Such methods become increasingly crucial as communications platforms
themselves continue to develop and self-reinforce in ways that make larger scale
moderation either increasingly difficult, or increasingly ignored (De Guzman,
2022).
Communicative technology is not the only avenue for similar speculative
lines of inquiry—for instance, the role of law, rhetoric of migration, and decrees
is another area in which such lines could be drawn. The temporal changes in this
instance are perhaps less dramatic, but the similarities are striking. The work of
Nandita Sharma highlights one particular shared feature of legal regimes before
genocidal events—the legal and cultural divisions of people into the categories
of 'natives' and 'migrants' (Sharma, 2020). Sharma draws particular attention to
Nazi Germany's 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, which explicitly linked people of
'pure German Blood' to German land (a literal example of blood and soil rhetoric)
(Home Rule, 106). By explicitly outlawing marriages between Jewish people and
the now legally enshrined German nationals, the former become implicitly and
explicitly allochthonous in the eyes of the law. Such a process was not exclusive
to Jewish people—further decrees also targeted travellers, Black people, and the
disabled (Sharma, 2020:107). This legal separation allowed the Nazis to attempt
to deport people en-masse—something they struggled to do, due to reluctance
from numerous other states to loosen their immigration restrictions (Home Rule,
108). The Nazi use of this form of preparation for ethnic cleansing, crucially
utilising the international political norms of citizenship, is not unique. Within
Myanmar, the Rohingya are excluded from citizenship, and are defined by some
as a 'stateless' people (Parashar & Alam, 2018). Citizenship is given only to those
seen legally as part of one of 8 'National Races'—the Rohingya are excluded from
such categorisation, with the 1974 constitution change in particular serving to
reinforce the idea of the Rohingya people as being 'unbelonging', introducing
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