> We didn't kill eleven million, but we did succeed
> where Hitler didn't: we actually exterminated some cultures (though there
> are still people descendent from them, eg. in Tasmania, they no longer
have
> their language.)
> The experience of the peoples I have studied in Australia and Papua is
that
> forcing the abandonment of language is extremely traumatic and is in fact
> intimately connected with the destruction of the rest of their way of
life.
> There is a good reason why the Turks, Indonesians, Australians, Americans,
> Canadians, the English, the Spanish, Portuguese, the Brazilians, Nazis and
> every one else who ever tried to wipe out a people set out to suppress
> language.
Thiago, I guess you don't agree with Henry Reynolds then, who rejects the word "genocide" in relation to the Aborigines? And I have to admit, as well, that although Keith Windschuttle is essentially a reactionary propagandist, he has managed to score significant hits on the idea of "Australian genocide", _including_ what happened in Tasmania. He has exposed serious flaws in the work of historians like Lyndall Ryan on this exact matter. Put simply, this is because it is impossible to establish that "genocide" was official policy in relation to the _whole_ of Tasmania, let alone Australia in general. In any event, as with native Americans, it is quite clear that European and other imported diseases did much more of the killing than did actual violence.
My main area of research is state-labour interaction in Colonial Western Australia and my feeling from my reading is that the rationale for massacre, removal of children, etc, in Australia was generally _not_ similar to the Nazi "Final Solution", although racist ideology certainly played a supporting role. From my research its seems to me that most of what is called genocide in Australia took place not as overt/official policy, but much more usually as part of a general idea among capitalist settlers, that Aboriginal populations which had survived the (almost certainly non-intentional) introduction of devastating diseases like smallpox, could be coerced into becoming capitalist-productive labour, especially in the sheep and cattle industries. And while there was a huge component of forced labour in the policy of the Third Reich, I don't have the feeling it was the main purpose of the concentration camps etc. (although I also recognise that some have argued that it was.)
Regards,
Grant.