Graham,
Well done Trudy to point to Queensland. Police in that
state organised terrorist
units, like Hitler's Waffen-SS, and recruited blacktrackers to murder and decimate
whole tribes of
aborigines. They formed a special section of the police, the Native Mounted Police,
to "deal" with the
"aboriginal problem". They poisoned wells with strychnine. All the time, they
justified this extermination
campaign with words like "dispersment".
And this is not genocidal?
The law might have said it was wrong, but then again the law in Hitler's
Germany said that
genocide was wrong as well, but the Nazis were able to co-opt the Judiciary into their
racism. That was the
way it was put in one history of the Holocaust I have read: Hitler's Willing
Executioners. Many judges
were very happy with the laws against Jews and even said as much. Even if they
didn't, none, or very few of
them protested against the obligation to swear an oath to the Nazi party, knowing they
advocated racial
segregation and even extermination of other races of people. That does not differ much
from the Queensland
situation either, where doubtless many members of the judiciary must have similarly
been co-opted into the
racism of that society as well. Frothy-mouthed assassins they may not have been, but
they doubtless
supported the genocide all the same.
Graham makes a good point about assimilation though. How far do we link
assimilation to
genocide? You see, anti-semitism had propoganda against the Jews which was
assimilationist. Many
nineteenth-century German scholars, even those considered as 'liberal', used
assimilationist arguments to
demonise Jewish people, to promote racial sterotypes and justify discrimination
against them on employment,
housing etc..
But wasn't that part of Genocide as well - just the racism of German society,
and the entrenching of
anti-semitism, long before the Nazis came to power? And shouldn't we see events in
Queensland for instance,
as being the same - assimilation demonising, portraying as subhuman, and the policies
of "dispersment" as
carried out by the police force in the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries?
I am inclined to say Yes, that assimilation was part and parcel of aboriginal
genocide.
It's interesting that in Switzerland, they didn't have concentration camps or gas
chambers, but they
did have a program I heard about on an SBS documentary, where Gypsy children were
taken from their parents
to "assimilate" them more into society. The Gypsy people too have suffered
assimilation, and have stolen
children, like the Australian experience. I wonder if they have recieved any
compensation yet for their
suffering? If anyone knows anything more, or where I can get more information about
this practice, which I
think had some sort of name like "Open Road" or "Clean Roads" then I would be very
grateful, as it often
troubles my conscience as something I would like to know much more about.
Cheers,
Matthew Davis
Trudy & Rod Bray wrote:
> Graham Young wrote:
>
> > With respect to the stolen generation and the holocaust my point is that
> > there is an extreme difference of degree. In most cases of wrong doing we
> > recognise a range of culpability. It is wrong to jail a person for
> > stealing a biscuit and some cordial, but entirely justifiable if they knock
> > off a couple of banks at gun point. Hitler committed mass murder as a
> > means of destroying a culture. We assimilated them into another population.
> > Both wrong, but a long way apart on the scale. There were murders, but
> > these were contrary to the laws at the time. As I understand it, part of
> > the basis of the original Native Title cases was work done by Henry Reynolds
> > showing that land had been alienated from the original inhabitants against
> > the law as laid down by the British authorities.
>
> Graham,
> How do you dismiss 10,000 Aboriginal people shot off their land in
> Queensland alone as 'there were some murders'? The genocide committed
> against Indigenous Australians was against British law but only in *one*
> case were people held responsible and that was in NSW!
>
> Trudy
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