1/18/08
G is for Genocide
http://blackgst.revolt.org/index.html
Report details crimes against Aborigines
Assimilating the Natives in the U.S. and Australia12/4/07
Police Corruption: Cops Hit the Front Page
Original article here
It all started with a dead gigolo named Shane.
Who would have thought that, four years after the murder of Shane Chartres-Abbott in June 2003, an initially unrelated probe into inappropriate emailing would culminate in the resignations and suspension of several high-ranking police?
But that’s exactly what happened at the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) hearing in Melbourne over the last few weeks — the latest episode in the enduring drama of Victoria Police corruption, which, with its plot twists, secret evidence and high-profile cast, has had Victorians on the edge of their tram seats.
At the centre of the hearing were allegations that high-ranking police had leaked information that tipped off another police officer that he was under investigation by Operation Briars, a taskforce investigating the gangland murder of gigolo Shane.
As reported in The Age, the same officer, Detective Sergeant Peter Lalor, was concurrently being investigated over emails, written under the alias ‘Kit Walker,’ which discredited a rival to the Police Association leadership.
The bombshells dropped at the OPI hearings destroyed some high-profile careers — Assistant Commissioner Noel Ashby and Media and Corporate Communications Director Stephen Linnell resigned in disgrace after being found to have lied to the OPI, while Police Union President Paul Mullett and Head of the Media Unit Inspector Glenn Weir were suspended. But it has not been without collateral damage.
In the words of Counsel assisting the OPI, Dr Greg Lyon SC:
This hearing focuses on a very few. This hearing should not cast a shadow over the majority, who in reality are also betrayed by such misconduct .
Which is exactly what happened.
Apart from, perhaps, Inspector Weir, no one at the Media and Corporate Communications Department (MCCD) had the barest suspicion of the goings-on behind their Director’s door. Yet the fallout from Linnell’s public humiliation and resignation cast a pall over them all.
Labelled by news-hounds as the Police Propaganda Unit and the ‘101 members of Victoria Police’s Spin Machine,’ the mood in the MCCD plummeted, reputedly ‘like someone had died.’
And slagging off the department attained new heights. Neil Mitchell on 3AW asked:
the police are so far into media manipulation it’s obscene. This isn’t to do with helping the public, it’s to do with hiding things from them. Why do we need 101 spin doctors in the Victoria Police?
Instead of asking the MCCD, he asked the Herald Sun’s Keith Moor, who answered:
I remember before there was a Media Unit and it was certainly, in my view, a much more efficient way of members of the public finding out exactly what was happening … The old Chinese whispers happens if you’ve got to deal with somebody other than the detective who pulled the knife out of the back, then you get a slightly different story…
Andrew Bolt’s post on the issue in his Herald Sun blog elicited dozens of responses from all the usual conspiracy theorists:
‘They probably need [the 101 people in the department] to keep all of the Vic Govt’s information suppression orders in line,’ wrote ‘Larry of Canberra.’
‘MartinX’ of Springfield Lakes was on the right track: ‘Some of those 101 would be involved in internal communications, possibly AV work, intranet support, etc.’
But a salient point was made by ‘K Walker of Melbourne,’ who suggested: ‘Before the boring slagging off most should get some facts right.’
As the Media Department later informed Mitchell, the MCCD actually comprises 102 people (OK, make that 101 now) across several divisions, only one of which, Inspector Weir’s Media Unit, is involved in day-to-day media campaigns and response — accounting for 22 people. The remainder work in areas such as Strategic Communications, the Film and TV Office, the Police Museum and, largest of all, 50, in the Police Bands.
But the Herald Sun’s Roger Franklin wasn’t letting the facts get in the way of a good rant. On 16 November, he wrote:
at a time when police are thin on the ground, so stretched that some officers responding to a recent riot in Noble Park had to be summoned from 40km away, why did disgraced PR man Steve Linnell need 101 staff in his spin machine? Residents in areas plagued by hoons, drugs and increasing numbers of knife crimes will be particularly interested in that one.
Fair enough, the next time there is a riot in Noble Park, perhaps Victoria Police can redeploy its pipe band.
The MCCD was enraged. But worse was to come with the very public humiliation of their boss. If the cringing transcriptions of secretly taped conversations weren’t enough to destroy Linnell’s career, there was no shortage of journalists willing to add an extra sentence or two.
Linnell’s locker-room language was a particular shock for some: Paul Austin editorialised in The Age about the ’foul-mouthed’ Linnell — as if newsrooms aren’t equally as colourful.
Roger Franklin wrote: ‘[Linnell] talks the lingo like a man born to the blue and he shoots the poison darts of gossip and slander … as if he was himself in the running for the top job.’
Nor was there a shortage of people willing to say ‘I told you so.’ At The Age, John Silvester wrote:
One senior officer was warned that Linnell was a ’wild card’ who lacked the experience for the job and could be manipulated. Before he left The Age he was warned to be wary of cut-throat police politics because it could be career-ending and to try to temper his locker-room language because it could be used against him. He chose to ignore the advice. Former media director Bruce Tobin offered to provide a background briefing on the job and the key players in the force. Linnell declined, preferring to wander into the minefield without a map.
At least the Herald Sun’s senior police reporter Geoff Wilkinson speaks from personal experience, having been Victoria Police Media Director 1981-89.
Linnell failed one of the most basic tenets of journalism and his job — the need to be right and assume nothing. He also ignored the fact that the first test of the credibility of a police media director … is the number and nature of the secrets you can keep.
By their very nature, relations between police media units and the news media are strained. Stereotypically, journalists perceive media units as providing too little information too late, while police place the imperatives of their own investigative inquiries above those of journalists.
In a time when both police and news media are equally skeptical of each other, media units are caught in the middle trying to facilitate the timely exchange of information. In reality, it works quite well. Police news, particularly crime and arrests, sell newspapers, while police rely on the media to promote campaigns, improve the public perceptions of police, and call for information.
It is not foolproof, as past president of Liberty Victoria Brian Walters wrote:
Instead of informing the public, the [police] media unit can be used to spin a line that is deceptive, or even use their position to trade influence.
Compared to the rest of the world, Victoria Police charts the middle ground with its media relations. In Sweden, at the overarching National Police Administrative Board (Rikspolisstyrelsen), the desire to be seen as transparent means the official police magazine has beaten the news media in breaking controversial policing stories. Any police can proffer personal comments on policing issues without fear of retribution from their superiors, and following media conferences, journalists may even be granted one-on-one interviews with relevant police to ensure they get different grabs from their rivals.
The New York Police Department, meanwhile, is strict with its media control; reporters have office space within the media bureau which facilitates all media comment. The NYPD utilises technology such as podcasts to promote public messages — with the added bonus that journalists can write off iPods as a tax expense.
But perhaps the most generous police media relations exist in Cambodia. Following the January 2004 assassination of Trade Union leader Chea Vichea, whose death was the seventh political murder in a year, the police surprised everybody with the speed in which they apprehended the two murderers. A media conference was hastily convened around a large table at the police station, and the ‘culprits’ were paraded in for journalists to photograph, touch and question.
So what if the lowly small-time crooks protested, tears streaming down their cheeks, that their confessions had been beaten out of them, or that the Phnom Penh Post later found that one had been four hours away at the time of the murder? The pressure was off the police to solve those dastardly political murders, and the media had a great front page.
About the author:Sam Davies worked in the Victoria Police Media Department between 2004-2006 as a journalist on Police Life magazine and as the Internet Content Editor, also undertaking a research trip to the Swedish National Police Board and the NYPD. He worked with the Phnom Penh Post in January 2004 and is now a freelance journalist based in France
Nothing New Under this Sun
As others have said these tactics are nothing new here, cause its always has been a penal, capitalist, colonial and genocidal settler colony.
11/7/07
The Fourth World: Struggles for Traditional Lands and Ways of Life
By Ward Churchill
- Our conceptions of “First-”, “Second-”, and “Third-” world nations dates back to the theories of Mao Zedong. Although instructive, this framework did not account for subsequent neocolonial strategies, puppet governments, and the Indigenous peoples in “First world” settler states and those whose land was dissected by emerging “Third world” nations. In this article, Ward Churchill writes about the indigenous “Fourth World” and the hopeful implications of idigenist resistance struggles worldwide.
At the 1963 Bandung Conference, Mao Zedong set forth his famous vision of a planet divided into three “worlds.” In Mao’s view, the “First World” consisted of industrialized capitalist states in the northern hemisphere, overwhelmingly white in racial composition, and pitted—economically, philosophically, and militarily—against a “Second World” of their industrially-developed socialist counterparts. There was as well a “Third World,” he said, composed of countries or “territories,” mostly to the south of the other two and populated almost exclusively by peoples of color, which were either maintained as colonies within the ambit of several first world imperial powers, or had recently freed themselves from colonial domination.
The Third World, Mao asserted, was inherently aligned with neither side in the first/second world conflict. Rather, its agenda was situationally-defined within each colony or former colony in accordance with the requirements of attaining political self-determination and economic development. In other words, the overarching goal of what soon came to be known as the “Third World Revolution” was “national liberation” on whatever terms and by any/every means through which it could be attained. It was a potent recipe, all in all, giving both shape and voice to sustained struggles which led, between 1945 and 1990, to an across-the-board decolonization of Africa and Asia and a corresponding repeal of European imperialism in its classic form.
For all its undeniable triumphs, however, the Third Worldist formulation was afflicted from the outset by many deficiencies. Insufficient weight was placed upon the prospect that the extent of colonialism’s often protracted underdevelopment of the Third World might have created structural conditions within the newly-independent countries that would leave them virtually defenseless against “neocolonialist” exploitation by their former colonizers. Nor—despite the warnings implicit to pioneering studies undertaken by Fanon, Memmi, and others—was the virulence and intractability of the psychological maiming inflicted upon those subjugated under colonialism’s genocidal yoke ever truly taken into account.
Scant attention was paid as well to the implications of the reality that those who typically instigated and led the Third World liberation struggles, thereby assuming control of the state apparatus in the wake of formal decolonization, had themselves been “educated” in imperial institutions. As a result, their perspectives and priorities—even their most personal sensibilities—often displayed a far greater commonality with those of their former colonizers than with those of the grassroots populations whose destinies they now presumed to decide and direct. In short order, the ostensible constituents of many such “revolutionary leaders” had come to complain that they were “more European than the Europeans” and were often “worse than they themselves.”
Perhaps most significant in this regard, little or no consideration was given in the canons of Third Worldism to the fact that the territorial boundaries of what were now proclaiming “sovereign states” had been drawn by the colonizers, not the colonized. By-and-large, the geographical demarcations defining the “possessions” of each imperial power were established in a manner amalgamating/partitioning the homelands of various peoples indigenous to the areas cast as “colonial compartments.” Their right to govern themselves in accordance with their own traditions was usurped by the centralized authority embodied in colonial administrations, their very identities as peoples subsumed under the homogenizing nomenclature of “colonial subjects.”
Self determining
Thus, while “liberation” was seen by Third Worldists as the transformation of Europe’s overseas colonies into states independently governed by their former subjects, the subjects themselves often envisioned it in dramatically different terms, i.e.: the restoration of control over their traditional territory to each of the peoples encompassed within colonial boundaries and, on that basis, resumption of their self-determining modes of governance, social organization, and economy. In substance, these indigenous peoples—nations, actually—comprised a “Fourth World,” unmentioned by Mao, upon the expropriation of whose lands and resources all states depend for their very existence.
It follows that for Fourth World peoples the success of Third World revolutions added up, not to a repeal of the system of subjugation imposed under European imperialism, but instead to something more nearly resembling a consummation of such oppression. Certainly, any difference between the forcible subordination of indigenous nations by a colonial regime imported from overseas and relegation to the same status by a “domestically-constituted” central government was/is negligible at best. In effect, colonialism in its classic form was merely supplanted by a still more insidious “internal” form resembling that which had facilitated consolidation of Europe’s imperial states themselves a few centuries earlier.
The results, while often misinterpreted, were both predictable and soon apparent. In “India,” an entity which did not exist until it was forcibly synthesized by British colonizers from the territories of nearly 300 indigenous nationalities. The Nagas—to provide but one example—were waging what turns out to be an ongoing armed struggle to recover self-governing control over their traditional homeland even before the “broader” society’s independence was announced in 1947. Across the European-drawn border separating India from “Burma,” the Karins had commenced a similar struggle in the south, as had the Kachins in the north. So, too, in what was known until 1954 as “French Indochina,” especially as regards the Hmongs in Laos and the various “Montagnard” peoples of Vietnam’s highland regions.
By the 1970s, such resistance had emerged in Indonesia, notably among the Papuans of “New Guinea” and the peoples of East Timor. In the Philippines as well, native peoples of the more southerly islands like Mindanao had begun to actively pursue agendas of their own, distinct in many ways from that of the maoist guerrillas operating in such locales. Across the vast reaches of Micronesia, from Samoa, Palau and the Solomons in the south, northward through the Marianas, westward to Okinawa and other islands along the Ryukyu chain, and eastward through the so-called Marshall Islands, comparably “indigenist” phenomena could be discerned.
Primary barrier
Much the same process began to unfold in Africa almost from the outset, probably the most notable example being the bloody and protracted effort mounted by Katangese “secessionists” to free themselves from the Congo, created as a personal holding by Belgium’s King Leopold towards the end on the 19th century. During the early 1960s. Scores of similar struggles materialized throughout the sub-Saharan regions of the “Dark Continent” over the next decade—the Ibos’ attempt to separate their Biafran homeland from Nigeria, for instance—a matter that so eroded claims of cohesion both within and between the various components of Africa’s emergent statist system that Kwame Nkrumah, a leading advocate of a Pan-African Union, was led to observe that “tribalism” rather than the ravages of neocolonialism stood as the primary barrier to actualization of the Third Worldist vision.
Nor have North Africa or the Middle East been immune. Since 1948, by far the most visible has of course been the sustained resistance of indigenous Palestinians to the impositions of the Israeli state. Less noticed, but sustained over an even longer period, has been the struggle of the Kurds to free their traditional territory, spanning the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia. By the 1970s, Bedouin resistance to statist rule in the Western Sahara had also congealed into the Polisario Liberation Front, a movement aimed mainly at securing the self-determining rights of tribal peoples against the self-anointed authority of Morocco’s central government.
Throughout Latin America, what might otherwise be viewed as typical Third World national liberation struggles and/or their precursors, have all along exhibited a pronouncedly indigenist dynamic. This became apparent at least as early as 1915, with an attempt by the Yaquis to (re)establish their own “free state,” separate from that born of the Mexican revolution. Comparable objectives were apparent in the “Land or Death” program for reorganizing property relations in the Andes advanced by Quechan revolutionary Hugo Blanco during the 1960s, and in the armed resistance of the Miskitos and other native to consolidation of the Nicaraguan state by the Sandinista government 20 years later.
More recent struggles undertaken in the same vein include those of the Mayan population of Chiapas to assert their autonomy from Mexico’s central government, an initiative presently being replicated in the provinces of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Sonora. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, having apparently reconsidered certain tenets of Third Worldism, has become the first self-consciously revolutionary head of state to restore lands and rights to indigenous peoples (whether this initiative was gestural or programmatic remains to be seen). Meanwhile, in Bolivia—demographically, the most overwhelmingly indigenous of all the Andean states—Evo Morales, an Aymara, has been elected president, largely on a promise to usher in a “new day” for the country’s native peoples (what this means, and where it might lead, also remain to be seen).
Settler states
The issue of demographics brings up yet another major mode of colonialism the paradigm left unaddressed in Mao’s “Three Worlds” paradigm. This is that of “settler states,” wherein a colonizing European population, having sufficiently established itself in its new overseas domain, declares itself, or is otherwise declared, to constitute a country in its own right, independent of the colonizing power from whence it sprang. Structurally, settler states—examples include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Argentina, Northern Ireland, Israel, and, until lately, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa—resemble the above-discussed internal colonial model embodied in Third World states, other than that the dominant population has been imported rather than being of local origin, and must therefore be seen as continuing rather than assuming the role of colonizer vis-à-vis subsumed within the “liberated” state.
To be sure, the latter circumstances have served to foster conditions radically different from those prevailing in Third World settings. Since the society “freed” by the attainment of settler state independence was that of the colonizers themselves—for those actually colonized, colonial domination was not only sustained but in most cases intensified in the “postcolonial” context—there has been sufficient developmental continuity to place virtually every such entity on a First World footing. Nonetheless, Fourth World liberation struggles have been every bit as apparent in the most advanced of the First World settler states as they have in the least developed states in the Third, oft-times more so.
While the efforts of Australia’s aboriginal peoples have been quite fruitful, as have those of the Maoris in New Zealand, the sharpest confrontations have been in North America, a reality highlighted by the American Indian Movement’s 1972 seizure of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C.; AIM’s 71-day armed defense of Wounded Knee in 1973; the ongoing and sometimes armed resistance of the Big Mountain Dine (Navajos) to forced removal from their land, beginning in 1974; the armed occupation of Montreal’s Mercier Bridge by the Mohawk Warrior Society in 1990; the armed occupation of traditional lands at Gustafsen Lake, British Columbia, during the mid-90s; and, currently, the struggle being waged by the Mohawks and others of the six-nation Haudenosaunee confederation to regain control over their traditional territory around Caledonia, in the Canadian province of Quebec.
Other examples abound: the long struggle of the Newes (Western Shoshone), spearheaded by the sisters Mary and Carrie Dann, to assert their right under the Ruby Valley Treaty to most of present-day Nevada; the protracted struggle of the Lubicon Cree to preserve and protect the traditional territory in northern Alberta; the hard-fought campaign by the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) to assert the rights under international law to land and self-governance; the Makahs’ assertion of their right to maintain their traditional whaling economy; the successful drive by the James Bay Cree to block hydroelectric projects that would have submerged their entire homeland under 200 feet of water; the ongoing efforts of the Dine to block the construction of coal-fired generating plants on their land, and to prevent conversion of their most sacred sites into tourist resorts. The list goes on and on, from the Dene campaign to enforce their treaty rights in Canada’s Northwest Territories, to the Mik’maq insistence upon their treaty-guaranteed right to fish and take lobsters off the coast of Nova Scotia, to the ongoing Lakota effort to recover the Black Hills, guaranteed them in perpetuity under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
Mother countries
Even in the European “Mother Countries” themselves, the Fourth World has increasingly made its presence known over the past 50 years, most spectacularly by a 30-year intensification, beginning in 1970, of the 800-year long Irish struggle to evict the last vestiges of British colonialism from their homeland. Less conspicuously, similar processes have been at work in Celtic Wales and Scotland during the same period. Elsewhere, the Basques have also engaged in an armed struggle to free their homeland, Euskadi, from its status of forcible incorporation into the Spanish state, while the Catalans have recently begun to openly pursue a similar agenda. So, too, the native Corsicans, whose island homeland in the Mediterranean has long been held as a settler possession by France. Far to the north, in the Arctic region of Scandinavia, the Samis (Lapps) are also seeking to resume their traditional autonomy vis-à-vis Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
Where does all this lead? One answer is to genuine and complete rather than partial or figurative decolonization on a planetary basis. Another, is to a redefinition of the relations between peoples in terms of the mutual acknowledgement of fundamental rights—hence, mutual respect—a matter establishing self-determination and free association as the cardinal principles upon which the affairs of nations are conducted. Perhaps self-evidently, such principles preclude the exercise of the kind of centralized, arbitrary, and inherently coercive authority which constitutes the very essence of statist organization. This, in turn, would serve to delegitimate in its entirety the 17th century Westphalian system of international relations, wherein states are the only entities deemed to be legitimate for purposes of deciding questions of world order.
The upshot would be a multiplicity of sociopolitical environments, wherein decision-making processes are inherently geared to what Kirkpatrick Sale once and aptly described as “human scale.” All but inevitably, this would lead to the contours of the resulting societies conforming closely to bioregional realities, a circumstance that would go far towards shaping the nature of their economies and facilitating a high degree of interactivity among/between societies through the medium of satisfying reciprocal needs.
Much more could and no doubt needs to be said, but constraints on length prevent its being said herein. Long story short, however, what has just been sketched goes a long way towards describing the restoration of the Fourth World, the indigenous or “host” world upon which all three of those identified by Mao were built, and without the perpetual subjugation/nullification of which none of the three could/can exist.
My personal preference of a term by which to refer to pursuit of Fourth World restoration is “indigenism,” although it shares much in common with certain variants of anarchism, a promise which seems worthy of further exploration. That too, however, is a discussion consigned by the limits of space to be had another day….
Ward Churchill is an indigenous activist and author. He has written over 20 books, including On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present.
Genocide Denial and North American Academia
An interview with Ward Churchill
It might be said that the measure of any decent smear campaign is the level to which the subject's own peers turn against them. If that's the case, Ward Churchill's defamers must be pretty pleased with themselves these days, as people of all political stripes line up to heap scorn on him.
Talking to him, you know this man is anything but defeated. Following his recent dismissal from the University of Colorado, he's taking his polemic show on the road, with stops next week in Ottawa, Toronto and Guelph.
Churchill became a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in 1990. His name was already well-known in activist circles, following a long stint as a leader of the American Indian Movement, and later as a national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. His books, from Agents of Repression to Pacifism as Pathology to A Little Matter of Genocide, are eye-opening, rending accounts of history, and staples on the shelves of thousands of people who are committed to social justice.
He gained widespread notoriety in 2005, when the media seized on an essay he had written on September 11, 2001 entitled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." In it, he suggested that American foreign policy was to blame for the attacks. He went on to say that some of those killed in the attacks were not "innocent" victims, but in fact the very people orchestrating and profiting from the imperialist system. He called them "little Eichmanns," a reference to the infamous Nazi bureaucrat.
The essay had appeared on a fairly obscure website, and didn't attract much public attention until 2005, when Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in New York State. Former Stalinist and current right wing writer David Horowitz, among others, led a campaign against Churchill which quickly picked up steam. Right wing radio host Bob Newman went so far as to argue that he should be executed for treason.
Under considerable pressure, the University of Colorado began investigating claims that Churchill had falsified and plagiarized some of his research. In 2006, a five-person investigative panel announced that it had found evidence of misconduct, but was split as to whether he should be fired, especially given the questionable timing of the allegations.
Eleven professors at the university signed a complaint against the investigation, saying that the committee violated standard scholarly practices and was biased against Churchill. He has continued to deny any misconduct, but was fired in July. He filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming that his dismissal was retaliatory, and contravened his right to freedom of expression. Free speech is constitutionally protected regardless of the popularity of the perspective, he argues.
You'd like to think that academia, if nothing else, is a bastion for bold ideas, a last refuge for unpopular speech.
Significantly, the "roosting chickens" title is a nod to a Malcolm X quote on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who called it a simple case of "chickens coming home to roost." The comment was undoubtedly received with as much enthusiasm in Malcolm X's time as Churchill's essay has in the years following its publication.
In a lively interview with Newsweek shortly after his dismissal, he refused to apologize for the "little Eichmanns" statement, in characteristically ardent terms:
"I never have any particular regrets about calling things by their right name. And it's about time we stop pretending that Americans are in a completely different analytical category from everyone else in the world, and are somehow exempt from the consequences of their actions."
Churchill is no stranger to unpopular ideas. Many of his writings have focused on the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US. Inspired in part by resistance to his own work, Churchill's current speaking tour focuses on what he calls "the denial of genocide in American academia."
"If you were making the exact same arguments and using same techniques to deny the holocaust in Germany, you would be guilty of a crime in Canada," he says.
Most deniers of the German holocaust are nuts, fringe types, he explains. "When you're talking about native people exactly the same thing is done, only it's the mainstream of academic discourse."
Churchill makes a convincing argument that the historic and systemic oppression of this continent's Indigenous populations does indeed fit within the official definition of genocide as found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which specifies "...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:"
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
"It's no more acceptable when something is done to victims of one genocide than when it's done to another set of victims," he says. "If the... Zundel types are repugnant--and they are--then the people who would deny the native genocide are just as repugnant."
One of the main differences in this context, he points out, is that European whites were largely successful in their conquest. And the victors, of course, write history.
"If you'd had a Nazi victory in Eastern Europe, the situation of any Jews who survived... would have been quite discernibly different."
At its best, academia can be a space for people of colour and Indigenous peoples to develop their own histories. Churchill presents a different analysis of history, and he doesn't much care if the mass media or his political opponents like it.
Overall, he says, Canadians have been more receptive than Americans to his message. He does as many talks in Canada as he does in the US, despite the much smaller population.
"One suspects it is in part because Canadians - and even progressive Canadians - tend to view their history as rather less genocidal than that of the United States," he muses.
"Canada didn't resort to the same direct killing techniques... but that's hardly an indication that the genocidal policy wasn't effective, just that the techniques employed were different."
He cites articles A and B of the genocide convention--imposing serious physical or mental harm, and inflicting destructive conditions of life.
"Surely in Canada it's clear that native peoples are subjected to various forms of psychological battering, and physical battering in the sense of endemic poverty," he says.
Falling back on the argument that Canada's treatment of the Indigenous population hasn't been as brutal as that of the US doesn't cut it either. "If you're talking about a worse genocide than another genocide, then you're arguing for a 'good' genocide.
"That's part of what I'm about, is calling people on their self-absolutionist stances. Canadians like to pretend that they're qualitatively different than Americans, and they're not."
Likewise, the Canadian myth of a "mosaic" society is deliberately oblivious to systemic racism. "You have to be in a state of extreme denial to be blind to the profundity of racism in society," he adds. "You really have to be a Nazi or a Klansman to come out and celebrate being a racist... At least they're honest. They're relatively easy to deal with. It's the mass of deniers who continue to profit from a racist society which is far more insidious."
"Give me a Klansman any day; at least I know exactly who I'm dealing with."
Churchill's sense of humour comes through again as he turns to the controversy surrounding his 9/11 essay. His favorite moment, he recalls, was reading a headline in a Maoist publication: "Ward Churchill fired for calling little Eichmanns little Eichmanns."
"The only people upset are in fact those who would be encompassed within my meaning of the term little Eichmanns," he says. "I'm not getting it from communities of colour. I'm not getting it from poor people."
With all of the focus on his dismissal from university, there is a risk that people aren't listening to what he has to say about racism and imperialism, and clearly that's what frustrates him most.
"If they can discredit my scholarship they can discredit my analysis, and if they can discredit my analysis they can reinforce the status quo," he fumes.
Some detractors went as far as questioning his Native American heritage. And although there were rumblings that Karl Rove had a direct hand in his targeting, Churchill, who has written extensively about the government's illegal and corrupt Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro) against civil rights era activists, shrugs them off.
"Cointelpro has been assimilated into the media to the point that you don't actually need intelligence agencies' involvement most of the time," he says.
Still, there's more than a hint of those bad old days in the air, with leftist writers and academics eagerly siding with those who want to dismiss Churchill as a kooky extremist. People like Todd Gitlin--who are considered left, but not too left, get a big share of the media attention surrounding this case.
"Most of my generation has sold out so long ago for so fucking cheap that it gives me generational embarrassment," Churchill says.
He believes that there is still hope for a broad social justice movement, outside of the currently established left. "It's not going to be people who work for the Nation, or the Progressive. It's certainly not going to be any part of the 'responsible left.'"
"We need to constitute an actual left. And that's going to come by and large from the new generation."
As a professor, Churchill was extremely popular with University of Colorado students, who have invited him to teach a "voluntary" class. The course is entitled "ReVisioning American History: Colonization, Genocide, and Formation of the US Settler State."
After years of weathering attacks, Churchill offers advice to budding activists. "Take clear positions and remain consistent and people will come to you. Don't worry about alienating people who are fundamentally sold out... Strip them of their privilege, they're gonna be alienated. I thought that was the goal."
Harawira accuses state forces of terrorism
Hansard Of Hone Harawira On Terror Amendment BillGrubbyment was embroiled in another heated debate on terrorism last night and a Maori Party MP was accused of effectively justifying anarchy.
Hone Harawira was on his feet again during the committee stage debate on a bill that strengthens New Zealand's terrorism suppression laws.
It is strongly supported by Labour, National and New Zealand First against the opposition of the Greens and the Maori Party.
Mr Harawira said the sort of terrorism the bill referred to seemed to be the American definition.
"I don't understand terrorism as it is understood by those fuelled by the jingoistic, acid-drenched, hate-filled, anti-Islamic, death to anyone from the Middle East, vitriolic, poisonous claptrap that the United States is trying to foist upon the rest of the world.
"And when I think about terrorism in this country, I've got to ask again - what about the terror of the state? What about the terror imposed on communities?"
Mr Harawira said last month's police raids imposed terror on communities and activists around the country.
"I will not sit quietly by while the state forces terrorise my people ... I will challenge the rule of law and I will oppose the rule of law if terrorism is a vehicle being used by the state forces of this country to terrorise Maori communities."National MP Wayne Mapp said Mr Harawira took an oath two years ago when he became an MP to uphold the laws of New Zealand. "And what does he say today? He doesn't believe in the rule of law.
"What does he believe in? The rule of anarchy, because that is what he is effectively justifying today."
Mr Mapp said Mr Harawira had a duty as an MP to uphold the rule of law. "The alternative does not bear thinking about."
National's foreign affairs spokesman, Murray McCully, said he had a simple reason for supporting the bill. "There are some very, very bad people out there in the world today.
"These are people who drive planes into buildings. These are people who put bombs in cars and drive them into nightclubs. These are people who kill in cold blood ... they don't play by any rule book."
The legislation under debate was the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill.
It creates a new offence of committing an act of terrorism, under penalty of a life sentence, allows courts to consider classified information without giving it to defendants, and gives the Prime Minister responsibility for designating groups and individuals as terrorists.
Green Party MP Keith Locke tried to amend it by tightening the definition of a terrorist act, but his proposal was voted down 109-10. Only the Maori Party backed him.
The bill completed its committee stage and has one more stage to go before it becomes law.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=252&objectid=10474445&ref=rss
'I do not mind saying that I do not understand terrorism, as it is understood by those fuelled by the jingoistic, acid-drenched, hate-filled, anti-Islamic, death to anyone from the Middle East, vitriolic, poisonous claptrap that the United States is trying to foist upon the rest of the world.'
Wednesday, 7 November 2007, 4:58 pmSpeech: The Maori PartyHansard Of Hone Harawira On Terror Amendment BillUNEDITED COPY SUBJECT TO CORRECTIONTurn(s) 22.2 to 23.1 Tuesday, 6 November 2007 4:25 PMTERRORISM SUPPRESSION AMENDMENT BILL In CommitteeHONE HARAWIRA (Māori Party—Te Tai Tokerau):
I just want to clarify something that was raised by the previous speaker. The Māori Party has *never ever said that it represents all Māori. In fact, we represent only intelligent Māori. That is the first thing I want to clear up, and that is not a matter of debate. At another level, when people start talking about the historical nature of terrorism and ask whether the Māori Party actually understands the historical nature of terrorism, I say that absolutely we do. An earlier speaker talked about introduced diseases.
I think of influenza, which was introduced by the whalers and sailors, wheelers and dealers, and thieves—who came from England. That disease wiped out thousands of Māori people. When I hear members talk about the murder of innocent citizens, I think of the so-called New Zealand colonial forces who murdered thousands of innocent Māori. When I think of the terror of the overtaking of a people’s land, I think of the land theft that has gone on since the time the New Zealand Government was first established in this country, and that continues to this very day. I absolutely understand the historical nature of terrorism. I understand it more so than, I assume, many other members of the House. But do I understand terrorism in the way that other members have expressed it, in terms of this bill?
The *answer is no. I do not mind saying that I do not understand terrorism, as it is understood by those fuelled by the jingoistic, acid-drenched, hate-filled, anti-Islamic, death to anyone from the Middle East, vitriolic, poisonous claptrap that the United States is trying to foist upon the rest of the world.
Dr Wayne Mapp: *al-Qaeda.
HONE HARAWIRA: The member says “al-Qaeda”. I have heard the mention of al-Qaeda in this discussion on terrorism. Is that the same al-Qaeda, and Taliban, that were funded by the United States to get the Russians out of Afghanistan?
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): The member needs to come back to the bill.
HONE HARAWIRA: I am speaking to the bill in terms of organisations that are listed as terrorist organisations. One of them is al-Qaeda and another is the Taliban. I ask the question of those who would sanction that practice, and would challenge me on it, whether we are talking about the same Taliban that was funded by the United States to throw the Russians out of Afghanistan. When they are talking about al-Qaeda, and the forces in Iraq that are currently opposing the Americans—*Saddam Hussein’s people—are they the same forces that the Americans funded to fight against the *Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran back in those days? Exactly where does this terrorism come from? It seems to me that terrorism, in terms of this bill, is terrorism as it applies to the American definition, not as it applies to the terrorism that is being meted out against people who oppose that kind of American imperialism.
I come back to the meaning of terrorism in this country. My understanding of terrorism comes from a source that is far different from the American expression of terrorism. My source relies on historical fact, rather than hysterical drama, for its position. My source connects me to my indigenous brothers and sisters all over the world. When I think about terrorism in this country, I again think about the terror of the State. What about the terror imposed on those communities in my whanaunga’s electorate? What about the terror imposed on those communities throughout Rūātoki? What about the terror imposed on activists right throughout the country—Pākehā, Māori, and all sorts of people, like Jimmy O’Dea, a 72-year-old staunch activist. His house was broken into by these—
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): The member will come back to the bill, thank you.
HONE HARAWIRA: Madam Chairperson, that is not—
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): The member must not refer to specific cases.
HONE HARAWIRA: That case is not before the court.
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): All right, thank you. The member assures me it is not.
HONE HARAWIRA: I think about terrorism in this country and whether I will sit quietly by, as suggested by Wayne Mapp, Mr John Hayes, and others, and wait for the police to come up with a decision. I think not. I will not sit quietly by, while State forces terrorise my people. If this requires of me that I speak out against the rule of law that would impose terror on Māori communities in this country, then I will speak out. I will speak out against it in this Chamber, on television, in newspapers, and anywhere else I possibly can. I will challenge the rule of law and I will oppose the rule of law, if terrorism is a vehicle being used by the State forces of this country to terrorise Māori communities. I will support those whānau, hapū, iwi, and individuals—Pākehā, Māori it does not matter—who have been threatened—
John Hayes: I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. This matter has no bearing on the bill under discussion. If there are concerns about the matter, then process should be followed, which takes place outside this Chamber.
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): The member is right to a certain extent, and I am trying to keep members to speaking to the bill. However, there has been a lot of discussion about the concepts in the bill, and that discussion includes probably every speaker so far. I ask the member to come back to Part 1 and relate his comments to that part. Again, I remind all members that the Committee stage is really the nuts and bolts of the bill. That is why we are back on Part 1.
HONE HARAWIRA: Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to point out that following on from speakers who have talked about the calicivirus and Adolf Hitler, what I have said about terrorism in this country was probably a lot closer to this bill than what others speakers have said. My support for whānau, hapū, iwi, and individuals—be they Māori, Pākehā, or whatever who are threatened by the imposition of terror by State forces—is absolute. I will not stand by quietly and wait for the New Zealand Police to come up with its idea about what is right and what is wrong. I note that American experts on terror, who have been flown over to this country to give their view, say that our police are probably breaking the law if they hold people without bail. I am not speaking on any particular case here.I am not speaking on any particular case here; it is a generic expression in respect of a range of charges, and none in particular. If that is the measure of us sitting quietly and accepting the rule of law, then we should not—as a society, as a Committee, and as any party in this Chamber—sit quietly by.
When I hear speakers in this Chamber in respect of this bill talk about the Untied Nations and ask how we could possibly not go along with the United Nations, I think to myself: “How could we possibly not go along with the United Nations *Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples?”
John Hayes: I raise a point of order, Madam Chair. The member is confusing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is a commission of the United Nations, with the *Security Council, which is quite a different body.
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): That is clearly a debating point, and the member is debating the bill.
HONE HARAWIRA: Thank you, Madam Chair. If Mr Mapp wants to talk about us honouring the call from the United Nations for this, that, and the other, then I would say to members let us not be picky about it—let us honour them all. If one of the calls from the United Nations happens to be the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, then let us honour that as well. Let us not say we will honour only certain aspects of it—those which go along with the United States’ version of what terrorism should be. Let us honour all aspects handed down to us by the United Nations, including the *Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s recommendation, for example, that the *Foreshore and Seabed Act be thrown out because it discriminates against Māori people here in Aotearoa. Coming back to the name of this bill, in terms of terrorism the Māori Party does support the rule of law. The Māori Party does oppose terrorism. The Māori Party will oppose terrorism in all of its forms, whether it is international terrorism or State terrorism. Madam Chair, thank you very much. I will come back to this later.
ENDS
Related
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0711/S00121.htm
11/6/07
Genocide and Empire
A. Dirk Moses (ed), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. New York: Berghahn, 2004.
Alan LesterUniversity of Sussex
1. This book is published as part of a series on war and genocide in which studies of National Socialist policies predominate. Its blurb promises that it will 'reconstruct instances of Australian genocide' and for the first time, place 'them in a global context'. At the series editor's suggestion, the key basis for this 'global' comparison is actually the policies pursued by Nazi authorities, especially in occupied eastern Europe, during the 1930s and 1940s. This was the context, after all, in which the word 'genocide' was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a figure whose writings loom large in some of the book's chapters.
2. In an effort to give a precise grounding to recent, publicly aired claims and counter-claims of parallels between white British/Australian treatment of Aborigines and Nazi treatment of supposed 'racial inferiors', the work of two scholars of those Nazi policies and their colonial precedents (Jürgen Zimmerer and Isabel Heinemann) is included in this volume. The reader is left largely to make their own judgement concerning the similarities and differences between the events described in these two chapters and those surrounding the settler-indigenous relations in Australia that are analysed in the remaining eleven chapters. I found these two chapters instructive and did indeed come to my own conclusions about both parallels and contrasts in the discourses of perpetrators, and the experiences of victims. However, I wonder whether a different kind of global context might have served a more useful purpose, both in furthering debates about apology, reconciliation and reparation in Australia, and in comprehending the past on its own terms. The context that I would propose is one of connection rather than simply comparison. This is something that I will return to below.
3. The first of three sections in the book sets out 'conceptual and historical determinants' of genocide studies more broadly, and their potential relevance for Australia. A. Dirk Moses is quite clear that the 'book aims to stimulate still more research, rather than provide easy answers', and the chapters that follow do indeed take quite sharply different approaches on the utility and applicability of the term 'genocide' in an Australian context. Moses' substantive introductory chapter argues that 'genocidal moments', if not systematic genocide on the scale of the Nazis, were intrinsic to the 'deep structure of settler society' (36). In this chapter he foreshadows questions that recur frequently throughout the volume. The most significant of these is whether or not Lemkin's and the UN's definitions of 'genocide' are applicable to the colonial and modern Australian states' and other white interests' treatment of Aborigines. Specifically, this applicability is tested first in relation to the mass murders and more indirect decimation of Aborigines as a result of settler occupation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Part Two of the book), and secondly in relation to policies of child removal, eugenic planning and racist restrictions on Aboriginal social life in the twentieth century (Part Three).
4. The question that preoccupies many of the contributors in Part Two is whether there must be deliberate, state-directed intent to destroy if we are to use the word 'genocide' to describe the effects of Australia's settler occupation. If not, can the word be used more flexibly to apply in conditions where massacres were (with some significant exceptions) undertaken by settlers outside of state control, and where the Aboriginal population was denuded by disease and starvation that could have been prevented? In Part Three, the problematic revolves in part around the UN's exclusion of what is popularly described as 'cultural genocide' from its own definition of the term. While pre-World War Two state and Commonwealth policies of child transfer, and the prohibition of certain patterns of procreation had the intention of forcing Aboriginal and so-called 'half-caste' biological 'absorption', and can therefore fit more easily with the UN's definition, can this definition legitimately be extended to describe policies of child transfer aimed more at cultural assimilation thereafter? Both policy directions would ensure the eventual disappearance of certain kinds of people, whether defined by 'racial' constitution or by cultural norms, but they would do so without destroying the existing Aboriginal and 'half-caste' individuals, who were their targets.
5. After Moses' Introduction, the first of the comparative chapters by Zimmerer argues that tracking colonial conceptions of race and space during the colonial period enables us to comprehend the 'archaeology' of genocidal intent on the part of National Socialists in the mid-twentieth century. Jan Kociumbas' subsequent chapter is a parallel argument that British settler colonization was frequently genocidal, in Australia as well as elsewhere. The next chapter by Raymond Evans, concluding Part One of the book, links the dispossession of Aborigines on Australia's colonial frontiers to the later development of White Australia immigration policies. Both are conceived as stages within a unitary racist project —'the single-minded drive to create in Australia a mono-racial continental community' (110). Many histories of South Africa were, until recently, similarly linear. They were concerned with the tracking of racist continuities across some 300 years, from the days of slavery in the early colonial Cape, through frontier expansion, industrialisation and early twentieth century segregation to the degradations of apartheid. In South Africa, the post-apartheid moment has opened up ways of disassembling these linear narratives. Historians have begun to draw attention to experiences, beliefs, performances and practices that complicate such 'endpoint' stories. The intriguing question that arises, for me at least, is whether or not, in the face of continued right wing denial and refusal to countenance reparation and apology, it is still too early for most historians to feel that they can do the same in Australia?
6. The second section of the book deals with the question of genocide on Australia's historic frontiers of colonisation. It starts with Henry Reynolds's concise account of the events in Van Diemen's Land that have, perhaps more often and more comprehensively than any other Australian episode, been described as genocidal. Reynolds provides a nuanced analysis of the differences between settler, humanitarian, and metropolitan and local governmental objectives, rhetoric and practice—an account that is at odds with some of the more homogenising tendencies in certain other chapters' treatment of colonial projects. Reynolds makes it clear that, in common with other British colonial frontiers, it was land-grabbing settlers who most clearly expressed 'exterminatory', or what we might with most reason today call 'genocidal' intent. Colonial governance in the early nineteenth century was caught ambivalently between the need to 'manage' such demands, appease evangelical humanitarian agendas and satisfy the metropolitan government and public at large as to the morality of British colonial rule, not to mention governors such as George Arthur's own feelings. The next chapter, Raymond Evans's second, is a narrative of the series of mass killings, many by the Native Police, that marked the destruction of Aboriginal societies along the mid-nineteenth century Queensland frontier. Evans demonstrates that the 'achievement' of settler self-government allowed greater scope for settlers to carry out exterminatory intent, despite the lingering concern of some humanitarians and of the metropolitan government.
7. Pamela Lukin Watson's succeeding chapter is the most direct, and perhaps rather forced, attempt to prove that genocide, strictly according to the UN's definition, took place, also in Queensland. With its squeezing of historical material into a format determined by the UN definition, and certain convolutions to demonstrate 'intent', such a chapter may well be politically necessary in pursuit of reparation and apology. It represents a kind of 'strategic essentialism' to counter the vastly more damaging, populist strategic essentialisms of people like Keith Windschuttle. But it does come at a price, and that is the understanding of nineteenth century colonial entanglements on their own terms, with all their ambivalences, multiple colonial and indigenous agencies, negotiations, accommodations and compromises, as well as their exactions, suppressions and downright horrors.
8. The final chapter in Part Two is by Paul Bartrop and is comparative in a different way from those focusing on National Socialism. It deals with two separate colonial massacres, one in Gippsland, Australia, in 1843, and one in Colorado, USA in 1864. Bartrop examines each case against the UN definition of genocide, finding that the Australian massacre, regardless of its own horror, did not constitute genocide in these terms because it occurred despite, rather than because of the law, and because it was not state-sanctioned. The Colorado massacre was, however, genocide in the UN's terms, because it was state-directed.
9. Part Three of the book is aimed at the second arena of debate over genocide in Australia—the Aboriginal and so-called 'half-caste' experience of forced child removal, procreative regulation and racist restrictions in the twentieth century. Robert Manne begins the section with an account of the genealogy of child removal policies and the context of eugenic and racist thought in which they occurred, before the Second World War. For the most part, he seeks to uncover the story on its own terms rather than try to match evidence up against any particular definition of genocide, but his conclusion is that, in the policies adopted, for example by Chief Protector A. O. Neville in Western Australia and emulated to some extent elsewhere, one can find genocidal thoughts and plans. Often, though, they fell short of reified genocidal crimes because of both insufficient resources and Aboriginal resistance.
10. In looking forward to the post-Second World War climate of social and racial policy, Manne is in substantial agreement with Russell McGregor whose later chapter persuasively distinguishes between pre-war plans for the biological absorption of Aborigines and 'half-castes' based on eugenics, and post-war policies based on cultural and social integration, which are better described as assimilation. The latter, argues McGregor, represented policies to manage rather than erase the Aboriginal presence, and bear little relation to the UN definition of genocide. In between the chapters by Manne and McGregor are those of Isabel Heinemann and Anna Haebich. Heinemann's is one of the chapters on Nazi policies included for comparative insight. It focuses on the bureaucratically organised murders, kidnappings and forced adoptions of tens of thousands of children in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe during the Second World War, and the transfer of those children deemed of good enough 'racial stock' to German foster parents. Again, readers are left to make their own conclusions about any comparisons with Australia. Haebich's ensuing chapter is an argument that the UN's definition of genocide be adapted to take account of colonial attempts to erase an indigenous presence where there was no central state policy of Aboriginal destruction, but where destruction was nevertheless inevitable as a result of policies that broadly supported expansionist settler imperatives. The existing UN definition, however, does more readily match the pre-war, absorptionist policies already described.
11. The volume concludes with an epilogue by Tim Rowse which tracks the population classified as Aboriginal numerically. Rowse argues that the history of the Aboriginal population since colonisation is one of decline followed by recovery, even if that recovery is in large part due to the encouraging fact that an increasing number of Australians with 'mixed' descent are choosing to classify themselves as Aboriginal. In a neat end to a disturbing book on genocidal thoughts and programmes, Rowse concludes that 'the indigenous Australian population, assumed until the 1930s to be headed for extinction, has bounced back and will continue to grow' (324).
12. While there is interesting comparative material in most of the chapters in this book, I found it problematic that some of them portray an apparently unitary mode of British colonization, with certain time and space-distanced episodes selected as being representative of that mode. There is, for instance, a recurrent instrumentalist view of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century humanitarian projects. The Myall Creek trial is dismissed by Jan Kocimubus as a 'show trial, staged by urban-based liberals concerned to streamline and modernize the process of colonization' (93), without any sense of the vehement contest over notions of Britishness, racial difference and the morality of Empire that the trial occasioned among Australian (and indeed other settler) Britons. Rather than seeing humanitarianism as being simply a smokescreen for legitimating, or a ploy for modernising, settler dispossession and the 'extermination' of indigenous peoples, it makes more sense to view humanitarianism and settler capitalism as different and contested projects to define the nature and purpose of British colonization. Both of these projects were indeed dispossessive, but in very different ways, the former culturally and the latter materially. Much of the 'new imperial history' of the last few years had been at pains to disaggregate the multiple projects and networks through which British colonisation was carried out and maintained, and to stress the tensions as well as the convergences between these projects. Paying attention to the heterogeneity of British colonial interests and their connections across the Empire (as, for example, does Reynolds), enables us to be much more specific about when, and in what contexts certain groups expressed genocidal intent, and how and why that intent was, or was not, realised.
13. I can see why the series editor suggested the inclusion of chapters on Nazi policies and actions. It helps to illuminate the arguments over the use of the word 'genocide' in relation to the colonial and modern state treatment of Australian Aborigines. As a non-specialist, I also found these chapters harrowingly informative and well constructed. Yet at the same time, they do sit rather awkwardly here, and I wonder whether a differently projected frame of reference for the book might have been of more use. This would be one based on colonial and modern Australia's positioning within British trans-imperial networks. Such a different form of contextualisation might just have served better both our historical understanding of the colonisation and modernist planning of Aboriginal Australia, and the present political struggle to secure a meaningful acknowledgement of the effects of those interventions.
14. What is rather clumsy about the inclusion of the Nazi chapters is the lack of any clear connection, rather than merely comparison, between Australia and Nazi Germany. While the comparative chapters can serve to highlight parallels and contrasts (the stock in trade of traditional comparative history), such points of comparison are not actually adverted to explicitly here, and even if they were, they would be of limited explanatory potential. Their main benefit is clearly to agitate for a recognition that one really can uncover some similarities between what is conventionally accepted as genocide, and the experiences of many Australian Aborigines. But certainly in terms of causative connection at least, situating Australia within trans-imperial networks has grater valence. The density of economic, ideological and material trajectories that linked nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia with other British colonies (settler colonies in particular), and with Britain itself, was far greater than the density of those trajectories connecting Australia with Nazi Germany or with any other sites across the globe for most of this period.
15. The British settler discourse of irreclaimable indigenous savagery, and the project of 'eradication' or 'extermination' that was indissolubly linked to it, was one that was worked out, elaborated and redefined through extensive conversation and communication between Australian, South African, North American and even New Zealand Britons. Later state and Commonwealth policies of 'breeding out the colour' of half caste children were framed within an ideological and scientific package of modernist social planning that was similarly trans-imperial in its elaboration and manifestation. It was not simply that Australian interests borrowed notions from other parts of the Empire. The traffic in ideas went in all directions. Robert Manne, for instance, notes that the South African government asked to have more detail on Australian policies for the eradication of 'half-castes' through manipulation of 'mixed-race' marriages. Even if prohibitions on 'mixed marriages' in South Africa were geared at the prevention of 'miscegenation', while those in Australia were aimed at the selective encouragement of the practice so as to 'whiten' the 'mixed race' population, such variations were nevertheless the product of extensive exchange and communication of racist discourse across imperial space. To give one more example, a couple of the contributors note how influential the colony of Natal's dictation test was in setting up a model for regulating 'non-white' immigration and maintaining the White Australia policy thrust. The circuits of Empire, then, encouraged both comparison and connection in ways that comparative history cannot access, but interconnected history can.
16. Even aside from generating a more meaningful context for historical enquiry, I think there is also an important contemporary political point to be made from such an imperially networked frame of reference. One of the most absurd arguments that Keith Windschuttle has had recourse to throughout the recent History Wars has been that which suggests that Britons in the colonies were incapable of what we might reasonably call genocidal acts, or even, falling short of that, mass murder, for the very reason that they were Britons. For Windschuttle, Britishness seems to mean a community guided by essentially liberal notions of the rule of law, by Christian precepts and by ideals of justice towards others. Tracking the difficulties that humanitarian British men and women, who to a greater or lesser extent genuinely did believe in such principles, encountered in trying to rein in equally 'British' settlers engaged in brutal acts of dispossession on the multiple frontiers of the Empire, is the surest way of highlighting the absurdity of this claim. What such an exercise in Australian-centred, but trans-imperial, history would also do, is to show how the deeply engrained Christian ethnocentricism, even of such humanitarians, fostered immensely painful and regrettable policies of Aboriginal and 'half caste' child removal and 'forced assimilation', which culminated in the twentieth century. Might a greater awareness of the perpetual, trans-imperial struggle to define 'proper' behaviour towards indigenous peoples in settler colonies, be even more conducive of a public acceptance of the need to apologise and make amends, than comparisons with Nazi Germany, which, if anything, tend to fuel more vehement and destructive right wing and public revisionism?
Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. His interests are in British colonial projects and networks in the nineteenth century. Most recently, he is the author of Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (Routledge, 2001) and, co-edited with David Lambert, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
11/3/07
IFG_New Zealand_Protest
IFG_Protest_New Zealand
Mililani Trask, Indigenous Peoples' Caucus Pacific Basin Representative
Victor Menotti, The International Forum on Globalization
Andrew Erueti Maori Human Right & Maori Customary Law.
International Coalition of NGOs and Protest and The International Forum on Globalization Denounces Canada , New Zealand and Australia For "HUMAN RIGHTS HYPOCRISY" IN LEADING THE OPPOSITION UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous PeopleS .
(apoligies for the sound quality)
11/2/07
JUSTICE 4 GARY KING JR
Please join Justice4GaryJr.,
20 yr Black Youth,
executed by OPD on 9-20-07
please copy & paste the follwingh link into your browser, then click
"Join" on the upport right corner !
http://groups.yahoo.com/group
On Sept 20, 2007, while 100.000 racial Justice activists and families
were marching in Jena, Gary King, Jr., 20 Yr, AfriKan American Youth,
was randomly singled out by Oakland PD rogue cop, Patrick Gonzales, put in
a headlock, punched, tortured (tasered 7 times) until he managed to get away from
his assailant who then shot him twice at close range in the back, in front
of his horrified friends, who had gone to buy chips and sodas with Gary at a
nearby corner store.
This is not Gonzalez first killing (3) (+ permanent disabling of a 17
yr. Youth), all AfriKan Americans young Brothers......
~ Let's put this sinister crazed cop behind bars for good! ~
Check out the Block Report's interviews on KPFA Flashpoints (archives)
with Gary's father and Davey D's interviews with eye witnesses, also on
KPFA.
Please show love and support to Gary Jr. courageous family by joining
this website, and forward the link far and wide !
http://groups.yahoo.com/group
Out of respect for Gary Jr family, we respectfully ask you to limit
your postings to Gary Jr' s case, and related news.
No political recruiting please (although we welcome you to post your
Justice4GaryKingJr. related events on our calendar and message link)
Everyone's welcome From: Friends of Jonathan Paul
Date: October 31, 2007 6:56:29 PM EDT
Subject: Update on Jonathan Paul
Early this morning Jonathan was interviewed by Amy
Goodman on Democracy Now. You can read the
transcript at http://www.democracynow.org
At approximately 1:45 this afternoon, Jonathan
reported to FCI Phoenix accompanied by his sisters,
Caroline and Alexandra. He was informed that he would
be in the Annex for awhile and would not be able to
call out for a couple of weeks. They would not let
him bring in important legal documents, nor commissary
money which he had been told he could bring. They
also told me the commissary money I sent in earlier
would not be credited to his account because he wasn't
in custody yet. Kind of a pain, but easily remedied,
which I will take care of tomorrow.
One guard actually told Jonathan and his sisters that
FCI Phoenix seems like a camp compared to other medium
security facilities in the country. I guess we will
just have to wait and see. Jonathan walked in strong,
with his head held high and in good spirits. As
Jonathan told me just before he went in - "this is way
bigger than us, this is for the animals and the
planet, we will never suffer as much as they do."
The first month is usually the toughest, so please
write to Jonathan often. Feel free to post this far
and wide. Jonathan has been a great warrior for the
animals and the environment for over 20 years. Let's
not forget him now! And please remember to keep
writing
Jonathan's co-defendant's and other political
prisoners. As a photographer, Jonathan is very
visual, so he would love to get photos. You don't
have to print them on photo paper, you can just insert
them in a letter (if you are typing it on your
computer).
Jonathan Paul
#07167-085
FCI Phoenix
Federal Correctional Institution
37910 N 45th Ave.
Phoenix, AZ 85086
?
Please feel free to contact Jonathan's support group
at friendsofjonathanpaul@yahoo.com or e-mail me
directly at tamidrake@wildblue.net. If you are
interested in organizing a fundraiser or a letter
writing event, please let us know.
We plan to get a support website up for Jonathan very
soon.
Here are some guidelines for writing: (We've taken
this from Daniel's support website - thanks to
Daniel's support group for these comprehensive
guidelines)
When sending a letter, it's best to keep it simple.
Write or type on blank notebook or copy paper no
bigger than 8.5x11 and don't use any special colored
or gel pens or pencils, stamps, or stickers. Don't
write anything on the outside or inside of the
envelope except the prisoner's address and your full
name and return address in the upper left hand corner
of the addressed side of the envelope. Use plain white
envelopes without a clear plastic address window, or
any special decorations. Most prisons also REQUIRE a
return address on the envelope.
Please take a minute to read the following VERY
IMPORTANT guidelines.
- Write on both sides of the paper, since the number
of pages he can have may be limited. It is also
totally acceptable to type your letters. More will fit
on a page.
- Write your address inside your letter/card if you
think he does not have it, but DO NOT put an address
label anywhere inside or on the letter/card. Address
labels are ONLY OK to go on your envelope.
- Do NOT send him stamps, envelopes (self-addressed or
otherwise), blank paper or notecards. He will not be
able to receive them and he will be denied your
letter.
- Do NOT send him any form of currency, whether cash,
check or money order.
- Do NOT send photographs larger than 4x6. Do not send
polaroids and make sure the content is appropriate.
- Do NOT include any paperclips, staples or any extra
things in your letter.
- Do NOT send a card that has glitter or any 3-D
objects in or on it.
- Do NOT send cards with paper inserts glued in them.
- Do NOT tape your envelope shut.
- Do NOT ever write "legal mail" or anything implying
that you are an attorney unless you are
- Please use your common sense; don't write about
anything that is likely to get a prisoner in trouble
in any way.
Jonathan will not receive the envelope your letter is
mailed in, so write your return address and full name
in the letter as well. Also, number the pages like
"1/5, 2/5,3/5..." so that a prisoner can tell if some
pages are missing.
If you send Jonathan a letter and it gets returned to
you, please let us know about it so we can add any
other restrictions to the guideline list.
Please do NOT send in any books to Jonathan yet. We
are in the process of getting a system going for him
to receive books.
Jonathan's co-defendants:
Daniel McGowan
#63794-053
FCI Sandstone
Federal Correctional Institution
PO Box 1000
Sandstone, MN 55072
Nathan Block #36359-086
FCI Lompoc
Federal Correctional Institution
3600 Guard Road
Lompoc, CA 93436
Joyanna Zacher #36360-086
FCI Dublin
Federal Correctional Institution
5701 8th St - Camp Parks- Unit E
Dublin, CA 94568
SHAC:
Jacob Conroy # 93501-011
FCI Victorville Medium 1
Federal Correctional Institution
PO Box 5300
Adelanto, CA 92301
Lauren Gazzola #93497-011
FCI Danbury
Federal Correctional Institution Route #37
Danbury, CT 06811
Kevin Kjonaas # 93502-011
FCI Sandstone
PO Box 1000
Sandstone, MN 55072
Joshua Harper 29429-086
FCI Sheridan
Federal Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 5000
Sheridan, OR 97378
Andrew Stepanian # 26399-050
FCI Butner Medium II
Federal Correctional Institution
PO Box 1500
Butner, NC 27509
Other Green Scare:
Jeffrey Luers # 1306729
Lane County Adult Corrections
101 West 5th Ave
Eugene, OR 97401-2695
MCDAVID, ERIC X-2972521 4E231A
Sacramento County Main Jail
651 "I" Street
Sacramento, CA 95814
For the animals and mother-earth,
Tami
Friends and Family of Jonathan Paul
PMB# 267
2305 Ashland St., Ste. C
Ashland, OR 97520
**THE JAILS ARE THE REAL CRIME!!**
**FOR A WORLD WITHOUT PRISONS!!**