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’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.
