America is genocidal, sure, but so is every single other society in the history of civilization. America is exceptional because of the technology and the art it contributed to genocide, which is the goal of every civiliztion, remember. Pointing out the difference in scale of US atrocities just prevents us working together for greater justice.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/6343679 https://hexbear.net/comment/4329347
I think the only ancient empires which did treated resettlements institutionally and did it routinely was Neo-Assyrian Empire and to way lesser extent, Neo-Babylonian, and they get shit for that in every single text about them, both contemporary and later.
It was the Neo-Assyrians, I always mix them up with the Persians.
Yup, Persians are famous rather from allowing people resettled by NA and NB empires to go back, and iirc they also did resettle some people but the topic is much less researched since it was not done as much and less documented, unlike Assyrians which not only documented everything (and even bragged about it), but their archives were preserved in much better state.
I was going, in my head, “I know the Babylonians and like one other one were really really into resettling, it was super uncommon. Eh fuck it, I’ll just put the Persians, the whole ancient Egyptian thing is what really blows that whole settler-colonial thing out of the water.” And then it was just a matter of figuring out whether I wanted to mention that the Jewish people who had been resettled by the Babylonians basically made up a story about being previously resettled in Egypt, in an attempt to foster a whole “We have been resettled once before and God brought us back.” parallelism with the Babylonian exile (which is a huge part of Jewish myth-making), which ended up being a huge part of the Old Testament, which is partially why people who’s only real exposure to history is like, the Bible and the Roman Empire (because of the Bible) (who also were not huge on resettlement, but arguably did some genocide on the Gauls), thinking it was common, when the archaeological record does not support that.
I should really look more into the Neo-Assyrians, if their records are better kept. Probably a bunch of cool reading or podcasts around it.
Romans actually did resettled people, but their resettling method was often mass abducting into slavery (usually after conquest or rebellion), so way worse than even Assyrians.