The colonisation of Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, remains
one of the most devastating genocides of an Indigenous society in modern
history.
When the British arrived in 1803, the Palawa numbered in the thousands.
Within a few decades, land seizure, frontier killings, the kidnapping of women,
introduced disease, martial law, and forced removal reduced them to a few dozen
survivors in distant settlements. A people were not only displaced; they were
systematically broken.
What began as clashes over land turned into organised campaigns. The
Black War. The 1830 Black Line. Then the so-called Friendly Mission that
removed the remaining Palawa to Flinders Island. By the mid-19th century,
colonial records declared them “extinct.” It was more than a description. It
was a legal convenience. If a people are extinct, their land is no longer
contested. Yet their descendants survived.
But this genocide was not carried out by weapons alone. It was prepared
by words. The Palawa were described as “savages” and “hostile natives.” Their
resistance was labelled criminality. Expropriation was called civilisation.
Removal was called protection. Language cleared the ground before policy did.
Imperial vocabulary turned invasion into order and dispossession into
administration.
The pattern did not end in Tasmania.
In Palestine, language also comes first. Palestinians are described as
terrorists, extremists, or demographic threats. Resistance is framed only as
violence. Collective punishment is framed as security. Settlement expansion
becomes neighbourhood growth. Occupation becomes administration. Displacement
becomes evacuation. Civilian deaths become collateral damage.
The contexts are different. The century is different. The weapons are
different. But the method is familiar.
The Palawa had no political bureau, no media arm, no foreign sponsors.
What they had were armed bands who fought back. They ambushed settlers,
attacked frontier posts, and tried to halt the seizure of their land. It was
not a modern militant organisation. But in function, it was armed resistance
against expansion.
The British did not call it resistance. They called it savagery and
outrage. The political question of land was erased and replaced with a story
about security and threat.
Today, groups like Hamas are framed almost entirely through the language
of terrorism. Whatever one’s view of their actions, the broader political
struggle over land, sovereignty, and rights is often reduced to a single label.
The framing comes first. The narrative fixes the moral lens. Once a people are
defined only as danger, their dispossession can be presented as necessity. When
dispossession becomes prolonged and systematic, the line toward destruction
narrows.
Tasmania and Palestine are not isolated cases. In the Americas,
Indigenous peoples were called savages and obstacles to manifest destiny. In
Africa, communities resisting land seizure were labelled tribes, rebels, or
terrorists. In India, uprisings were reduced to mutiny. In Kenya, anti-colonial
fighters were branded extremists. In Algeria, resistance became insurgency. The
vocabulary always worked the same way. It stripped political struggle of
context and recast it as disorder. Once the native is described as backward,
violent, or irrational, expansion becomes duty. Control becomes stability.
Suppression becomes peacekeeping.
Across centuries, the vocabulary changes. The structure remains. Define
the native as threat. Define expansion as order. Let words move first. Policy
will follow.
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for
light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” -
Isaiah 5:20, The Bible
“And when it is said to them, ‘Do not cause corruption upon the earth,’
they say, ‘We are but reformers.’ Unquestionably, it is they who are the
corrupters, but they perceive it not.” - Qur’an 2:11–12
Peace, anas
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