The Jewish War on White Australia: Colin Tatz and the Genocide Charge — PART ONE of FOUR

Captain James Cook statue, with graffiti

January 26 is Australia Day, a national public holiday marking the date the first permanent British settlers (mostly convicts) arrived in Sydney in 1788. These thousand or so souls — transported to the other side of the world and told to fend for themselves — laid the foundations for one of the most successful nations in history. Traditionally a day to celebrate this remarkable achievement, Australia Day has, in recent years, been attacked by leftwing activists who, emboldened by the escalating anti-White rhetoric of the intellectual establishment, have rebranded it “Invasion Day.” Every year sees shrill demands for Australia Day to be moved to another date, recast as a day of mourning, or abolished altogether. Despite the growing agitation against Australia Day, two-thirds of Australians favor retaining the date as a national public holiday.

Speaking to an “Invasion Day” protest rally in Melbourne this year, Aboriginal activist Tarneen Onus-Williams, screamed: “Fuck Australia,” expressing her hope “it burns to the ground.” A statement produced by her organization, the so-called Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR), drew freely on the Cultural Marxist lexicon, insisting they “would not rest until this entire rotten settler colony called Australia, illegally and violently imposed on stolen Aboriginal land at the expense of the blood of countless thousands, burns to the fucking ground, until every corrupt and illegal institution of white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist settler colonial power forced upon us is no more… Fuck your flag, your anthem and your precious national day. … Abolish Australia, not just Australia Day.” Aboriginal activist Tony Birch insisted Australia “does not deserve a national celebration in any capacity,” while Onus-Williams later claimed “people who celebrate Australia Day are celebrating the genocide of Aboriginal people, waving Australian flags in our faces. It’s disgusting.” Aboriginal activist Dan Sultan likewise maintained that Australia Day marks the “day that started the ongoing genocide of our people.” A local councilor for the city of Moreland (in Melbourne) claimed that commemorating Australia Day is “like celebrating the Nazi Holocaust.”

Tarneen Onus-Williams at an “Invasion Day” protest rally on January 26

The origins of the “genocide” charge embedded in these comments can be traced (inevitably) to a coterie of Jewish academics and intellectuals including, most prominently, Latrobe University historian Tony Barta and Sydney University genocide studies professor and “anti-racism” crusader Colin Tatz. In collaboration with Winton Higgins, Anna Haebich, and A. Dirk Moses, these Jewish intellectual activists have succeeded in ensuring that “genocide is now in the vocabulary of Australian politics.” The word “genocide” was first used regarding Australia’s Aborigines by Barta at an academic conference in 1984 in a presentation entitled “After the Holocaust: Consciousness of Genocide in Australia” where he proclaimed that “genocide had indeed occurred here.”[1] For Barta, a laudable focus on “the Holocaust” had “inhibited consciousness of the violent past that had enabled us to meet on ground named after the colonial secretary, Lord Sydney. The question was equally suppressed where I had settled with my family, the city named after Lord Melbourne.”[2]

The policies of the British administrators of the Australian colonies of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and those of Australian state and federal governments in the twentieth century, cannot, by any objective standard, be regarded as “genocidal” as the term was defined by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who coined it in 1944. The problem for anti-White activists has been that Lemkin’s definition, subsequently adopted by the UN, relies heavily on “intent to destroy,” which has proved problematic in an Australian context where, “without being able to prove intent on behalf of the colonial administration, the case for genocide is weak.”[3] Barta, therefore, redefined “genocide” to make it encompass the totality of European colonial societies like Australia. His redefinition was “a way of obviating the centrality of state policy and premeditation” embedded in Lemkin’s ‘hegemonic intentionalist’ definition of genocide.”[4]

Lemkin had defined “genocide” as involving “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating groups themselves.” Aware no such plan or policies existed for Australia’s Aborigines, Barta — extrapolating the Marxian emphasis on economic relations for understanding sociological reality —argued for “relations of genocide” as an inherent feature of the interaction between Europeans and indigenous peoples in colonial societies like Australia. He writes:

Genocide, strictly, cannot be a crime of unintended consequences; we expect it to be acknowledged in consciousness. In real historical relationships, however, unintended consequences are legion, and it is from the consequences, as well as the often-muddled consciousness, that we have to deduce the real nature of the relationship. In Australia very few people are conscious of having any relationship at all with Aborigines. My thesis is that all white people in Australia do have such a relationship; that in the key relation, the appropriation of the land, it is fundamental to the history of the society in which they live; and that implicitly rather than explicitly, in ways which were inevitable rather than intentional, it is a relationship of genocide.

Such a relationship is systemic, fundamental to the type of society rather than to the type of state, and has historical ramifications extending far beyond any political regime. … My conception of a genocidal society — as distinct from a genocidal state — is one in which the whole bureaucratic apparatus might officially be directed to protect innocent people but in which a whole race is nevertheless subject to remorseless pressures of destruction inherent in the very nature of the society. It is in this sense that I would call Australia, during the whole 200 years of its existence, a genocidal society. [Emphasis added][5]     

Thus “all white people in Australia” are implicated in a “relationship of genocide” with Aborigines even if they (or their ancestors) lacked any such intention, had only benevolent interactions with Aborigines, or had no contact with them at all. When colonial, and later state and federal governments implemented policies designed to protect Aboriginal people, “genocide” was, for Barta, still “inherent in the very nature of the society.” This amounts to a sweeping moral indictment of all White Australians and their ancestors, and of Western civilization generally.

Tony Barta

Barta’s redefinition of genocide enabled him to conclude that “Australia — not alone among the nations of the colonized world — is a nation founded on genocide.” He advocates this message “be the credo taught to every generation of schoolchildren—the key recognition of Australia as a nation founded on genocide.”[6] Decades of activism has succeeded in embedding this ahistorical notion in school curricula where White Australian children are encouraged to loathe not only their race, but also their ancestors and to disregard their achievements. The Sydney Jewish Museum is proudly playing its part in training Australian teachers “not only about the Holocaust” but also about “the Australian genocide.” It is this kind of anti-White activism, masquerading as objective historical analysis, that foments the seething hostility to White Australia seen in recent attacks on Australia Day.

This activism, and the widely-publicized removal of confederate monuments in the United States, prompted the disfiguring of a statue of Captain James Cook last year with the slogans “NO PRIDE IN GENOCIDE” and “CHANGE THE DATE” (see lead photograph). Lisa Murray, the City of Sydney’s official historian, defended this act of historical illiteracy (Cook had nothing to do with the First Fleet) for challenging the cultural power of White Australia. For her, the real vandals were the cleaners who removed the graffiti. “Should the graffiti have been removed?” she asked. “Is challenging the dominant historical narrative a legitimate part of the monument’s heritage? I ask again; should the graffiti have been removed. … Slave traders and representatives of colonial imperialism are equally on the nose in Britain, parts of Europe and America.”

Far from being a slave trader, Captain James Cook led a scientific voyage of discovery that charted the east coast of Australia for the first time in a ship containing botanists, an astronomer, artists and boxes of scientific equipment. This reality did not prevent Bronwyn Carlson, a Macquarie University associate professor who identifies as Aboriginal, from calling for tearing down not just Cook’s statue, but those of Lachlan Macquarie, Australia’s fifth colonial governor, on the basis that such statues “continue to represent those people who were part of genocide in this country.”

An “inspirational moment”

Recalling how he was inspired by Barta’s genocide thesis, Jewish academic Colin Tatz claimed it “set my wheels going about seeing not parallels or analogies but echoes of the Holocaust here — at the very least making me realize that genocide doesn’t have to be a sharp annihilatory episode confined to 1939 to 1945.”[7] For Tatz, Barta’s presentation was an “inspirational moment and one that became central to my life thereafter.”[8] Embracing and weaponizing the bogus notion of the “Stolen Generations” (discussed in Part 4), Tatz claims that as a result of “the public’s first knowledge of the wholesale removal of Aboriginal children, the dreaded ‘g’ word is firmly with us,” affirming that the “purpose of my university and public courses” is “to keep it here.”[9]

Colin Tatz

According to Barta, Professor Tatz has “achieved his goals as an activist scholar.” His recent publications include: The Magnitude of Genocide, his memoir Human Rights and Human Wrongs, and his latest book, Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide. His work has, unsurprisingly, been praised to the skies by other Jewish activists and intellectuals. Israel Charny, Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem described The Magnitude of Genocide, as “an amazingly readable intellectual tour de force. Rarely have I seen the dread topic of genocide addressed so humanely and interestingly.” Acknowledging Tatz’s increasing success in conferring on Australia a global reputation for “genocide,” Barta contends that:

His attack on the membrane of ignorance and innocence was sustained and effective. Work on Australian genocide by other scholars combined with Indigenous activism began to bring international attention to bear on our history. I believe the most cited and defining intervention was Tatz’s 1999 paper “Genocide in Australia,” supported by his path-breaking work on racism. He succeeded in installing genocide studies as an academic discipline with institutional support and founding [the academic journal] Genocide Perspectives to stimulate Australian scholarship in an environment of ignorance, ideology and interests resistant to any association with genocide.[10]

Barta and Tatz, in their determination to associate White Australians with “genocide,” obviously have agendas and interests of their own. Barta’s agenda leads him to insist that White Australians who reject his tendentious characterization of their history, “as settler-colonial, based on genocide,” will necessarily “deny others their history — as victims or perpetrators or bystanders — of conflicts elsewhere.”[11] The result of the “genocide denial” of White Australians is, he contends, the creation of “a climate in which Australia shows no compassion for those fleeing conflict and seeking better lives elsewhere.”[12]

Here the real motivation of Barta’s intellectual activism is revealed: the inculcation of White guilt to suppress opposition to non-White immigration and multiculturalism. Barta’s colleague, A. Dirk Moses, recently associated critics of these policies with “Anders Breivik and Steven Bannon” for their suggesting “Western countries are succumbing to a poisonous cocktail of multiculturalism, Muslim immigration, political correctness and cultural Marxism that dilutes the white population and brainwashes young people at school and university.” According to Tatz, White people who reject his “genocide” label exhibit psychological disturbances manifested in “paroxysms, ranging from upset to extreme angst to even more extreme anger, when the (literal) spectres of genocide appear as facets of their proudly democratic histories.”[13]

Inevitably, Barta and Tatz liken rejection of, or even ambivalence toward, their assertion that “Australia is a nation built on genocide” to “Holocaust denial.” Here they are joined by fellow Jewish academic and leading proponent of the “Stolen Generations” myth, Professor Robert Manne. Former editor in chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, noted Manne’s penchant for “manipulation of the idea of the Holocaust for political advantage, particularly in the Stolen Generations debate,” observing “this Holocaust tactic, like the related use of the word ‘denier,’ is a simple trick to undermine an opponent’s moral position when a polemicist has little intellectual case.”[14] In levelling the “genocide” charge against White Australians, these Jewish activists seek to exert the kind of psychological leverage used so effectively against Germans, who, as Tatz notes, are “weighed down by the Schuldfrage (guilt question)” to such an extent that “guilt, remorse, shame permeate today’s Germany.”[15]

Robert Manne’s essay “In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right” as published in ultra-Zionist Morrie Schwartz’s Quarterly Essay

Tatz has dedicated his professional life to ensuring that an analogous guilt permeates and becomes indissolubly linked with White Australian identity. In this endeavor, he is careful, however, not to detract from the metaphysical pre-eminence of “the Holocaust.”[16] A writer for the Australian Jewish News notes how “painful memories of the Holocaust still resonate and make us sensitive to comparisons,” emphasizing the supreme importance of ensuring that “recognizing the genocide of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia does not diminish the horror of the Holocaust.” To mitigate this danger, Tatz insists that, in discussing other putative genocides, scholars have an obligation to never “ignore, or evade, the lessons and legacies of the Holocaust in pursuit of other case histories.” The Holocaust must forever remain “the paradigm case, the one more analyzed, studied, dissected, filmed, dramatized than all other cases put together.” It must endure as “the yardstick by which we measure many things” and be the highest point on “a ‘Richter Scale’ that can help us to locate the intensity, immensity of a case so that we don’t equate all genocides.”[17]

Jews at the forefront of Aboriginal activism

Australia’s Aborigines, in contrast to Jews, are a group characterized by extremely low average intelligence, and are, therefore, a poorly organized and essentially headless community devoid of effective leadership.  It is unsurprising, therefore, that activist Jews, with their deep animosity toward Europeans, have been pivotal in establishing, funding, and leading Aboriginal activist organizations.  This Jewish activist front is an adjunct of a broader campaign by transform Australia through non-White immigration and multiculturalism. Dan Goldberg, journalist for Haaretz and former editor of the Australian Jewish News, observed how “In addition to their activism on Aboriginal issues, Jews were instrumental in leading the crusade against the White Australia policy, a series of laws from 1901 to 1973 that restricted non-White immigration to Australia.”

Jewish journalist Debra Jobson insists that “Indigenous people need additional voices raised on their behalf given that the ‘tyranny of the majority’ can oppress within a democracy, as we can see in Trump’s America.” For the Jewish academic Nikki Marczak, the intellectual activism of Colin Tatz “embodies the relationship between the Jewish community and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” Tatz, who describes himself as “the anthropologist of the White tribes of policy makers and bureaucrats,” is frustrated by “the reluctance of Aborigines to go international with their grievances. There is some external activity but not nearly enough when compared to the strategies of other minority groups.”[18] Noting the outsized Jewish contribution to Aboriginal activism in Australia going back decades, The Sydney Jewish Museum declared last year that:

When we say, “never again” to the Holocaust, we make a moral judgment about the German nation. We don’t accept the claim that they didn’t know. Many did know, and those who didn’t, should have. Thanks to the work of scholars like Colin Tatz and the work of lawyers like Ron Castan, in 1992 in the Mabo Case, the High Court was able to make a judicial statement that “Aborigines were dispossessed of their land parcel by parcel, to make way for the expanding colonial settlement.”The late Ron Castan summarised it well when he commented on what motivated his legal work for Aboriginal people: “What was the meaning of my determination to do my part never to permit a future destruction of the Jewish people, if I just stood by and participated in the bounty and opportunity of the Australian nation?

In a 1998 speech, Castan implored the government to say it was sorry, citing Holocaust denial in his argument: “The refusal to apologize for dispossession, for massacres and for the theft of children is the Australian equivalent of the Holocaust deniers — those who say it never really happened.”

Tatz welcomes the fact that White Australian identity has increasingly broken down when “confronted with increasingly strident Aboriginal assertions and other ethnic challenges to the assimilationist mould. The old shibboleths about ‘one people’ people sharing the same hopes, loyalties, customs and beliefs began to fragment some time ago.”[19] This social fragmentation is the direct (and fully intended) result of mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism: Jewish-originated and -championed policies designed to preserve Jewish particularism, while demographically, politically and culturally weakening a White Australia seen as threatening to Jews. The supposed benefits to Australian Jewry of this social transformation, most notably the diminished threat of the emergence of a mass movement of anti-Semitism among White Australians, is perceived to outweigh any negative effects of large scale immigration like the fact that “Some Australian Jews fear that migrants arriving from Muslim countries will contribute to anti-Semitic currents in Australia, inflame extremist groups and pose a threat to the relative peace they currently enjoy.”[20]

Activist Jews know full well that racial and cultural heterogeneity are prime sources of national weakness. In a recent opinion piece entitled “Iran is Hardly a Nation and Will Likely Fall Apart,” Mordechai Kedar, a Zionist academic from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, contended that “there is no such thing as an Iranian people or an Iranian nation.” Instead, Iran is, he asserts, a country divided into various ethnic and religious groups riven by conflicting interests. He notes that “All these parts of the population have little in common, the awareness of nationhood is weak and, as a result, the state is always under threat of breaking apart.” He urges Western nations to facilitate this disintegration by finding “those anti-ayatollah forces” to “support them and empower them to bring Iran to the same end that met the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by creating homogenous ethnic states on the ruins of the artificial state of Iran.” Divide and conquer remains the overriding Jewish group strategy pursued at both national and international levels.

Go to Part 2.


[1] Colin Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life Confronting Racism (Clayton, Victoria; Monash University Publishing, 2015), 251.

[2] Tony Barta, “Realities, Surrealities and the Membrane of Innocence,” In: Genocide Perspectives: A Global Crime, Australian Voices, Ed. Nikki Marczak & Kirril Shields (Sydney: UTS ePress, 2017), 161.

[3] A. Francis Johnson, Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Novel (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 198.

[4] A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History” In: Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Ed. A. Dirk Moses (Sydney: Berghahn Books, 2004), 26.

[5] Tony Barta, Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonisation of Australia (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008) 239-40.

[6] Ibid., 238; 174.

[7] Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs, 251-52.

[8] Colin Tatz, Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide (Xlibris; 2017), 499.

[9] Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London; Verso, 2003), xvi.

[10] Barta, “Realities, Surrealities and the Membrane of Innocence,” 173-4.

[11] Ibid., 66.

[12] Ibid., 66-7.

[13] Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, xiii; xvi.

[14] Chris Mitchell, “A critic untroubled by facts who seeks to silence dissent,” The Australian (Sydney, September 17, 2011).

[15] Colin Tatz, Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide (Xlibris; 2017), 3009.

[16] Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, xiii.

[17] Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs, 261.

[18] Ibid., 356.

[19] Tatz, With Intent to Destory, xvi.

[20] Marcus Einfeld, “We Too Have Been Strangers: Jews and the Refugee Struggle,” In: New Under the Sun — Jewish Australians on Religion, Politics & Culture, Ed. Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau & Nathan Wolski (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006), 311 & 314.

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