Armenian Genocide Day, Australian Anzac Day
And Australian Holocaust Denial
By Dr Gideon Polya
24 April, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Armenian Genocide Day, 24 April, commemorates the death of 1.5 million Armenians who died in the Turkish-imposed Armenian Genocide that commenced on 24 April 1915, the day prior to the Anglo-French and Australian and New Zealand Army Corp (ANZAC) invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles on 25 April 1915. 25 April is marked as Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand that commemorates the war dead of both these sister countries. Yet Australia resolutely ignores its causal connection to the Armenian Genocide and indeed to other genocidal atrocities as a participant in Anglo--American wars.
The Dardanelles Campaign was the WW1 brain-child of racist, imperialist and militarist Winston Churchill who conceived the plan to capture the Dardanelles (that links the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea) in order to supply the Russians were fighting the Germans on the Eastern Front. The Turks who had been pushed by the Anglo-French Allies into Alliance with Germany and Austria were fighting the Russians in eastern Anatolia and were paranoid about Christian Armenian support for Christian Tsarist Russia. About 2 months of naval shelling of the Dardanelles and a huge build up of an Allied invasion force preceded the invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsular by the Allies on that first Anzac Day, 25 April 1915. The 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide commenced on the preceding day, 24 April 1915, with the round up and murder of Armenian community leaders (doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, priests, councillors, mayors) and the butchery that was to kill 1.5 million Armenians.
Australia has been, and still is, involved in numerous genocidal atrocities linked to its association with the British Empire and thence with the American Empire. However people naturally enough want to think the best of themselves and these genocidal atrocities are remorselessly ignored in Australian public life, whether 19th century atrocities in Africa and Asia, the Armenian Genocide (1.5 million dead, 1915 -1923) or the ongoing Iraqi Holocaust ( 4.5 million dead, 1990-2011) and Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide (5.0 million dead, 2001-2011).
A powerful illustration of this Australian national censorship and self-censorship is provided by extraordinary under-reportage and indeed non-reportage in relation to the Armenian Genocide by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC, Australia 's equivalent of the taxpayer-funded UK BBC). The ABC has Search Device that enables one to “search results from the entire ABC site”. However a search of the ABC for “Armenian Genocide Day” yields zero (0) results (see: http://search.abc.net.au/search/search.cgi?form=simple&num_
ranks=20&collection=abcall&query=%22armenian+genocide+day%22 ) whereas a Google Search for the same phrase “Armenian Genocide Day” yields 109,000 results.
A search for “Armenian holocaust” yields 1 result from the ABC (as compared to 39,900 for a Google Search) which turns out to be an ABC TV Lateline interview with an Israeli Security expert Hirsh Goodman of the Institute of National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University, about the Israeli terrorist attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla in which Israeli terrorists killed 9 Turks (1 an Turkish American ), kidnapped over 600 people in international waters, including 5 Australians of whom one was tasered and another shot, with a reported 3 Australian Israeli terrorists involved in this act of international piracy and terrorism). Goodman offensively stated: “Here we've got an ally, it's called Turkey, we sell them their most sophisticated weapons, we allied with them on a lot of things - including not demanding an international Armenian Holocaust Day - we send 150,000 tourists there a year, we do $2 billion worth of trade a year and here they go, send a ship full of provocateurs to one of the worst enemies that this country's ever seen - Hamas, who is dedicated to this country's destruction… It all began with an outright provocation and a test of Israeli sovereignty. And I hope I'm not coming across as a propagandist here but I'm an Israeli and I'm saying it straight. The Institute of National Security Studies we try to look at the objectives objectively and I'm saying it all is part of an orchestrated Turkish geopolitical thing of trying to rework itself, reinvent itself, in the post military era and into a-a soft fundamentalistic state that has been rejected from Europe and is now trying to play off Iran and Syria against us” (see “Israeli commandoes were provoked: security expert”, ABC TV Lateline, 3 June 2010: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2917844.htm ”).
A further powerful; example of Australian censorship, self-censorship, holocaust complicity, genocide complicity, holocaust-ignoring, genocide-ignoring and effective holocaust denial and genocidal denial is again provided by the ABC in its non-reportage and under-reportage of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British deliberately starved to death about 6-7 million Indians in an atrocity greater in magnitude that the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation). It should be noted that the WW2 Jewish Holocaust was part of the WW2 Holocaust that killed about 30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies but this vastly wider atrocity has been remorselessly ignored by the racist Zionists and cowardly, dishonest, holocaust-complicit, holocaust-ignoring, pro-Zionist Western Media . The Bengali Holocaust was indeed the first holocaust atrocity of World War 2 to be described as a “holocaust” (by Indian writer N.G. Jog in his 1944 book “Churchill's blind-spot: India”, New Book Company, Bombay).
Searches of the ABC for the terms “Bengali Holocaust”, “Bengali Genocide”, “Bengal Holocaust” and “Bengal Genocide” yield zero (0) results as compared to the results from the corresponding Google Searches that yield 2,900, 1,920, 604, and 2,110 results, respectively. A search of the ABC for the term “Bengal famine” yields 10 results (of which 4 are due to my attempts to restore this atrocity to history in the English-speaking world) and an ABC search for “Bengali famine” yields 6 results (all due to my holocaust-reporting efforts). In contrast, Google Searches for the terms “ Bengal famine” and “Bengali famine” both yield 125,000 rersults.
Of course this Australian non-reportage or massive under-reportage of holocaust and genocide atrocities in which Australia has been variously complicit is not confined to the ABC. Thus leading Australian historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey AC (Companion of the Order of Australia) was well aware of the 1943-1945 Bengal Famine (Bengali Holocaust) but this huge atrocity is completely absent from his “ A Short History of the World” (1997) and his “A Very Short History of the World” (2007). At this point, in the face of such ignoring from such an eminent Australian historian and from the important Australian national medium the ABC, the reader may begin to doubt to my veracity or sanity and so I must direct them to a recent UK BBC radio program on the Bengal Famine involving my self, Economics Nobel Prize winner Professor Amartya Sen and other scholars and entitled “Bengal Famine”, this program being part of a belated BBC series entitled “Things we forgot to remember” (see: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html ). For detailed, in-context accounts of this atrocity that numerous English-speaking publishers refused to publish see my books “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) and “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (see: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ).
Of course one must precisely define the terms “holocaust' and “genocide”. Holocaust simply means death of a huge number of people as exampled by the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million people killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation), the WW2 Holocaust in general (30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies killed), the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death by the British) and the 35 million Chinese killed associated with the Japanese occupation of China in the1930s and 1940s. However the definition of “genocide” by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention involves Assessment of “intent' by those responsible, and states “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” “Intent” to commit mass murder is only rarely explicitly expressed by the culprit but can be established by relentless, remorseless sustained conduct (e.g. in establishing the “intent” of a crime-denying serial killers).
As outlined below, the Armenian Genocide and the Bengali Holocaust are but 2 of some 24 holocaust and genocide atrocities in which has Australia has been involved since the Anglo invasion of Australia in 1788 - relentless, remorseless sustained conduct, indeed.
1. 18th-19th century Aboriginal Genocide (the Indigenous Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after invasion in 1788).
2. Tasmanian Aboriginal Genocide (the “full-blood” Indigenous population dropped from 6,000 to zero in the period 1803-1876; however there are several thousand “mixed race” descendants of Tasmanian and Mainland Aborigines still living in Tasmania today).
3. British Indian Genocide (Indian Holocaust) (post-invasion excess deaths 0.6 million, 1757-1837; 0.5 million, 1837-1901 under Queen Victoria; 0.4 million, 1901-1947; 1.5 million in total and 1.8 million victims if the carnage various royalty-ruled Indian British Protectorate States are included) .
4. European Chinese Genocide (20-100 million deaths in the European imperialism-driven Tai Ping rebellion period; Australia was involved in suppressing the Boxer rebellion).
5. Maori Genocide (Maori population dropped from 0.1-0.2 million in 1800 to 42,000 in 1893; Australia was involved in the 19th century Maori wars).
6. African Genocide (scores of million perished over 5 centuries of European slavery and colonialism; Australians participated in the Sudan War, 1881-1898).
7. Pacific Genocide (there was a catastrophic population decline due to introduced disease and slavery; thus 40,000 Fijians died from measles out of a population of 150,000 in 1876; “blackbirding” slavery was conducted by Australians in the late 19th century).
8. Boer (Afrikaaner) Genocide (1899-1902; 28,000 Afrikaaner women and children died in British concentration camps; Australians participated in the Boer War as immortalized in the movie “Breaker Morant”).
9. Armenian Genocide (1.5 million killed; the Australian invasion of Gallipoli as part of an Anglo-French force in 1915 helped to precipitate this atrocity; indeed April 24 is Armenian Genocide Day and April 25 is the day of the Australia invasion in 1915 and also a sacred war dead remembrance day for Australians and New Zealanders – it is called Anzac Day after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) which stormed ashore on that first Anzac Day at Gallipoli in 1915).
10. Bengali Genocide (6-7 million perished in the “forgotten” man-made Bengal Famine atrocity in Bengal and adjoining provinces in British India, 1943-1945; Australians were there and indeed the Governor of Bengal in 1944 was an Australian R.Casey).
11. British post-1950 Third World Genocide (1950-2005 excess deaths in countries subject to British occupation as a major occupier in the post-war era totalled 727 million; Australia has the same Head of State as the UK and continues to be a loyal military ally of the UK in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan).
12. US post-1950 Third World Genocide (1950-2005 excess deaths in countries subject to US occupation as a major occupier in the post-war era totalled 82 million; Australia participated in all post-1950 US Asian Wars in Korea, Indo-China, Iraq and Afghanistan with Indigenous Asian violent deaths and excess deaths from war-imposed deprivation now totalling 28 million).
13. Australian Colonial Genocide (1950-2005 excess deaths in countries subject to Australian occupation as a major occupier in the post-war era, namely Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands totalled 2.1 million).
14. 20th century Aboriginal Genocide (total excess deaths clearly of the order of 1million; 0.1 million Stolen Generations Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their Mothers in the 19th and 20th centuries; excess deaths in the 11 years of the Bush-ite Coalition Government totalled 90,000 for 1996-2007).
The following Australian genocide involvements in this catalogue of horrors are ongoing.
15. Palestinian Genocide (post-1967 excess deaths 0.3 million, post-1967 under-5 infant deaths 0.2 million and 7 million refugees; with bi-partisan agreement, pro-Zionist Australia provides diplomatic, financial and haven support for Israeli state terrorism – even when directed against tens of thousands of Australian citizens as in Lebanon in mid-2006 - and up to life imprisonment for anyone giving support to the Hamas Party that overwhelmingly won the 2006 Occupied Palestinian elections, winning 76 out of 132 seats).
16. Iraqi Genocide (4.5 million violent deaths plus excess deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 1990-2011; 2.6 million post-invasion excess deaths, 0.8 million post-invasion under-5 infant deaths and 5-6 million refugees).
17. Afghan Genocide ( 5.0 million post-invasion violent deaths plus excess deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 2.6 million post-invasion under-5 infant deaths and 3-4 million refugees; Australia involved militarily since 2001).
18. Ongoing Aboriginal Genocide (9,000 excess deaths annually; over 100,000 excess deaths in the recent dozen years of Bush-ite Coalition rule i.e. more avoidable Indigenous deaths in that period than Australian military deaths in all wars).
19. Biofuel Genocide ( 18 million people die avoidably each year in the Developing Worlds minus China, but this is increasingly biofuel-impacted as the legislatively-mandated US, UK and EU biofuel perversion forces up global food prices; Australia is a major sugar cane grower and sugar exporter with 60% of sugar going to bioethanol production worldwide; Australia has biofuel-promoting legislation and is a major canola grower, this being a major source for biodiesel ).
20. Climate Genocide (18 million die avoidably each year already from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease in the Developing World minus China; Professor James Lovelock FRS says that over 6 million will perish this century die to unaddressed climate change; on a per capita basis Australia is among the very worst greenhouse gas (GHG) polluters – in terms of 2005-2008 figures for “fossil fuel-derived annual per capita CO2 pollution” Australia is about 40 times worse than India and 60 times worse than Bangladesh if you include Australia's world leading coal exports).
21. Tamil Genocide (scores of thousands killed, 0.3 million incarcerated in concentration camps, horrendous human rights abuses; Australia is directly involved in this atrocity by declaring Tamil activists to be “terrorists” under Australia's draconian anti-terrorism laws, preventing medical aid for Tamils, “suspending” the human rights of Tamil refugees and providing military, diplomatic and lying propaganda assistance to the genocidal Sri Lankan authorities).
22. Muslim Genocide (9.5 million Muslims violently or non-violently killed in the Iraq War, 1990-2011, and Afghan War, 2001-2011, alone; 1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in the Muslim World totalled 0.6 billion; it is predicted that 3 billion Muslims will die due to unaddressed man-made global warming this century; 20 million Muslim refugees have been created by the US Alliance of which Australia is a slavishly loyal part; Australia is a leading player in the ongoing and worsening Muslim Genocide and Climate Genocide).
23. Asian Holocaust, Asian Genocide (Australia has been involved in all post-1950 US Asian wars, wars that have been associated so far with about 28 million violent deaths plus deaths from war-imposed deprivation, the breakdown being 3 million (Korea), 15 million (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam), 4.5 million (Iraq), Palestine (0.3 million), 5.0 million (Afghanistan) i.e. about the same number as the number of Slavs, Jews an Gypsies murdered by the Nazis in WW2).
24. Arab Holocaust, Arab Genocide (Australians were involved in massacring Palestinian villagers in WW1; Australians were involved in massacring Egyptian democracy activists in 1919; Australia has been variously involved in the Palestinian Genocide and Iraqi Genocide with violent deaths plus avoidable deaths from deprivation totalling about 5 million)
Small wonder that Australians don't want to look under the carpet. Yet history ignored yields history repeated. Australia enthusiastically backs the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Coalition invasion of Libya that on the precedents of the Afghan Holocaust and Iraqi Holocaust is set to become an endless civil war and a Libyan Genocide and Libyan Holocaust. The genocide-ignoring ABC is hysterically reporting unrest in Syria and will no doubt back US Alliance commencement of a Syrian Holocaust and Syrian Genocide.
About half the victims of these Australia-complicit holocausts and genocides have been children. Here are some messages to look-the-other-way Australia on Anzac Day, 2011: remember the children and women victims of war; “thou shalt not kill children”; and those who ignore, obfuscate, deny, minimize, support or are otherwise complicit in the mass murder of women and children (not to mention men) have crossed the line separating decent humanity from Nazi-style barbarity.
What can decent people do? Decent people must (a) inform everyone they can about gross abuses of humanity (of which active and passive killing are the most egregious examples) and (b) apply sanctions and boycotts against all people, politicians, corporations and countries involved in gross abuse of humanity.
On 9 January 2010 I sent a Formal Complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC) re US Alliance and Australian involvement in the Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Muslim, Aboriginal, Biofuel and Climate Genocides (see: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/9-january-2010 ).
Dr Gideon Polya currently teaches science students at a major Australian university. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has recently published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has just published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot..com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/ bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .
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