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At times of unprecedented disaster,human societies have had to coin

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  • At times of unprecedented disaster,human societies have had to coin

    Australian Magazine
    September 4, 2004 Saturday

    Phillip Adams

    At times of unprecedented disaster, human societies have had to coin
    new words, or apply old words to the experiences.

    When the citizens of Pompeii were being suffocated by the gases
    from Vesuvius, the Romans had no word for volcano. When the French
    stormed the Bastille, there was no appropriate term for the scale
    of the upheaval, and so for the first time the word "revolution"
    was appropriated for the purpose. In the 20th century when, by some
    estimates, 140 million people died in wars and genocides, the latter
    term was in few lexicons. We'd had wars forever, but genocide? Yes,
    there'd been attempts to wipe out this or that group, but not a
    specific word to describe the carnage. Nor had "holocaust" become
    The Holocaust.

    A few months ago, I gave the annual Oration on the Armenian Genocide.
    Though still denied by the Turks, that terrible event set the stage for
    so many more attempts to wipe out groups, races and communities in the
    20th century, from Europe's Jews and gypsies to Rwanda's Tutsis. And
    what happened in the Balkans introduced another unprecedented term,
    a particularly loathsome one: ethnic cleansing.

    That, at the very least, is what's been happening in Sudan and
    Darfor. So I asked Foreign Minister Alexander Downer why he hadn't
    agreed with the US Senate to label that ongoing massacre of Africans by
    Arabs as genocide. Downer pooh-poohed the question, saying that "words
    don't matter". But, of course, they do. "Genocide" has powerful legal
    ramifications - it kicks in an escalation clause in international law.

    Correctly used, genocide doesn't have to involve slaughter. An
    orchestrated attack on people's culture and religion can be defined
    as genocidal under United Nations law. Which is why it has sometimes
    been used in regard to Australia's treatment of Aborigines. It's
    not just the massacres and the arsenic in the flour, but also the
    destruction of Aboriginal languages and beliefs. The driving of
    indigenous populations from their ancestral lands or the kidnapping
    of Aboriginal children from their parents can be deemed genocidal.

    When that word is applied in the Australian context, the conservatives
    are enraged. Which is why, recently, Geoffrey Blainey lost his
    crown as the Right's favourite historian. That's now worn by Keith
    Windschuttle, impeccably connected to Paddy McGuinness and Quadrant -
    where the stolen generation is regarded as a misnomer. If anything,
    Aboriginal parents should be grateful - with McGuinness calling their
    children the "saved generation".

    Windschuttle has gone further, insisting that what has been described
    for generations as genocide in Tasmania was a fabrication of history
    and of left-wing historians. He insists that the only dead Aborigine
    is one with an official toe tag, listed on a documented body count.
    We must ignore anecdotal evidence, particularly that provided by
    Aborigines. (Apart from not inventing the wheel, they failed to
    invent writing and filing cabinets, and their oral histories mean
    nothing.) When one protests to Windschuttle that official body counts
    had to be understated, not everyone went around demanding that their
    acts of murder be notated. Even then there was a remote possibility
    of punishment.

    But Windschuttle's efforts at revising history are nothing compared
    with the serious work of the revisionist historians. Now, there's
    another 20th century coinage. These ultra right-wing ranters with Nazi
    sympathies or neo-Nazi connections say that either the Holocaust didn't
    happen or, if it did, the death toll has been immensely exaggerated. By
    whom? By Jews, of course. Britain's David Irving and Frederick Tobin,
    of the Adelaide Institute, insist that the Holocaust is a guilt
    industry run by Jews manipulating sympathy and greedy for reparations.

    This issue has renewed urgency for me as a consequence of a recent
    column wherein I disputed a claim of British Prime Minister Tony
    Blair's, twice repeated, that 400,000 corpses had been found in mass
    graves since the invasion of Iraq. As The Observer and The Guardian
    both pointed out, at last count 395,000 fewer bodies had been unearthed
    and Number Ten was forced to issue a retraction. But the story had
    a life of its own - and was bounding and rebounding around the world
    on official US Web sites.

    It's odd that the same conservatives who want the names and addresses
    and fingerprints of every indigenous Australian killed since the First
    Fleet have written letters to the editor, or to me, protesting that
    I'm quibbling.

    We were misled about Iraq. About Saddam Hussein's personal
    responsibility for 9/11. About his connections with Osama bin Laden.
    About the mountains of WMDs. So if the world is to believe that
    Saddam's trial is ethical, lest it descend into a show trial, a
    publicity stunt, let's get the facts right. Let it be as forensic as
    Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel. Simply declaring the former dictator
    of Iraq as guilty as hell, and hanging him ten times, won't convince
    many in the Arab world, and will leave the door open for all sorts
    of revisionist historians in the months and years ahead.
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