Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.
In Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to spend an initial £100 million (C$180 million) on slavery-reparations in response to the discovery that its endowment had “links” with African enslavement. “The immense wealth accrued by the Church … has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement,” a document explains. “African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter.” And this has “continuing toxic consequences.”
Yet almost none of this is true. The evidence shows that the Church’s endowment fund was hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all. Most economic historians reckon the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development as somewhere between marginal and modest. And between abolition in 1834 and the present, multiple causes have intervened to diminish slavery’s effects.
Consonant with his church’s policy, the (then) Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar last year, in which he criticized Christian missionaries for treating Africans as inferior and confessed that “we (British) must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar.”
Really? What the British did in Zanzibar during the second half of the 19th century was to force the Sultan to end the slave-trade. Indeed, the cathedral in which the archbishop was preaching was built over the former slave-market. And here’s what the pioneering missionary David Livingstone wrote about black Africans in 1871: “I have no prejudice against (the Africans’) colour; indeed, anyone who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels that they are just fellow men…. If a comparison were instituted, … I should like to take my place among (them), on the principle of preferring the company of my betters.”
Meanwhile, in Australia, there’s the extraordinary career of Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 book, Dark Emu. This argues that Aborigines, far from being primitive nomads, developed the first egalitarian society, invented democracy, and were sophisticated agriculturalists. Such was the morally superior civilization that white colonizers trashed in their racist greed. Named Book of the Year, Dark Emu has sold more than 360,000 copies and was made the subject of an Australian Broadcasting Company documentary.
Yet, it has been widely criticized for being factually untrue. Author Peter O’Brien has forensically dismantled it in Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2020). And in Farmers or Hunter Gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate (2021) — described by reviewers as “rigorously researched,” “masterful,” and “measured” — eminent anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe dismiss Pascoe’s claims.
Which bring us to Canada. The May 2021 claim by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to have discovered the “remains of 215 children” of an Indian Residential School was quickly sexed up by the media into a story about a “mass grave,” with all its connotation of murderous atrocity. The Globe and Mail published an article under the title, “The discovery of a mass gravesite at a former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg,” in which a professor of law at UBC wrote: “It is horrific…. a too-common unearthing of the legacy, and enduring reality, of colonialism in Canada.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the allegedly murdered children. Because the Kamloops school had been run by Roman Catholics, some zealous citizens took to burning and vandalizing churches, 112 of them to date. The dreadful tale was eagerly broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera.
Yet, almost four years later, not a single set of remains of a murdered Indigenous child in an unmarked grave has been found anywhere in Canada. Judging by the evidence collected by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan in their best-selling 2023 book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled us (and the Truth about the Residential Schools), it looks increasingly probable that the whole, incendiary story is a myth.
So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors, and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries — from London to Sydney to Toronto. Why?
An obvious reason is the well-meaning desire to raise respect for indigenous cultures with a view to “healing” race relations. But that doesn’t explain the aggressive brushing aside of concerns about evidence and truth in the eager rush to irrational self-criticism.
One plausible explanation is a degenerate Christian sensibility. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of a saint is a heightened awareness of his own sinfulness. This virtue, however, can degenerate from genuine humility into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou. In The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2006), Pascal Bruckner captures this when he writes of contemporary Europe (and by extension, the West): “This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history.… Barbarity is Europe’s great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself.”
Yet in this ostentatious virtue-signalling, the penitent hogs the stage: “In Western self-hatred, the Other has no place. It is a narcissistic relationship in which the African, the Indian, and Arab are brought in as extras.”
Maybe Canada’s First Nations, too.
Nigel Biggar, CBE, is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas and author of the bestselling Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2024). He will be speaking at Yorkminster Park Church, Toronto as the guest of the Canadian Institute for Historical Education on March 1.