Concentration camps reveal the nature of the modern state

Methodical killing of any type at scale is very rare in the modern world. It's even rarer for it to to be conducted through camps; to my knowledge, only the Nazis ever did it (and their allies, the Croatian fascist Ustaše regime). Most mass killing simply consists of taking groups of people somewhere remote and shooting them. Concentration camps are what you do when you don't want to do that and are basically a cheap form of prison. Even in the Soviet Gulag, where the harsh conditions and threat of death were part of the punishment, the majority of prisoners survived.

Even where death is tacitly the expected outcome of a camp (rare), it's mostly done by slow starvation and overwork. I think that's interesting, given how inefficient that is. It provides a kind of mental "plausible deniability".

Their actions severely depressed to population of the area for centuries.

What do you have in mind about "the Assyrians"? Control of Mesopotamia flipped back and forth many times until it was eventually conquered from the east by Persia. The Assyrians neither destroyed any land nor were they destroyed by any enemies.

It was common for conquered populations to be deported elsewhere in a Mesopotamian empire, and for conquered cities to be burned (particularly the local palace) -- that's why we have so many contemporary records. But there was no ethos of killing the people or salting the earth, and those things just didn't happen.

There is a myth that the late Assyrian capital of Nineveh was sacked, destroyed, and completely abandoned, but this is contradicted by a wealth of archaeological evidence showing that it was sacked, recovered, and sustained its population continuously for several hundred more years.

The mongols were just as "squeamish" about killing as any other empire - british, spanish, american, etc. Hell, by any measure, the mongols were a far less "brutal" empire than the british, spanish, american.

> There are cases where they decided a city needed to be destroyed and they took great pains to make sure that destruction was total.

Yes. It's called "sacking" a city. It has happened throughout history. The mongols weren't special. You are just perpetuating stereotypes and myth. The US, british, soviets annihilated cities far worse than anything mongols ever did.

It's absurd that you have to resort to silly myths. If you want to see pure evil, go look at what the british empire did to the natives and aborigines. Go look at what we did in hiroshima or nagasaki. You don't have to push racist myth about the mongols.

> Ears were put into sacks and carted off in wagons to be counted

If you think that was horrific, go read about what we did to the japanese in ww2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...

> Many states throughout history have committed genocide against enemies and many others have persecuted populations within their own borders.

No they didn't. Genocides, as we see define them, are relatively new european concept based on racist ideology.

You brought up the mongols. Try and find out anyone the mongols "exterminated". You won't find anything other than perhaps mongols tribes that they "merged" into larger mongol tribes.

> Modern human society is gentler now than at any point in our past

It really isn't. You misunderstood why concentration camps were created initially. They were created for slave labor. When the germans realized they were losing, they decided to exterminate the people in concentration camps.

You say modern society has gotten "gentler" but there hasn't been a more evil and callous action in human history than the dropping of nukes on cities.

Humans haven't "evolved". We are just more sated and nukes make it harder for serious war. That's it. But sooner or later, it's inevitable we will get a serious war. And then you'll see how much "gentler" we are.