Mahatma Gandhi, asked what he thought of European civilization, replied, "I think it's a very good idea."
Between 1910 and 1970, 100,000 Australian aboriginal children were taken from their families and placed into white foster homes. The goal was to wipe out the 40,000 year old aboriginal culture through detribalization: assimilating the children into European civilization while the adults died out. The result was dispossession, dislocation and devastation of Australia's first inhabitants.
The official inquiry into the "stolen generation," chaired by judge Sir Ronald Wilson, president of the Human Rights Commission, listened to the stories of 535 Aborigines and received written submissions from another 1,000. "Bringing Them Home" (1997) the 689-page report into the sorry saga, used a U.N. definition -- the extermination of a culture of one group through the forcible transfer of its children to another group -- to conclude that the policy was one of genocide.