The US & EU crimes – part two
British colonialism in Australia – British colonisation of Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay in 1788. In 1968 Professor W. E. H. “Bill” Stanner, an Australian anthropologist, argued that the writing of Australian history was incomplete. He asserted that Australian national history as documented up to that point had largely been presented in a positive light, but that Indigenous Australians had been virtually ignored. He saw this as a structural and deliberate process to omit “several hundred thousand Aborigines who lived and died between 1788 and 1938. Interpretations of Aboriginal history became part of the wider political debate sometimes called the ‘culture wars’ during the tenure of the Coalition government from 1996–2007. This debate extended into a controversy over the way history was presented in the National Museum of Australia and in high school history curricula. It also migrated into the general Australian media. 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. Smallpox (variola vera) was also misued by British colonists to exterminate native population. In 1983, Professor Noel Butlin, an economic historian, suggested: “it is possible and, in 1789, likely, that infection of the Aborigines was a deliberate extermination act”. There is also detailed findings set out in the 1997 Bringing Them Home (680 page) report into the Stolen Generation, which documented the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by Australian State and Federal government agencies and church missions. By 1900 the recorded Indigenous population of Australia had declined to approximately 93,000. From First World War they were mixed with mainstream society and from 1960 they got right to vote and they participated in sport but it doesn’t meant that they are not discriminated anymore. Colonialism and racism come together. in 2007, government misused children to justify racism against natives. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough launched the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, in response to the Little Children are Sacred Report into allegations of child abuse among indigenous communities. The government banned alcohol in prescribed communities in the Territory; quarantined a percentage of welfare payments for essential goods purchasing; dispatched additional police and medical personnel to the region; and suspended the permit system for access to indigenous communities. In 2010, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, found the Emergency Response to be racially discriminatory. The Intervention has continued under the Rudd/Gillard Labor Government.
Here is an example of problems for natives caused by colonialism and racism: In 1935, an Australian of part Indigenous descent left his home on the local reserve to visit a nearby hotel where he was ejected for being Aboriginal. He returned home but was refused entry to the reserve because he was not Aboriginal. He attempted to remove his children from the reserve but was told he could not because they were Aboriginal. He then walked to the next town where he was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and sent to the local reserve. During World War II he tried to enlist but was rejected because he was an Aborigine so he moved to another state where he enlisted as a non-Aborigine. After the end of the war he applied for a passport but was rejected as he was an Aborigine, he obtained an exemption under the Aborigines Protection Act but was now told he could no longer visit his relatives as he was not an Aborigine. He was later told he could not join the Returned Servicemens Club because he was an Aborigine.
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