Tony,
This particular article was written for the New Statesman, 13
October, 2000.
There is a brilliant website at: http://pilger.carlton.com/
Where you can find John Pilger's latest articles in print, together with
reports on Burma, East
Timor, Vietnam, Australia, Iraq.
Pilger wrote another interesting article just a couple of weeks ago on his
concerns about
Amnesty International. That's included on-site as well. I'll send people on this list
a copy of that as
well.
Cheers,
Matthew Davis
TONY SPIERS wrote:
> What is the source of this article , please?
> At 02:50 PM 10/13/00 +0800, you wrote:
> > Hi,
> > This article from John Pilger for a British Newspaper covers
> >the Quadrant dirty-tricks campaign, it's dated the 13th October.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Matthew Davis
> >
> > Australia is the only developed country whose government has
> >been condemned as racist by the United Nations
> >
> > According to the folksy writer Matthew Engel, the glories of
> >the Olympic Games have a cathartic effect on nations. The 1984 Olympics
> >in Los Angeles �helped the US regain the confidence it lost in Vietnam�.
> >He omitted to explain the benefits of this renewed confidence for the
> >millions of bereaved, maimed and poisoned Vietnamese. As for the Sydney
> >Olympics, he described a �glorious self-confidence� that will �sustain
> >Australia for years�.There is no doubting the efficiency of the Sydney
> >Olympics, the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the setting; but
> >there was a political fa�ade. Soon after the Aboriginal runner Cathy
> >Freeman won her gold medal, the cabinet of John Howard�s government met
> >in Canberra to mount yet another attack on her people by planning to
> >change the Land Rights Act.
> >
> > In 1998, the Howard government enacted legislation that effectively
> >took away the common-law rights that the High Court said belonged to
> >Aborigines. Nothing like it has been passed by a modern parliament. It
> >is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia
> >the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has
> >been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the
> >Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The UN has also called racist the
> >mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory and Western
> >Australia, which have given black Australians an imprisonment rate at
> >least as high as that of apartheid South Africa, and have been a primary
> >cause of one of the highest suicide rates in the world, among young
> >Aborigines.
> >
> > The Howard government�s response, on the eve of the Olympics, was
> >to bar UN human rights officials from entering Australia and
> >investigating further.Howard�s racist administration is a beneficiary of
> >an Olympic Games that successfully co-opted Aboriginal motifs, culture
> >and talent, leaving the question begging: if �glorious self-confidence�
> >can produce such brilliant organisation, why can�t the same energy and
> >political will be applied to ending the shameful treatment of the first
> >Australians?Take sport, a passion of all races. Why are the annual
> >Aboriginal Games in the Northern Territory, an event of great
> >significance to black Australians, played in a dust bowl without the
> >most basic facilities? There are no athletics tracks, no swimming-pools,
> >no basketball court, often not even a set of goalposts.
> >
> > Professor Colin Tatz, author of Obstacle Race, a study of Aboriginal
> >sport, told me: �I think most white Australians would weep if they were
> >taken on a tour of black sporting Australia. There is a great push to
> >have more and more Aboriginal athletes, more and more scholarships for
> >an elite group, because it�s wonderful to say in the year 2000: �Look,
> >we have half a dozen Aborigines in our briefcases, which shows that
> >Australia makes no racial distinctions.� But the Aborigines who
> >represented Australia in the Olympics had to show three times as much
> >talent in order to rate an equal place with whites. Cathy Freeman is the
> >greatest thing that ever happened to white Australia, because this
> >happy, delightful, fun-loving young lady looks as though she is the
> >representative of all black womanhood. But she is not; she is an
> >aberration.
> >
> > �Professor Tatz is also the author of a monograph called Genocide in
> >Australia, which concludes that, under international convention,
> >Australia is guilty of at least two types of genocide: massacre (�nigger
> >hunts� continued into the 1960s) and the theft of mixed-race children
> >from the families: the �Stolen Generation�. Compared with the death of a
> >third of world Jewry in the Holocaust, a majority of Aborigines are
> >believed authoritatively to have died in the initial white invasion and
> >appropriation.
> >
> > Partly to win over the million Australians who voted for Pauline
> >Hanson�s overtly racist right One Nation Party, Howard has aggressively
> >campaigned against the teaching of the rapacious past, deriding it as
> >the �black armband view of history�. Last year, he abolished Abstudy, a
> >programme designed to help Aboriginal people reach secondary and
> >tertiary education. He holds the unique position of being the only
> >leader of a white settler nation to refuse to apologise for the
> >decimation of the original inhabitants. He and his ministers have caused
> >widespread hurt among the survivors of the Stolen Generation by doubting
> >their stories. Last year, his Aboriginal affairs minister, John Herron,
> >was guest of honour at a conference in a Sydney hotel attended by a
> >group of revisionist commentators and academics whose reactionary views
> >are reflected in Quadrant magazine. They discussed the �hoax� of many of
> >the Stolen Generation. The Australian equivalent of David Irving
> >denialists, they are supported by the prime minister.
> >
> > On the eve of the Olympics, clearly timed to interest the foreign
> >media, Quadrant mounted another conference, at which a little-known
> >academic, Keith Windshuttle, set out to demolish the reputation of
> >Professor Henry Reynolds, a pre-eminent historian, whose 1981 book The
> >Other Side of the Frontier effectively broke the popular silence over
> >the 19th-century assault on Aboriginal Australia. Reynolds estimated
> >that 20,000 Aborigines were killed by settlers: a figure Windshuttle
> >accused him of inventing. Four historians came to Reynolds�s defence,
> >describing the 20,000 as a conservative estimate of �massive violence
> >and pitiless dispossession�. However, in a small elite not renowned for
> >its bravehearts, the failure of others to speak out is striking. Olympic
> >hype will not give Australia glorious self-confidence. Justice for its
> >indigenous people might.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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