History Wars - Genocide Debate

Genocide Debate

After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin himself and most comparative scholars of genocide and many general historians, such as Robert Hughes, Ward Churchill, Leo Kuper and Jared Diamond, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide. The Australian historian of genocide, Ben Kiernan, in his recent history of the concept and practice, Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur, (2007) treats the Australian evidence over the first century of colonization as an example of genocide.

Among scholars specializing in Australian history much recent debate has focused on whether indeed what happened to groups of Aborigines, and especially the Tasmanian Aborigines during the European colonisation of Australia can be classified as genocide. According to Mark Levene, most Australian experts are now "considerably more circumspect". In the specific instance of the Tasmanian Aborigines Henry Reynolds, who takes events in other regions of colonial Australia as marked by "genocidal moments", argues that the records show that British administrative policy in Tasmania was explicitly concerned to avoid extermination, however practices the events on the ground that lead to the virtual extinction worked out. Tony Barta, John Docker and Anne Curthoys however emphasize Lemkin's linkage between colonization and genocide. Barta, an Australian expert in German history, argued from Lemkin that, "there is no dispute that the basic fact of Australian history is the appropriation of the continent by an invading people and the dispossession, with ruthless destructiveness, of another". Docker argues that, "(w)e ignore Lemkin's wide-ranging definition of genocide, inherently linked with colonialism, at our peril". Curthoys argues that the separation between international and local Australian approaches has been deleterious. While calling for "a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship", her own view is that the Tasmanian instance constitutes a "case for genocide, though not of state planning, mass killing, or extinction".

Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide, centres on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or ... might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers". Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victim group it matters little if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated as a result of smallpox introduced to Australia by British settlers, or introduced European farming methods causing a group of Aborigines to starve to death, the result is in his opinion genocide.

Henry Reynolds points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aborigines during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent" this is an indicator of genocide. Janine Roberts has argued that genocide was Australian policy, if only by emission, noting that despite contemporary newspapers regularly decrying "the barbarous crop of exterminators" and "a system of native slaughter... merciless and complete", the government contended that "no illegal acts were occurring", with the worst incidents being described as merely "indiscretions".

The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and other historians such as Keith Windschuttle disagree and think that no genocide took place. Minogue does not try to define genocide but argues that its use is an extreme manifestation of the guilt felt by modern Australian society about the past misconduct of their society to Aborigines. In his opinion its use reflects the process by which Australian society is trying to come to terms with its past wrongs and in doing this Australians are stretching the meaning of genocide to fit within this internal debate.

In the April 2008 edition of The Monthly, David Day wrote further on the topic of genocide. He wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv the original inhabitants off the land... confin them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names."