http://home.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/abor_s/abo_genocide.htm

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Much the same happened to the jews. If you want to do something really bad to another race first you need to marginalise, separate (Oyster Cove – reservations etc) and then slowly but surely dehumanise them. The literature has it that Tasmanian Aboriginies could not make fire – interpret as too backward to make fire – yet there is evidence witnesses saw them making fire and using logs as boats.

Dehumanisation is the only way a person could consider, or other people would permit to occur, the making of a tobacco pouch out of someone’s scotum after their death (lampshades where made out of dead jews skin in concentration camps).

In this, my friend Jeremiah, you may have raised an interesting point by denying a parallel between Nazism and the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginies. Was it really much different? How do you know, Jeremiah? I dont see much difference now. The dehumanising process started there with the branding of jews who were made to wear the star of david as an armband.

People can apparently only do horrible things to other people when they no longer consider them human. Perhaps this has more influence in the Tasman aboriginal situation than you wish to acknowledge.

This is wrong. The events in Germany have got nothing to do with what happened in colonial Australia. Our historical discourse is based on Australian circumstances and genocide is a completely appropriate theme for discussion.

Whether it occurred and/or how, is a separate issue.

demonstyrating some association with some criminal intent or guilty mind is not relevant.

I am sorry you cannot see the connection between ignorant racism, lebenshchraum and genocide.

Windschuttle is too partisan to be taken seriously. His discussion is a political exercise based on a working thesis that the only deaths that occurred were the deaths that were recorded by colonial authorities. He had an opportunity to clarify possible errors in the history, and this would have been of some use, but he ruined his chances.

Whether someone wants to see colonial authorities as a proper lot of officers and evangalistic bibleists is not relevant except as a contrast to what was done by them to Australian natives – including possibilities of massacre, starvation, mass slaughter, dispossession and social breakdowns.

Ignorance of one races ways by another, is hardly the point. Ignorance is no excuse for inhumanity and is probably a false pleading anyway.

I have not explored whether genocide is relevant to today. This is not my context. It is also not the context where the original aggression occurred. But I well understand the tactic of trying to deflect attention away from Australia’s colonial history.

Why hide one context with another?

#129 Chris Warren: In your terms your use of “wordplay” is itself word play – and the resort of one who is unused to precision of thought or language and, on the evidence, incapable of it. A most important item of evidence is that you are now saying or implying that I am denying that there were “genocidal outcome”[s] in Australia and therefore denying that white settlement led, for example, to the wiping out of the Tasmanian aborgines. As a close relation of mine wrote one of the first books on the subject that would be unlikely and is in fact quite false as attention to what I have written on this blog would demonstrate.

From the outset I have tried to convey the major point that “genocide” is an inappropriate word to use for what happened in Australia because anyone with sensitivity would understand its historical connection in fact and in usage with the Holocaust. Many dead metaphors have started off as mere exaggerations in innocent examples of limited vocabulary (e.g. when the cricket commentator says “they had to literally blast him out”)but the acceptability of loose language can be affected a number of factors. Here I would cite first the well known and justified sensitivity of Jews to suggestions that almost any other persecutions of people compared in magnitude or evil motivation with the Holocaust. Then there were the people who ought to have known better using Nazi and Hitler analogies of Jeff Kennett when Premier of Victoria. In the current context there is also the (prima facie deliberate) switching between meanings of genocide to insinuate that someone (who? anyone who was some part of a causal chain?) had the kind of criminal intent that would have allowed (some senior people constituting)the colonial authorities – or maybe the representatives of some fictional private association (“The Top end of Town”?) – to be convicted of what was later defined as the crime of genocide, or maybe just held morally culpable as if they had committed genocidal acts or created genocidal policies with such a guilty mind.

I suspect that part of the reason that you are all over the place is that you are ignorant of the context of debate raised by what Windschuttle has actually written. The old lefty discovered in his researches that the colonial authorities were by and large a very proper lot of officers and (perhaps even) gentlemen much influenced by the evangelical Christianity which had led to the abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of slavery itself in the West Indies, and, eventually to all sorts of protections of the weak like restrictions on child labour, not to mention the ending of widow burning in India and other mere impositions of Western prejudices. Of course he did also get particularly angry with people like Lyndall Ryan and a few others who were completely unscrupulous in their fabrications of evidence about actual numbers of Aborigines killed. He was answering the whole package of misrepresentations (which, as I have previously indicated, may be a much more formidable task for him if he tries to do it comprehensively on Queensland and Western Australia although a few articles he has written appear to hit the mark) which includes both physical facts and motivations.

As to the causal factors you say were sufficiently set out in #112, I presume you weren’t referring to your “maybes” and are reasserting the view that “ignorant racism” and the need for land (given by you as “lebenshchraum”) were universal. But you still haven’t made the connection. It goes without saying that nearly all whites were as ignorant of Aboriginal ways as Aborigines were of modern European culture and it is likely that the views of many , even most of our white forbears fell within a range from “hopelessly primitive culture which can’t last in the modern world” to “in some ways admirable but basically inferior people who won’t be able to adapt to modernity” which takes the argument nowhere. Even Indonesian peasants desperate for land don’t try and wipe out the Orangutans just because they are inferior being by some criteria. Irish Catholics, English Evangelicals and Scottish Presbyterians would have all been horrified at any people being treated like vermin (as Muslims presumably would have too if the people in question would accept Allah as the one god).

You may Chris Warren want to inhabit a private world where there is some question about what happened to Aborigines but, for most people, there is a completely different context for discussion of genocide in relation to Aborigines, beginning, perhaps, with the sanctimonious insensitivies of Wilson, Manne and Gaita or maybe later when Windschuttle led the counter-attack with Fabrication and a number of published articles about particular alleged massacres.

Don’t waste a good word. That Aboriginal life as it was 220 years ago has simply ceased to exist is not in question, but if you want an actually useful way of bringing “genocide” into the conversation you might consider broadcasting “genocide of Aborigines continues apace today. It is the genocide by alcohol and drug abuse, untreated STDs, child abuse, physical violence and obesity related diseases produced by a rotten diet and lack of exercise. And this genocide is largely committed by Aborigines against themselves.” That should get you two minutes attention, like calling Kennett a Nazi and it contains an element of truth even if the fundamental fact of a genocide is nowhere to be seen: Aborigines are actually increasing in numbers despite the fact that the unforgivable policies of Coombs, Fraser and other high-minded fools have done more harm to more people than all the policies towards Aboriginal people of the first 180 years.

Such wordplay and abuse will get you nowhere.

It is a not necessary to have evidence of genocidal intent in the historical record to have had a genocidal outcome.

So this is just a diversion by a denier.

And a game I find rather too common, boring and useless.

I gave sufficient causal factors in #112 above so I am not going to repeat them here. If Jeremiah wants to contests real positions, he should start here – not in Germany.