The “Genocide”

The Pocket Windschuttle: Australia’s reputation for "genocide"

Tony Thomas: Most Australians would be unaware that our academic industry has successfully invested Australia with a global reputation for "genocide", along with Nazi Germany, Turks in Armenia, and the Stalinist gulags.

[Note: All page references are to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History – Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008 by Keith Windschuttle (Macleay, 2009)]

Keith Windschuttle checked the London-based Journal of Genocide Research, March 2001. In the index to articles, found Australia right up there with the SS in Belorussia, Auschwitz and Kalmykia. The kalmyks were a minority nation deported wholesale to Siberia by Stalin in 1943 – a third of the population froze and starved to death just on the journey alone.

The piece on Australia in this unedifying company was by academic Paul Bartrop of Deakin University, headed, “The Holocaust, the Aborigines, and the Bureaucracy of Destruction: An Australian Dimension of Genocide.” p14

Bartrop claimed our past policies, e.g. in the 1930s, towards Aboriginal children were ultimately the same as Hitler’s goals for the Jews (without the actual killing):

“namely that at the end of the process the target group would have disappeared from the face of the earth.”

In its first ten years to 2009, this journal ran 12 similar major pieces about Australia’s genocidal style. This was three times as many as the journal carried about the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. In one issue in 2008, three of the seven articles were on Australia. “Indicting Australia for genocide has become an academic obsession,” Windschuttle remarks. Genocide was broadened to include our original white settlement and colonial history. 14.

Of course, the academics had their lead from Bringing Them Home (1977) which said Australia had breached the UN convention on genocide.

In a recent anthology Genocide and the Modern Age, a chapter was specially commissioned on Australia, along with Turkey and Nazi Germany.

In the ten volume series, Studies on War and Genocide, seven of the books were on Germany, but Australia was the only other country to be given its own volume.

Expatriate Australian historian Ben Kiernan of Yale, in 2007 published Blood and Soil, a world history of genocide, which wound up with 61 pages on Australia compared with only 21 on Armenia, 39 pages on the Holocaust, 31 pages on Japan in Asia, and about 26 pages each on Stalin and Mao. p15-16

These academics have been so influential that comparisons of Australia and Nazi Germany are tossed off as though any possible debate about it is over.

The story about our genocide of Aborigines via child-stealing is demonstrated to be bogus through the 620 pages of Windschuttle’s Volume Three.

He sums up on his final pages with a table listing the number of Aboriginal children taken into care from 1880-1970 in all states and territories. This best-estimate total is 8250, based on archives and official submissions. That’s an average 92 per year, nationally. p617

This 8250 is NOT the number of ‘stolen’ children. It includes:

• children fostered or adopted into white families
• children separated from their parents for good reasons and bad, and forcibly or voluntarily.
• children sent with parents’ consent to be educated and trained elsewhere
• children taken away because they were neglected or abused by their parents.

Windschuttle says there was NEVER any policy by any state or territory government to steal children from parents to eliminate the race of put an end to Aboriginality. There were NO stolen generations, he says:

“Rather than being over-zealous in their removal of children, most states and territories did not do nearly enough, especially in the period from Federation to the Second World War. There were many more Aboriginal children who should have been removed on grounds of health and welfare, or who would have benefited from an education away from their immediate surroundings, than governments were willing to fund.

Our one genuine national shame is that this is still the case today…Aboriginal children are Australian citizens. They deserve nothing less than the same opportunities provided for all other children in the country.” 618

Buy The Fabrication of Aboriginal History – Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008 here…