The Truth About Empire

Lester says in The Truth About Empire that ‘Emigrant Britons established political control over what became the Dominions in North America, Australia and New Zealand through the ‘displacement, dispossession and frequent killing of Indigenous peoples’ (p.21). Such control is reflected in the Zionist takeover of Palestine, where the displacement and killing of the indigenous people is ongoing . And just as ‘across the British Empire, racial discrimination was the everyday norm’ and ‘British imperial officials... helped develop... apartheid’ (p .37), we also see racial discrimination and apartheid in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories .

Addressing the issue of ‘Tasmania and the question of genocide,’ Lyndall Ryan points out that the killing of the Aboriginal people ‘was no inadvertent behaviour’ by the British . ‘They killed Aboriginal people from the outset’ and ‘the perpetrators knew that they would never be arrested, let alone charged and convicted of murder .’ Furthermore, ‘when [Charles] Darwin declared that the island was at least “native free”, this was the outcome the settlers had always wanted’ (p .71) . The illegal Zionist settlers in occupied Palestine express the same ‘native free’ desire, and they too are largely allowed to act with impunity by the occupation government .