrading conquest” or “different system”; the effect is the same. Any pre-European case that looks like identity targeted destruction gets pushed out of your “modern ethnic cleansing” category by definition, so you can keep that box reserved for post-Enlightenment Europe and its aftershocks. Me using plain language for that move isn’t putting words in your mouth, it’s describing what your distinction actually does.

And no, this isn’t about defending “whiteness.” It’s about the scope of your claim. I’d be making the same objection if you’d pinned the “modern break” on the Abbasids or the Qin. You keep trying to relocate the disagreement into my supposed psychology instead of staying with the text of your own argument.

Again, your examples of ancient absorption do not contradict my argument. Ancient systems mixed killing, expulsion and incorporation. That is exactly why they are not the same as modern identity-targeted destruction. Ancient identity was situational. Modern identity in these conflicts is treated as fixed. That is the distinction you keep sidestepping.

I’m not sidestepping the distinction; I’m saying it isn’t as clean as you keep asserting. “Situational vs fixed” sounds crisp until you look at how actual systems behave. Long before race science you already have identities treated as inherited and effectively inescapable for most people caste, “stained blood,” permanently suspect lineages, outsider groups marked across generations. And in your own modern cases, the reality never matches the absolute rhetoric, Nazi Germany, the late Ottoman Empire, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan all mix killing, expulsion and various forms of coerced absorption or passing.

So yes, the ideology now says “nothing you do can change your category.” In practice there are always channels, narrow, ugly, contingent in and out of those boxes. That’s why I keep pushing you back from slogan to structure. Once you look at structure, ancient and modern don’t fall into two neat bins; you get a spectrum where European colonialism radicalizes and formalizes something older instead of inventing it from scratch.

And no, I am not calling Sudanese actors puppets of Europe. Good grief dude. That interpretation is all yours homie. Clearly I have to state the obvious or your next bullshit will be "well.. you still won't explicitly state..... herp derp" Sudanese groups are fully responsible for their own actions. The point is that the identity categories they are using, and the racial hierarchy they are enforcing, operate under a colonial logic that did not exist in antiquity. Pointing that out does not erase agency. It explains the context in which this modern form of ethnic cleansing is happening for the umteenthmillionthtrillionthmuthafuckintime.

I’ve never said you called Sudanese actors puppets. What I’ve said is that you keep talking as if “operating under a colonial logic” means the underlying pattern of going after a group as such is uniquely modern and European. That’s where I don’t follow you.

We both agree Sudanese groups have full agency and that colonial borders, race categories and state habits shape the context they’re acting in. Where we don’t agree is on you turning that context into a hard historical rule, ancient violence “punishes resistance,” modern violence “punishes existence,” and only the latter deserves to be called ethnic cleansing in the full sense. That’s the leap I’m not buying. The labels you’re using for the present are fine; it’s the way you’re trying to write earlier, structurally similar cases out of the same family that turns your argument into a closed loop.

NHC

 

[bilby]

I think I’d like it in Australia, other than everything trying to kill you. Their white people seem generally less scary.

Not really, just ask the aborigines.

They lived and thrived with all the dangeraous Australian fauna (and some that they drove to extinction that were even more dangerous than the current lot) for 40,000 years.

Then one day, white people showed up.

Very few aborigines survived that.

 

[Gospel]

I’ve never said you called Sudanese actors puppets. What I’ve said is that you keep talking as if “operating under a colonial logic” means the underlying pattern of going after a group as such is uniquely modern and European. That’s where I don’t follow you.

You're not following me because I didn't say that. Like at all.

 

[Emily Lake]

@Gospel I have a question for you. Are you trying to draw a distinction between the intentional extermination of a group of people on religious or political grounds, versus intentional extermination on religious or political grounds with a veneer of scienciness rubbed on it? If that's what you're attempting to communicate... then I suppose you're technically correct that the scienciness bit came out of Europe. But I would counter by noting that the scienciness really only came about because that's where genetics was being studied at the time.

So unless you're going to say that europeans are somehow innately and genetically more disposed toward science... I think that's largely coincidental.

I am not saying Europeans were born with some special disposition toward science or racial ideology. I am saying the specific intellectual framework that turned identity into something fixed, biological, and inescapable was developed in Europe during the Enlightenment and colonial period. That is a historical fact, not an attack.

First off, I'm not viewing this as an attack. You seem to think I am, and that the only possible reason I could object is because I see it as an attack on what you've assumed is some important part of my identity... but you're wrong about that. I think my skin color is of no importance whatsoever to me as a person - nor does my predominantly black family. Sheesh. I feel a bit gross having to appeal to my family and upbringing to even get this idea across.

Viewing identity as something fixed, biological, and inescapable was NOT developed in Europe, and it existed FAR before the enlightenment. Jewish ancestry was viewed as fixed, biological, and inescapable for a millenia prior to the enlightenment. Indian castes have existed for 3000 years - far before europe was even a thing in any rational sense - and those castes were explicitly defined as fixed, biological (based on ancestry), and inescapable.

Your historical 'fact' isn't factual.

Sudanese militias have full agency in choosing to use that identity model. They are the ones racializing the categories now. But the framework they are using did not exist in ancient systems where identity could shift through marriage, culture, language, or allegiance. So yes, there is a distinction between ancient identity violence and modern ethnic cleansing, and pointing that out does not require attributing virtue or guilt to Europeans as individuals.

Anyway, I gave you an emotional off-ramp by chalking your defensive reaction up to you identifying Europeans with whiteness (which again, doesn't exist). I still think that played a role, because nothing else explains how strongly you reacted to my original comment, which I admit was not worded clearly. And that defensive reaction basically boiled down to “well, everyone else did it,” which is a historically debunked line European historians have repeated for years to minimize the uniqueness of modern identity-based violence.

Why are you determined to paint an emotional reaction onto me? I didn't get emotional until you decided to make it all some racial thing. My first post was giving credit to arabs for the invention of civilization!

Just a bunch of Arabs doing what they learned from the “civilized world.”

Wait, what?

Are we just gonna gloss over the whole cradle of civilization, oldest established society known to man, with millennia of conquest, slavery, and violence?

I mean... Arabs have been doing this pretty much since Arabs have been a thing. So have Mongols and Vikings and such.

Seriously, all I'm trying to get across to you here is that this horrific behavior isn't unique at all, and it's certainly not uniquely european - I'm not even convinced it's uniquely human.

What I will grant you is that the application of genetic science as a veneer to excuse identity-based extermination is European. Where I will push back on that is with the seemingly insinuated concept that such a veneer is because Europeans are somehow especially bad people, as opposed to a relatively small collection of actual for-realsies nazis being the first to use it.

 

[Gospel]

You’re focusing on the one claim nobody is disputing, that modern race science and colonial identity systems are European products and skipping the bit I’m actually arguing with. I’ve never said you claimed “Europe invented violence.” I’m saying you go further and treat fixed, inescapable identity as something that didn’t meaningfully exist before colonial modernity. That’s the part that isn’t just “pointing out where the framework came from,” it’s you drawing a much sharper break than your own examples support.

On Sudan yes, we agree the current violence uses a hardened Arab/African line. We also agree those categories were historically flexible. Where we differ is that you talk like “identity hardened and became elimination-worthy” is a uniquely modern, European-coded move, instead of a familiar pattern where fluid boundaries get frozen and weaponized whenever power, fear and ideology line up including in premodern settings.

No I'm treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity. Good lord., that is not an interpretation of my argument, and it is also just wrong historically. The kind of identity that is inescapable, meaning you are born into it, legally marked by it, and permanently stuck inside it, simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world. People shifted identity through marriage, adoption, political allegiance, language, religion and absorption by a conquering state. That is not me creating a sharp break. That is how identity functioned in premodern societies.

What colonial modernity did was turn identity into a rigid category that follows you everywhere and cannot be escaped, no matter what you do. That system is what Sudan is using today. That is the distinction I am describing. You keep trying to move me into some goofy ass version of the argument that I never made because you interoperated it that way.

You know what really shows the problem here. The moment I brought up the Holocaust as a clear example of what I mean by modern, rigid, inescapable identity, your answer is basically that I am “narrowing the requirements.” At that point I have nothing left to argue with you. If you really think Jews in Nazi Germany could have shifted identity through marriage, adoption, language, or allegiance the same way ancient groups did, then there is no shared reality for us to debate from.

 

[Gospel]

What I will grant you is that the application of genetic science as a veneer to excuse identity-based extermination is European. Where I will push back on that is with the seemingly insinuated concept that such a veneer is because Europeans are somehow especially bad people, as opposed to a relatively small collection of actual for-realsies nazis being the first to use it.

What you wrote here is exactly what I am talking about. I never said, claimed or argued that Europeans were “especially bad people,”. You added that yourself because you are hearing an attack that I did not make. That is your emotional connection to whiteness talking, not my argument. Nothing I said implied that Europeans are naturally worse. My point was about the historical development of the modern identity system, not about anyone’s personal identity.

 

[Elixir]

People shifted identity through marriage, adoption, political allegiance, language, religion and absorption by a conquering state. That is not me creating a sharp break. That is how identity functioned in premodern societies.

The degree to which that is true has been shocking me for decades as I learn ever more about it.
In a sense things were a lot more egalitarian. Generally brutal, as the notion of humanity as something special seems to have been invented rather recently. But the value of people as commodities for yourself or your tribe, to be acquired, exploited or joined with according to whatever was expeditious, was a human value with a fairly level playing field.

 

[Gospel]

People shifted identity through marriage, adoption, political allegiance, language, religion and absorption by a conquering state. That is not me creating a sharp break. That is how identity functioned in premodern societies.

The degree to which that is true has been shocking me for decades as I learn ever more about it.
In a sense things were a lot more egalitarian. Generally brutal, as the notion of humanity as something special seems to have been invented rather recently. But the value of people as commodities for yourself or your tribe, to be acquired, exploited or joined with according to whatever was expeditious, was a human value with a fairly level playing field.

I actually agree with most of what you just said. Ancient societies were brutal as fuck, but they were also weirdly egalitarian in the sense that almost anyone could be absorbed, traded, adopted, or folded into another group if the situation called for it. People were treated like resources more than permanent categories. It was bloody, but it was also flexible.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You're not following me because I didn't say that. Like at all.

You keep saying I’m putting words in your mouth, so let’s stay strictly with what you actually wrote.

You wrote:

“No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity.”

You also wrote:

“The kind of identity that is inescapable, meaning you are born into it, legally marked by it, and permanently stuck inside it, simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world.”

and:

“Ancient identity was situational. Modern identity in these conflicts is treated as fixed. That is the distinction you keep sidestepping.”

and:

“The identity categories they are using, and the racial hierarchy they are enforcing, operate under a colonial logic that did not exist in antiquity.”

On top of that you did a little scoreboard:

“uppity Negro = 1

Folks who… took offence to my pointing out a fact that ethic cleansing is a modern and European thing = 0”

Taken together, that’s not me inventing a position for you. That’s you, in your own words, saying:

1. The kind of fixed, inescapable identity you’re talking about “did not exist before colonial modernity.”
2. Ethnic cleansing “is a modern and European thing.”
3. Ancient systems are “situational,” modern ones “fixed,” and the “colonial logic… did not exist in antiquity.”

If fixed identity (in your sense) did not exist before colonial modernity, and ethnic cleansing (in your sense) is “a modern and European thing,” then yes, you are treating the pattern you care about as something that only really comes into being in that modern European/colonial moment. I didn’t invent that; I just spelled out what your own sentences add up to when you put them side by side.

If you now want to revise that to a narrower and more modest claim that colonial modernity hardened and bureaucratized older identity patterns and added race-science language on top fine, that’s a different discussion and a much easier claim to defend. But you can’t pretend I “made up” the stronger version when it’s sitting right there in your own quotes.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

No I'm treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity. Good lord., that is not an interpretation of my argument, and it is also just wrong historically. The kind of identity that is inescapable, meaning you are born into it, legally marked by it, and permanently stuck inside it, simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world. People shifted identity through marriage, adoption, political allegiance, language, religion and absorption by a conquering state. That is not me creating a sharp break. That is how identity functioned in premodern societies.

This is exactly the sharp break I’ve been calling out, and it’s not “historical fact,” it’s you describing an ideal type and ignoring all the counter-examples. Long before colonial modernity you already have systems where people are “born into it, legally marked by it, and permanently stuck” in practice: caste orders in South Asia, hereditary “stained blood” regimes like limpieza de sangre in Iberia, slave lineages, and outcast groups whose status follows descent over generations regardless of language, loyalty or religion. Yes, individuals could sometimes slip through cracks via adoption, marriage or fraud just like some people under modern genocidal regimes survive by hiding, marrying, converting or fleeing. That mix of hard rhetoric plus limited real mobility exists both before and after Europe’s race science shows up. So when you say fixed, inescapable identity “did not exist before colonial modernity,” you’re not stating a neutral fact, you’re just drawing the timeline so only the period you care about is allowed to count.

What colonial modernity did was turn identity into a rigid category that follows you everywhere and cannot be escaped, no matter what you do. That system is what Sudan is using today. That is the distinction I am describing. You keep trying to move me into some goofy ass version of the argument that I never made because you interoperated it that way.

Colonial modernity absolutely hardened and bureaucratized identity categories and gave states more power to enforce them; nobody is disputing that. The overreach is in “cannot be escaped, no matter what you do,” as if modern regimes ever perfectly achieved that. In Nazi Germany, in the late Ottoman Empire, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Sudan today, people do sometimes escape or transform their effective identity through hiding, mixed families, conversion, flight, forged papers, adoption, or being absorbed into the dominant group. The ideology says “no escape”; the social reality is messier. That’s why your rigid “cannot be escaped, no matter what you do” definition doesn’t really describe how modern systems work either, it just makes your category sound cleaner than the history actually is.

You know what really shows the problem here. The moment I brought up the Holocaust as a clear example of what I mean by modern, rigid, inescapable identity, your answer is basically that I am “narrowing the requirements.” At that point I have nothing left to argue with you. If you really think Jews in Nazi Germany could have shifted identity through marriage, adoption, language, or allegiance the same way ancient groups did, then there is no shared reality for us to debate from.

The Holocaust is obviously one of the clearest examples of modern, racialized identity-based destruction. Nobody is disputing that. What I said is that using “does it look like the Holocaust?” as the test for whether anything counts as the same type of logic is narrowing the requirements so far that almost nothing outside 20th-century Europe can ever qualify by design.

And again, you’re overstating your own case. Under Nazi rule, Jews could not safely, as a group, change category by “proving” loyalty or adopting German culture, that’s the whole horror of it. But on the ground, some Jews did survive precisely through the same kinds of mechanisms you claim are “ancient only”: passing as non-Jewish, being taken into non-Jewish families, hiding in convents, using forged papers, or being protected in certain mixed marriages. That doesn’t make Nazi ideology any less eliminationist; it just shows that even the most rigid identity project never fully matches the all-or-nothing story you’re telling.

So yes, the Holocaust is uniquely modern in its scale, technology and explicit race science. What it doesn’t prove is your much bigger claim that truly fixed, inescapable identity “did not exist” before colonial modernity and only then enters the world. That’s the jump that goes beyond what your own examples can actually support.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

The Holocaust is obviously one of the clearest examples of modern, racialized identity-based destruction. Nobody is disputing that. What I said is that using “does it look like the Holocaust?” as the test for whether anything counts as the same type of logic is narrowing the requirements so far that almost nothing outside 20th-century Europe can ever qualify by design.

And with all of human history, why the fuck is that?

 

[Gospel]

Colonial modernity absolutely hardened and bureaucratized identity categories and gave states more power to enforce them; nobody is disputing that. The overreach is in “cannot be escaped, no matter what you do,” as if modern regimes ever perfectly achieved that. In Nazi Germany, in the late Ottoman Empire, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Sudan today, people do sometimes escape or transform their effective identity through hiding, mixed families, conversion, flight, forged papers, adoption, or being absorbed into the dominant group. The ideology says “no escape”; the social reality is messier. That’s why your rigid “cannot be escaped, no matter what you do” definition doesn’t really describe how modern systems work either, it just makes your category sound cleaner than the history actually is.

The key difference in premodern systems is that violence was usually a way to control or punish rebellion, not an expression of a racial ideology that marked a whole population as permanently inferior. Ancient empires were violent, but the structure allowed conquered people and their descendants to be absorbed into the larger society.

Modern ethnic cleansing is different because the system is designed around permanent identity exclusion. The fact that a few individuals manage to escape by hiding, forging papers, or passing does not mean the system allowed assimilation. It means people will do whatever it takes to survive. The structure itself treats the targeted identity as inescapable. That is the part that did not exist in antiquity, and that is the core distinction you keep ignoring.

I think we’ve both made our points, so I’m fine leaving it as agree to disagree.

 

[Gospel]

You're not following me because I didn't say that. Like at all.

You keep saying I’m putting words in your mouth, so let’s stay strictly with what you actually wrote.

You wrote:

“No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity.”

You also wrote:

“The kind of identity that is inescapable, meaning you are born into it, legally marked by it, and permanently stuck inside it, simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world.”

and:

“Ancient identity was situational. Modern identity in these conflicts is treated as fixed. That is the distinction you keep sidestepping.”

and:

“The identity categories they are using, and the racial hierarchy they are enforcing, operate under a colonial logic that did not exist in antiquity.”

On top of that you did a little scoreboard:

“uppity Negro = 1

Folks who… took offence to my pointing out a fact that ethic cleansing is a modern and European thing = 0”

Taken together, that’s not me inventing a position for you. That’s you, in your own words, saying:

1. The kind of fixed, inescapable identity you’re talking about “did not exist before colonial modernity.”
2. Ethnic cleansing “is a modern and European thing.”
3. Ancient systems are “situational,” modern ones “fixed,” and the “colonial logic… did not exist in antiquity.”

If fixed identity (in your sense) did not exist before colonial modernity, and ethnic cleansing (in your sense) is “a modern and European thing,” then yes, you are treating the pattern you care about as something that only really comes into being in that modern European/colonial moment. I didn’t invent that; I just spelled out what your own sentences add up to when you put them side by side.

If you now want to revise that to a narrower and more modest claim that colonial modernity hardened and bureaucratized older identity patterns and added race-science language on top fine, that’s a different discussion and a much easier claim to defend. But you can’t pretend I “made up” the stronger version when it’s sitting right there in your own quotes.

NHC

Listing my own quotes does not change the fact that you are adding pieces that I never said. My point has been the same from the start: ancient identity did not function the same way modern identity does, because modern identity is tied to state categories that make identity rigid. That does not mean ancient identity was “nonexistent.” It means it operated differently.

Modern systems create legal and bureaucratic identity that is supposed to be permanent. Ancient systems allowed conquered people to be folded in over time. That is the distinction I have been talking about. You keep treating the distinction as if it automatically means I said “Europe invented everything” or “identity did not exist before modernity,” which is not in anything I actually wrote.

If you want to disagree with the argument I did make, fine. But you keep insisting I made a "stronger" argument that only exists in your interpretation, not in my words.

 

[NoHolyCows]

And with all of human history, why the fuck is that?

Because the Holocaust is a very specific event with a very specific historical toolkit, and you’ve quietly turned that toolkit into the entrance exam for the entire category.

It’s 20th-century, European, industrial, bureaucratic, explicitly race-scientific, with railways, gas chambers, population registries, and a totalizing state ideology. If you bake all of that into your definition of what “really counts” as the logic of identity-based destruction, then of course almost nothing outside that slice of time and space will qualify. That’s not a deep truth about “all of human history,” it’s just you overfitting the concept to one extreme case and then acting surprised when the rest of history fails your custom filter.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

The key difference in premodern systems is that violence was usually a way to control or punish rebellion, not an expression of a racial ideology that marked a whole population as permanently inferior. Ancient empires were violent, but the structure allowed conquered people and their descendants to be absorbed into the larger society.

Modern ethnic cleansing is different because the system is designed around permanent identity exclusion. The fact that a few individuals manage to escape by hiding, forging papers, or passing does not mean the system allowed assimilation. It means people will do whatever it takes to survive. The structure itself treats the targeted identity as inescapable. That is the part that did not exist in antiquity, and that is the core distinction you keep ignoring.

I think we’ve both made our points, so I’m fine leaving it as agree to disagree.

The picture you’re drawing of “ancient = punish rebellion, absorb everyone; modern = punish existence, inescapable identity” just isn’t how the record looks once you get outside the slogan.

In a lot of premodern systems, violence absolutely was about control and rebellion, but there were also identities treated as permanently tainted or inferior in exactly the way you say “did not exist.” Caste hierarchies, slave lineages, “stained blood” regimes like limpieza de sangre in Iberia, despised outcast groups whose status followed descent for generations, all of those involved people being born into a category that was, in practice, extremely hard to escape and carried collective stigma regardless of individual loyalty. Were there margins and loopholes? Of course. But that mix of inherited stigma plus limited, messy mobility is precisely what we see later too.

And on the modern side, you keep talking like the “system is designed around permanent identity exclusion” as if that system ever perfectly matches its own ideology. The Nazi, late Ottoman, Rwandan, Bosnian and Sudanese cases you keep citing all involve both elimination and absorption, people killed and expelled “as such,” and people surviving via hiding, being taken into other families, conversion, passing, mixed households, exile, and later reintegration. That doesn’t magically make the ideology non-eliminationist. It just shows that “the structure treats the targeted identity as inescapable” is an ideal type, not a literal description of how these systems work on the ground.

So no, I’m not ignoring your “core distinction.” I’m saying that once you strip out the rhetorical extremes, ancient as pure pragmatism, modern as pure metaphysical race, what’s left is a spectrum. Colonial modernity radicalizes and bureaucratizes an older pattern of group-targeted destruction; it doesn’t conjure the underlying logic out of thin air. If you want to call that “agree to disagree,” fine, but let’s at least be honest that we’re disagreeing about how sharp that break really is, not about whether Europe invented railroads and race science.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You're not following me because I didn't say that. Like at all.

You keep saying I’m putting words in your mouth, so let’s stay strictly with what you actually wrote.

You wrote:

“No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity.”

You also wrote:

“The kind of identity that is inescapable, meaning you are born into it, legally marked by it, and permanently stuck inside it, simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world.”

and:

“Ancient identity was situational. Modern identity in these conflicts is treated as fixed. That is the distinction you keep sidestepping.”

and:

“The identity categories they are using, and the racial hierarchy they are enforcing, operate under a colonial logic that did not exist in antiquity.”

On top of that you did a little scoreboard:

“uppity Negro = 1

Folks who… took offence to my pointing out a fact that ethic cleansing is a modern and European thing = 0”

Taken together, that’s not me inventing a position for you. That’s you, in your own words, saying:

1. The kind of fixed, inescapable identity you’re talking about “did not exist before colonial modernity.”
2. Ethnic cleansing “is a modern and European thing.”
3. Ancient systems are “situational,” modern ones “fixed,” and the “colonial logic… did not exist in antiquity.”

If fixed identity (in your sense) did not exist before colonial modernity, and ethnic cleansing (in your sense) is “a modern and European thing,” then yes, you are treating the pattern you care about as something that only really comes into being in that modern European/colonial moment. I didn’t invent that; I just spelled out what your own sentences add up to when you put them side by side.

If you now want to revise that to a narrower and more modest claim that colonial modernity hardened and bureaucratized older identity patterns and added race-science language on top fine, that’s a different discussion and a much easier claim to defend. But you can’t pretend I “made up” the stronger version when it’s sitting right there in your own quotes.

NHC

Listing my own quotes does not change the fact that you are adding pieces that I never said. My point has been the same from the start: ancient identity did not function the same way modern identity does, because modern identity is tied to state categories that make identity rigid. That does not mean ancient identity was “nonexistent.” It means it operated differently.

Modern systems create legal and bureaucratic identity that is supposed to be permanent. Ancient systems allowed conquered people to be folded in over time. That is the distinction I have been talking about. You keep treating the distinction as if it automatically means I said “Europe invented everything” or “identity did not exist before modernity,” which is not in anything I actually wrote.

If you want to disagree with the argument I did make, fine. But you keep insisting I made a "stronger" argument that only exists in your interpretation, not in my words.

Listing your quotes absolutely does change the picture, because the “extra pieces” you’re accusing me of adding are in them already.

You now say your point was only that “ancient identity did not function the same way modern identity does.” If that’s all you meant, you wouldn’t have written “No I’m treating fixed identity as something that did not exist before colonial modernity” or “the kind of identity that is inescapable… simply did not operate the same way in the ancient world,” or that ethnic cleansing is “a modern and European thing,” or that the logic “did not exist in antiquity.” Those aren’t my embellishments, those are your exact phrases. When I talk about “fixed identity in your sense” not existing before colonial modernity, I am literally quoting you. When I say you’re treating the pattern you care about as something that really only comes into being in the modern European/colonial moment, I’m just connecting that claim with your “modern and European thing” line. That’s not me sneaking “Europe invented everything” into your mouth; that’s what your own wording implies when you put it together.

On the substance, I’ve already agreed that modern states create tighter, more bureaucratic and legally codified identity categories than most ancient polities could. Where we actually disagree is over how big a break that is. You frame it as “ancient systems allowed conquered people to be folded in over time, modern systems are built around permanent exclusion.” I’m saying, ancient systems also had identities that, in practice, were inherited and extremely hard to escape, and modern systems also have all kinds of messy loopholes and workarounds. Once you look at what happens on the ground rather than at the neatness of the schema, the contrast shrinks from “different worlds” to “same basic pattern, different tools and intensity.”

If you want to defend the modest claim that colonial modernity hardened and formalized older identity patterns and built a state machinery around them, I’m not fighting you. That claim is fine. The only reason I keep quoting you back to yourself is because every time I answer the stronger version you actually wrote, you try to walk it back to the softer one and then accuse me of attacking something that “only exists in my interpretation.” The text you’ve put in this thread shows otherwise.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

And with all of human history, why the fuck is that?

Because the Holocaust is a very specific event with a very specific historical toolkit, and you’ve quietly turned that toolkit into the entrance exam for the entire category.

It’s 20th-century, European, industrial, bureaucratic, explicitly race-scientific, with railways, gas chambers, population registries, and a totalizing state ideology. If you bake all of that into your definition of what “really counts” as the logic of identity-based destruction, then of course almost nothing outside that slice of time and space will qualify. That’s not a deep truth about “all of human history,” it’s just you overfitting the concept to one extreme case and then acting surprised when the rest of history fails your custom filter.

NHC

And what exactly makes Sudan different then? The scale? The tools? The region? The reason? Come on man. The point was never that the Holocaust is some entrance exam. The point is that the Holocaust shows the modern structure where identity is treated as fixed and elimination is justified inside that framework. Sudan is working off that same logic today. That is why I brought it up. You keep acting like I am saying nothing counts unless it looks exactly like 1940s Europe. I am not. People gave examples and I did not say “it doesn’t count.” I explained why those situations were different. You just keep adding arguments I never made bruh.