Senate Inquiry on Academic Freedom: Why genocide studies proliferate in our universities

Senate hearing opening remarks

…the underlying agenda of the academic field of “genocide studies” is not the study of genocide, let alone its analysis or prevention. It is to argue that our own society and those like it, that is, Britain and the United States, are every bit as bad as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. The old moral equivalence argument from the Cold War is alive and well in genocide studies. Let me quote from the 2001 edition of the academic journal Aboriginal History, whose editors, Ann Curthoys and John Docker of the Australian National University wrote:

“Settler-colonies like ‘Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, the United States, and Canada’ led the way in setting out to achieve what the Nazis also set out to achieve, the displacement of indigenous populations and their replacement by incoming peoples held to be racially superior.”

Curthoys and Docker are here quoting a claim by former Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado …

See also: Aboriginal History ‘a live political issue’