I'll make this my last post for today, since thesis-writing calls and we've probably caused a near-meltdown of the LBO server.
> I don't think a people who had suffered systematic serious bodily or
mental
> harm on the grounds of their ethnicity to the point it threatened their
> existence as a people would consider such offences meaningless or
> legalistic.
But we're not talking about the offences, we're talking about the names these are given.
> If you have a problem with the Geneva Convention, that's fine. It's not
> sacrosanct. But the ball is in your court to develop a better definition.
> It's not good to simply say "oh, this could be anything!" when in fact we
> have a very clear interpretation of what it could be
I have said that I think genocide has to involve actual systematic killing in addition to things like child-stealing, etc. Otherwise it is not an attempt to annihilate the people concerned. There is no doubt all the elements of the UN definition have been experienced in various parts of Australia at various times. But never in the same place at the same time.
> It sounds to me as if you are trying to define genocide such that it is
the
> crime that Hitler committed,
Not at all, I think there are other examples, but I also think all of those would also be questioned by others on this list. I keep coming back to the Third Reich because that is the prime, agreed example.
> and basically no one else, ever, certainly no
> one that could even begin to be compared to us.
National/ethnic identity is not a big part of my psychological framework, although I can't help occasionally comparing "us", in my own thoughts, to the Nazis and it is disturbing. For one reason, because I think the Third Reich was an accident of history, which could have happened in many comparable modern societies. And Hitler was undoubtedly inspired by the exploits of the British Empire, the American Frontier and the ideologies that went with those. But in most cases the comparison just doesn't work for me. Call it a historiographic quibble if you like, but is there anything, anywhere that we _can_ compare to Auschwitz?
> I am resigned to having lost the word
> 'holocaust' to the politicization of human suffering, but at this rate,
> there will be no words left to call our crimes by.
There are plenty of words and most of them were around before the word genocide.
> There is one huge difference between the Stolen Generations and the
British
> orphans: the British were not transferred with the stated intent to
destroy
> British culture,
As I say, I don't think race was the _real_, underlying motivation for the Stolen Generations, just as -- conversely -- the Nazis' main intent was not to channel and discipline the labour of European Jews, Gypsies, etc.
And there is plenty of evidence to say that proletarianisation was _the_ main motive in regard to the atrocities inflicted on the Australian Aborigines. e.g. in a remarkably frank letter published by the _Perth Gazette_ , (precursor of The West Australian) on June 19, 1848, an anonymous pastoralist wrote:
"The labour obtained from the natives is also very scanty in this district. They maintain, like the labouring white man of this colony, a sort of independence not easily to be dealt with. An increase of population would act equally the same upon the quantity of labour to be derived from the natives as upon the quantity derived from the European. At present from the wild state of the country, the natives can find abundance of food everywhere, and almost within sight of the different settlers' establishments; this makes them independent and deprives the colony of a great deal of useful labour. If the country was more numerously peopled with Europeans, and who, in bringing cultivation, destroyed the principal game of the natives, some further advances would probably be effected in bringing them round to European labour and civilization."
Of course there were all kinds of reasons why such things could not be said publically at later times.
> I think you are underplaying the role racist thinking played motivating
the
> policy and the fact that exterminating Aboriginal culture and society was
> its goal.
I have said to you before that racism was a motive for these policies. I mean, quite obviously a then-respectable racist pseudo-science _was_ the public face of the policies. But, as I just said to Bill Bartlett, not every bad thing that happens to a large group of people is actually motivated by racism. Even when it is supposed to be.
regards,
Grant.