Last week saw the end of the Melbourne Writer's Festival. On the last night, Prof. Robert Manne debated Andrew Bolt [Herald-Sun columnist] on the issue of the Aboriginal "stolen-generation". It will be recalled that Bolt steadfastly denies any such thing happened - his "qualifications" to make such an assertion suspect - and has over the years refused to debate Manne on the topic.
As Manne writes in this op-ed piece in The Age:
"One of the qualities of nationalist extremists is the anxious denial of their own group's historic crimes. As soon as the cultural warriors of the right embraced Keith Windschuttle, perhaps for the first time in our history an authentic version of Australian denialism began to emerge.
One branch of this denialism concerns the question of what Australians have come to call the "stolen generations", the policy and practice of removing mixed descent Aborigines from their mothers, families and cultures between 1900 and 1950 when the thinking was unambiguously racist, and between 1950 and 1970 when racist thinking and welfare considerations became intertwined.
The most extreme exponent of this branch of denialism is the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt. Despite the fact that an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey reveals that between 1900 and 1970, 20,000 to 25,000 indigenous children were separated from their natural families; despite the fact that a mountain of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony exists that reveal the cruelty and the racist motivations of the policy; despite the fact that even the Howard Government has funded a monument to the stolen generations - in column after column, Bolt has described the question of the stolen generations as a "preposterous and obscene" myth, a "pride murdering fantasy", a "libel on our past".
Read Manne's complete piece here. Bolt is not only exposed for the barreness of his position but also the totally offensive and unsupportable propositions - they are certainly not well-grounded or researched facts - he espouses. The Herald-Sun stands condemned for allowing Bolt to continue to spout his bile.
As Manne writes in this op-ed piece in The Age:
"One of the qualities of nationalist extremists is the anxious denial of their own group's historic crimes. As soon as the cultural warriors of the right embraced Keith Windschuttle, perhaps for the first time in our history an authentic version of Australian denialism began to emerge.
One branch of this denialism concerns the question of what Australians have come to call the "stolen generations", the policy and practice of removing mixed descent Aborigines from their mothers, families and cultures between 1900 and 1950 when the thinking was unambiguously racist, and between 1950 and 1970 when racist thinking and welfare considerations became intertwined.
The most extreme exponent of this branch of denialism is the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt. Despite the fact that an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey reveals that between 1900 and 1970, 20,000 to 25,000 indigenous children were separated from their natural families; despite the fact that a mountain of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony exists that reveal the cruelty and the racist motivations of the policy; despite the fact that even the Howard Government has funded a monument to the stolen generations - in column after column, Bolt has described the question of the stolen generations as a "preposterous and obscene" myth, a "pride murdering fantasy", a "libel on our past".
Read Manne's complete piece here. Bolt is not only exposed for the barreness of his position but also the totally offensive and unsupportable propositions - they are certainly not well-grounded or researched facts - he espouses. The Herald-Sun stands condemned for allowing Bolt to continue to spout his bile.
Comments