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Genocide In The Australian Genocide

Decent Essays

Genocide has always been present throughout history, whether it is Julius Caesar’s slaughter of the Gauls during his conquest from 58 BCE to 54 BCE or the Rwandan Genocide in the late-20th Century. Although they have been around for thousands of years, the term, genocide only recently received a formal definition. In 1948, during the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations came together to establish a concrete definition for the term “genocide”. The UN’s official definition for genocide stated:
“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 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.”
This definition is still applicable to events that occurred before its creation though, and one event definitely falls into these criteria. The Australian Aborigines’ disappearance is much more than a group of people simply disappearing, it is actually a genocide spread across hundreds of years, starting in the late 1780’s with the final culmination of it being formally acknowledged and apologized for in 2008. This is definitely a genocide, going by the criteria established by the UN

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