I don’t know how this one slipped through the net, but one of the leading advocates of the ‘Stolen’ Generation has admitted that even if one accepts his version of history about the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their parents, then the claim of genocide is incorrect, as reported in The Australian. This is in response to a claim by a Yale academic that the removal was genocide and on par with Cambodia or Darfur for instance. For background on the matter go over to the Bolt blog machine.
“Earlier this month, La Trobe University professor Robert Manne said it was now “generally acknowledged” that the authors of the Bringing Them Home report were wrong to argue that Australian authorities had committed genocide by removing indigenous children from their families.
Writing in the March edition of The Monthly, Professor Manne says “assimilation has never been regarded in law as equivalent to genocide”.
“There is almost no one who would now support the way Bringing Them Home arrived at the conclusion that Aboriginal child removal policies involved the crime of genocide,” Professor Manne writes.”
I think the above is a major concession given the manner in which Manne has sought to portray the issue in the past. In his 2001 Australian Quarterly Essay article, ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right’, as pointed out here, Manne explains the Australian public backlash against claims of a genocide as:
“1. the need for conservative stalwarts and their supporters to maintain dominant race and class positions and privileges,
2. a fear of their exposure of ancestral involvements with past practices of oppression and,
3. more broadly, a fear of diminution in the reputation of the self and the nation.”
Typical socialist clap trap, but nothing saying that the claim of genocide is wrong on its merits, which is what the law is there to do. Further to The Australian article:
“Historian Inga Clendinnen was reluctant to comment without further detail about Dr Bartrop’s claims, but said the term genocide rested on the “question of intentionality””
Bolt, over at the Herald Sun, has already pointed out on a number of occasions the lack of evidence used to support the claim of a ’stolen’ generation, hence that lack of legal success ’stolen’ generation advocates have had in the Federal courts.
So where does that leave the claim of a ’stolen’ generation? No establishment of an intention to harm would explain why there is a lack of evidence of such. Case closed…
Chief Blogger @ March 30, 2008 (This is a restoration of a previously posted blog)