re Genocide in Palestine.

"Leaders start to draw on their historical right to the land." Why do Jews think they have a right to push Palestinians off the lands they have lived on for 2000 years?

All the comments confuse mass murder , political repression, abortion,etc,etc with genocide,and thus render the concept meaningless.
In an otherwise impressive discussion of genuine genocide, in the form of the Holocaust, Kiernan, surprisingly, shares a common blind spot-more Russians than Jews were extermined as "untermensch" ( though, of course,many were Russian Jews.
Leslie

Good point Leslie. I'm surprised no mention was made of Tasmania, or indeed of many Australian mainland nations.

what about the genocide of us victims who were raped and abused and made slaves , for by the goverments and churches of australia in their state and territories , institutions , orphanages , girls homes, boys homes, remand centres, church homes run by the goverment , foster homes , out of home care , and many more and it is still happening till this day ,

and its about time the australian goverment apologized to us victims the forgotten australians

and stop the cover up of what we had suffered as children in these institutions , run by the goverment of australia ,

for refrence read the senate reports, Forgotten Australians dated August 2004 And The Second report Protecting Vulnerable children dated March 2005, And The recent report Lost Innocents Ad Forgotten Austrlians revisted

we are real victims of the goverment of Australias GENOCIDE

Foxy,

Well said. Once again Stalin's atrocities get airbrushed out of history.

The problem is that Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot destroy the University of Queensland's over-simplified thesis. These were not people who fantasised after a mythical past. They envisioned an equally mythical future.

The VACUITY of Queensland University's analysis may be seen from the way some of the worst current genocides, such as those occurring, in Sudan, fall outside the pattern. Any analysis which fails to account for something occurring under the analyst's nose is, to put it politely, male bovine excrement.

Kiernan's article is an example of academic equine fertiliser at its smelliest. The reality is that ANY totalitarian ideology contains the seeds of genocide. That applies equally to Nazism, Communism, extreme Nationalism and fundamentalist Islam.

"The reality is that ANY totalitarian ideology contains the seeds of genocide. That applies equally to Nazism, Communism, extreme Nationalism and fundamentalist Islam."

Actually Nationalism is not typical of a totalitarian regime where allegiance is demanded rather than expected. It's more a form of extreme patriotism within democracies.

No mention then of the 800,000 more recently killed within a 3 month period in Rwanda, a mostly Catholic democratic republic - or the mass killing of Muslims in Kosovo?

I think that all people are capable of all sorts of atrocities given the right circumstances. The greater the level of (extreme) patriotism, the greater the tendency toward "ethnic cleansing".

It's OK for Runner to bemoan the incidence of abortion but once the babies are born they are "fair game" for whatever predudices come their way or is dropping a bomb on a pregnant woman not a form of abortion too?