Genocide in Tasmania, California, and Namibia began with a common lie: the assertion that the land was “empty,” “unclaimed,” or should be “made empty.” The British in Australia employed a doctrine of terra nullius, or “land where nothing exists,” while in the US settlers and their advocates spoke of vacuum domicilium, or “empty domicile,” to justify invasion and expropriation. In Namibia, colonists enacted policies of tabula rasa, or “creating a map scraped smooth,” to facilitate dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The concept of tabula rasa asserted that indigenous people should be removed and that these people had minimal moral claim to the land. If white settlers saw no European-style agriculture or … Continue reading Benjamin Madley