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.