--- On Thu, 3/1/12, RDIABO <rdi...@rogers.com> wrote:
From: RDIABO <rdi...@rogers.com>
Subject: Fw: Rawiri Taonui: Holocaust or not, Indigenous have suffered
To: undisclosed-recipi...@yahoo.com
Received: Thursday, March 1, 2012, 10:11 AM
FYI
From: Michael (Mickey) Posluns, Ph.D.
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 10:05 AM
To: RDIABO
Subject: Re: Fw: Rawiri Taonui: Holocaust or not, Indigenous have
suffered
lI am writing to express my agreement with Mr. Taonui
while also sympathizing with Stephen Goldman, president of the Jewish Council
(though I'm not sure just which Jewish Council). Having spent most of my
adult life writing about the civil disabilities imposed on Indigenous peoples,
particularly on First Nations in Canada, I certainly support demands for much
greater recognition of the suffering imposed as a matter of state
policy.
I think that there can be no doubt about the genocidal intentions
in the colonization of many Fourth World peoples. The term "Holocaust" has
been used in English to describe the wholesale destruction of peoples or other
matters since the 13th century (See the Ox. Eng. Dict.). While I, as a Jew
would like a specific term to describe and refer to the Jewish experience, I
think it is a little late to run after a word that has been in common English
usage for quite so long. My preferred solution was mentioned in the
article below by Raouni Taonui, i.e. using the Hebrew or Yiddish terms. At
least in English discourse that should make it clear which event is being
referred to.
There is another question. I don't know whether there
was the same kind of systematic slaughter of Maoris that happened periodically
in the United States. (I have often thought that the main difference
between the American slaughter of "Indians" and the German destruction of
European Jewry is that the Americans waged their campaign "only" sporadically,
often as a sort of make word project, as, for example in the years following
the
Civil War when there were three million men under arms and the state had an
interest in removing them from the eastern States.)
If genocide is
mass murder calculated to bring about the destruction of whole peoples, I don't
see much difference. The element of mens rea, of intention is no
less present whether the campaign is waged systematically as in Germany or
sporadically. I remember my late mother-in-law telling us one evening of
the pogrom she witnessed in the village where she spent her childhood. She
watched as the Cossacks strung up several of the village elders. 70 years
later it was still preying on her mind. I know from working with them,
that the descendants of John Ice, the man who was shot in cold blood by the
Dominion Police at the Mohawk community of Akwesasne in 1901 continue to
remember that assassination. The impolite (and impolitic) question that I
am inclined to ask, from a child's eye view, is "How many such state sanctioned
murders does it take to traumatize those who witness such an event?"
I
particularly agree with Mr. Taouni's concluding observation, that competition
is
particularly inappropriate in the realm of human suffering.
Fraternally
yours,
Michael Posluns.
,
On 29/02/2012 8:01 PM, RDIABO
wrote:
FYI
From: First Peoples Human Rights Coalition
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 8:22 AM
To: i...@firstpeoplesrights.org
Subject: Rawiri Taonui: Holocaust or not, Indigenous have
suffered
From the article
below: "In 1993, the former British
colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States (Canzus)
opposed the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)
which included prohibitions against "ethnocide" and "cultural genocide".
_____________________________
nzherald.co.nz
Rawiri
Taonui: Holocaust or not,
Indigenous
have sufferedBy Rawiri Taonui
5:30
AM Tuesday Feb 28, 2012
EXPAND
The
term Holocaust was first used generally after the 1978 mini-series of the
same
name starring Meryl Streep. Photo / Supplied
Semantic
arguments are a sideshow when the subject is the destruction of peoples,
writes Rawiri Taonui, adjunct professor of indigenous studies at
AUT.
Jewish
Council president Stephen Goodman's criticism of Keri Opai's view that Maori
colonial experiences compare to a holocaust is simplistic.
He
labelled the claim an ignorant attempt to elevate Maori grievances that
trivialises and diminishes the genocide of European Jews.
However,
several scholars have taken issue with Jewish claims to exclusive use of the
term holocaust. For instance, it excludes millions of other victims of the
Nazi extermination including socialists, homosexuals, the disabled, Romani
(Gypsies), Slavs, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war (2.8 million Russian POWs
died in one eight-month period).
Used
for four centuries in Europe to describe various massacres, others argue the
Armenians have the first claim to its formal use. The Ottoman Empire caused
one million Armenian deaths during World War I. Winston Churchill termed that
a holocaust. In 1922 a now eminent poem titled The Holocaust was composed,
and
in the following year a book The Syrma Holocaust appeared. After World
War II, holocaust was used to describe the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima,
the 1930s Stalin-induced Ukrainian Great Famine and Japan's suppression of
Korea and Manchuria.
From
the 1950s onwards, holocaust was increasingly used to refer to the Nazi
genocide, often as a translation of the Jewish descriptor shoah (catastrophe)
or the Yiddish term churben (destruction). Nora Levin's book The Holocaust:
The Destruction of European Jewry appeared in 1968.
The
unqualified formal use of "Holocaust with a capital H" as the terror of the
Jews did not come about until after the 1978 TV mini-series of the same name
starring Meryl Streep. A majority of the world's named Holocaust centres date
from then.
Holocaust
with a small "h" continues to be used to describe events such as African
slavery, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, the Rwanda slaughter and indigenous colonial
histories.
While
I believe Holocaust defines the Jewish experience - the horrific pinnacle of
industrial-scale human extermination - I also understand why indigenous
peoples use the term, not just to define their experience, but more
importantly to highlight the denial of their experience.
Writers
such as David Stannard and Ward Churchill, who attest the colonisation of the
Americas was a holocaust, argue that condemnations like Mr Goodman's actually
reinforce the denial of horrors perpetrated upon indigenous populations.
That
denial has a history. Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in
1943 providing a broad based definition including physical, political,
social,
biological and cultural genocide. The latter was applicable to indigenous
contexts, Lemkin arguing genocide could be immediate or cumulative over
time.
Historian
David Cesarani went further. He said over the longer term the oppression of
colonised peoples can be more costly than the Holocaust.
Lemkin
subsequently drafted a UN Convention on Genocide in 1946. The Soviet Union
opposed his definitions because of its record of political suppression. The
United States, France and Britain did so as well because of their colonial
records.
When
the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(UNCPPCG) was adopted two years later, the reference to cultural genocide had
been effectively expunged. Administered under the Rome Statute (1998) and
International Criminal Court (2002), Article 2 defines genocide as any acts
intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group such as
killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting particular living
conditions, preventing birth and forcibly removing children.
With
an emphasis squarely on state "intent", the outcome has been that Western
European countries have been able to prosecute leaders from weaker developing
and Eastern Europe countries, while exonerating themselves for any colonial
transgressions on the basis that they were the inadvertent consequences of
"civilising" projects.
In
1993, the former British colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the
United States (Canzus) opposed the draft Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) which included prohibitions against "ethnocide"
and "cultural genocide". As a result the terms "cultural destruction" and
"forced assimilation" were moved into a separate section, and ethnocide and
cultural genocide replaced by genocide, which by default referral to the 1948
Convention and Rome Statute, again protected Western countries with colonial
baggage.
UNDRIP
was passed at the UN General Assembly in 2007 - 143 countries voted in
support, only the Canzus four voted against.
In
the search for due recognition, writers and academics continue to use the
terms cultural genocide and holocaust to describe colonisation in the
Pacific,
Americas, Tibet, East Turkmenistan and other places.
When
Tariana Turia made her holocaust reference in 2000, Judy Sedley from the
Wellington Jewish Community Centre said that might be appropriate if Maori
used the term with a small "h".
Posterity
might determine that the Jewish Holocaust belongs alongside an Armenian and
other holocausts and "Colonial Genocide" might describe many indigenous
experiences.
In
a debate about honouring by acknowledgement the inestimable numbers of humans
over many generations who suffered in this way, those who condemn indigenous
peoples lack the humanity and grace of Lemkin. Suffering is never a
competition.
© Copyright 2012, APN
Holdings NZ LimitedBy Rawiri Taonui
--
Michael (Mickey) Posluns, Ph.D.,
36 Lauder Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario,
M6H 3E3
Office: 416-656-2715
Home& Cell 416-995-8613
Pickerel River: 705-857-1095
How can we be sure that "the unexamined life is not worth living?"
