A few years ago, the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle published a book called The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. The burden of this excellent work (reviewed here in The New Criterion by the eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey) is to show that the received wisdom about the founding of Australia–that it involved the European genocide of the native Aboriginal population–is a myth. Europeans did kill some Aborigines–some 120 Tasmanian Aborigines, for example. But then, the natives killed a like number of Europeans. So it goes.

Mr. Windschuttle’s book is a work of meticulous scholarship that patiently sifts through the historical record to show exactly how the myth got started, how it was perpetuated, and how an entire academic industry grew up to nurture and propagate a false view of the Australian founding. You might think that a man who had discharged this service to the truth and brought his fellow Australians the good news that their country was not, as they had always been told, founded on genocide would be greeted as a hero. Fat chance. Instead, Mr. Windschuttle was greeted by howls of rage and a cataract of calumny by academics who couldn’t bear the thought that their ancestors weren’t the guilty imperialists and racists they’d always assumed they were. The reaction to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History was as predicable as it was inadvertently amusing. (See John Dawson’s rave review in Washout: On the academic response to the fabrication of Aboriginal history.)

The interesting question is Why? Why were intellectuals so hostile to Mr. Windschuttle’s book? Why were they so wedded–irrationally wedded–to the idea that their country was founded on genocide? Why, in short, did they desperately crave that story to be true? More generally, why are intellectuals–not only Australian intellectuals–constitutionally drawn to such dismal fabrications? (Scratch an American intellectual and you’ll get a similar tale about European genocide of American Indians.)

Such questions form the theme of Theodore Dalrymple excellent meditation some months ago on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History over at New English Review. Mr. Dalrymple’s essay bears the provocative title “Why Intellectuals Like Genocide.” I won’t be giving too much away if I say that the answer–a large part of it, anyway–has to do with that unwieldy and insatiably voracious thing: intellectuals’ self-regard.

The dispute was not just a matter of the interpretation of the contents of old newspapers in Hobart libraries: it went to the very heart of the intelligentsia’s self-conception as society’s conscience and natural leaders.

A conflict over the veracity of footnotes was thus also a conflict also over the proper place of intellectuals in modern society. And Windschuttle was vastly more often right about the footnotes than he was wrong. This was quite unforgivable of him.

“Why Intellectuals Like Genocide” is a classic. Read the whole thing here.

The promiscuous desire to be liked is a personal character flaw because it often conflicts with acting according the principles one espouses. This homely moral fact is binding on the great as well as the humble, and its pertinence even extends the behavior of nations. The poet Schiller once advised his fellows to render to their contemporaries “what they need, not what they praise.” This is a prescription not for immediate popularity but for lasting respect.

I thought of this recently while reading an interview President Bush gave to the London Times in which he expressed regret for his challenging rhetoric, and actions almost as challenging, in the war on terror. His regret, the Times said, had led him to replace “the unilateralism that marked his first White House term” with “an enthusiasm for tough multilateralism.”

“Tough multilateralism”: what manner of beast is that? Two headlines this morning made me ponder this with renewed curiosity: Bush urges diplomacy with Iran but all options open; the other read: Iran says West fails to stop nuclear advances and contained the useful additional observation by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that “With God’s help today [the Iranian nation] have gained victory and the enemies cannot do a damned thing.”

The popular option–the option advocated by most of Europe and nearly all Democratic politicians in the US–is to talk and talk and talk about Iran, to propose new “sanctions,” which Iran openly defies and holds in contempt.

President Bush is right that “Iran with a nuclear weapon would be incredibly dangerous for world peace.” But is he willing to take the steps, almost certainly unpopular steps, to prevent that from happening? “Jaw-Jaw,” said Winston Churchill, “is better than War-War.” True, too true. But Churchill also foresaw the cost of appeasing a fanatical enemy. “You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” he said in a speech after Neville “Peace in Our Time” Chamberlain returned from Munich. “You chose dishonor and you will have war.

Where’s the Dramamine? Quoth the distinguished William Rees-Mogg of the London Times, “Obama is the Kennedy of a new generation.” Have you ever read anything sillier? In fact, it is silly on two levels. In the first place, it posits a false comparison between Obama and Kennedy. The postmodern, left-wing racialist could hardly be more different from the patrician Machiavellian satyr. In the second place, it assumes that being like John F. Kennedy would be a good or at least a politically expedient thing to be–as if Kennedy swept into office courtesy an irresistible and progressive Zeitgeist. If you wipe the glaze of nostalgia from your eyes, however, you will recall that Kennedy barely squeaked into office, and the rasping wheeze you heard as the final votes were counted came from Cook County where mayor Daley had made sure that Democrats voted early and voted often.

Like so many Obamamaniacs, Mr. Rees-Mogg believes he has his finger on the pulse of history. He sees it all unfolding before him with the inevitability of the Hegelian dialectic. “On February 18,” he reminds his readers, “I wrote: ‘It is hard to see who can stop Senator Barack Obama becoming the next president of the United States. He has built up an excitement such as no candidate has created since President Kennedy in 1960.’” I have no doubt that Mr. Rees-Mogg is excited. He’s not alone. Most of the press corps is similarly agitated. Mark Steyn quotes MSNBC’s Chris Matthews who listened to one of Obama’s speeches and confessed that “I felt this thrill going up my leg.” (Is he sure is wasn’t a numbness creeping up his neck?) Anyone who doubts that hysteria is a contagious malady should observe the press in its ritual, self-reinforcing frenzy whenever the subject is Obama. It’s a bit like Beatlemania, but where that form of emotional intoxication affected mostly pubescent girls, this variety is non-gender specific and most virulent among aging left-liberals who have been rendered especially susceptible by repeated political disillusionment.

Like Mark Steyn, “Every time I hear an Obama speech, I start to giggle.” I know that contemporary political oratory sets a low standard, but, really, have you ever heard anything emptier and more calculatedly sentimental that the pabulum Obama emits? Of course, as Steyn points out, millions of voters have strong stomachs. And he’s right that “if Chris Matthews and the tingly legged media get their way and drag Obama across the finish line this November, the laugh will be on those of us who think that serious times demand grown-up rhetoric.” But I remain cheerful. William Rees-Mogg believes he can peek into the engine room of history. I think that the only thing that is inevitable is the capacity of the world to surprise us. Mr. Rees-Mogg says that “It is hard to see who can stop Senator Barack Obama becoming the next president of the United States.” I can help him out there. It isn’t really hard. His name is John McCain.

The indefatigable Glenn Reynolds reports on the reaction at JohnMcCain.com to Hillary Clinton’s speech announcing her withdrawal from the Democratic nomination.

Ultimately, and ironically, it seems she fell victim to a vast left-wing conspiracy that resented her generally centrist foreign policy views (early support for the Iraq war, support for Kyl-Lieberman, unwavering support for Israel, etc.).

And so it was interesting that she barely touched on foreign policy in her concession speech today. She mentioned Iraq only twice, she mentioned terrorism only once, and she didn’t mention Iran at all. After all, her serious approach to each of these issues proved liability in the Democratic primary. She spent years building a strong record on national security, and in the end her party opted for a candidate with no national security experience at all.

This strikes me as about half right. How serious was Hillary Clinton’s approach to foreign policy issues? It was calculated, certainly, some might say opportunistic. I admired her response in one of the early debates on PBS last year when she and the other candidates were asked what the first thing they would do should a US city suffer a terrorist attack. Obama said the first he would do was make sure that there as “an effective emergency response” so there wasn’t a reprise of Katrina. Hillary–with some qualifications, it is true–said that the first thing she would do was “respond,” which I took to mean “retaliate”–the correct response, in my view.

But by and large Hillary Clinton’s position on foreign policy issues listeth as the wind bloweth. The commentator over at JohnMcCain.com mentions her “early” support for the war in Iraq, but that was back when supporting the President on Iraq was the popular thing to do. As the popularity of that position eroded, so did Mrs. Clinton’s support.

But where that commentator was exactly right was in his comment on the Democratic party’s opting for “a candidate with no national security experience at all.”

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Experience isn’t everything. There is also talent, character, commitment to the right values. Obama’s talent is for ingratiating himself with the left-liberal factions of the electorate. His character was displayed, for example, by his allegiance to the church, and therefore to the announced positions, of Rev. “God-damn America” Wright and by his friendship with aging 60s radicals like Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn. When it comes to foreign policy, the “cash value” of all this was shown in his declaration that he would be happy to meet, without preconditions, leaders of nations like Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea.

I used to think that Obama was a sort of updated version of George McGovern, with a generous helping of Jimmy Carter’s self-righteousness thrown in for good measure. I now believe I misread Obama. He is something far more grandiloquent, and far more toxic. He is a reprise of 1960s radicalism, burnished by a Harvard education, underwritten by the simmering resentments of an anti-democratic elite that never recovered from the shock of Ronald Reagan, the end of the Soviet Union, and the stupendous, historically unprecedented, prosperity of the last two decades. They will not easily forgive America for those victories, and an Obama presidency would make sure they were not repeated.

Quick: what is the fastest growing religious movement in the United States? No, not Islam, but the Church of Environmentalism. It is a low church, adamantly non-ecumenical, but aggressively proselytizing. More than a decade ago, the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed that “Environmentalism is school prayers for liberals.” How right he was. But I wonder whether even so astute an observer as Professor Mansfield foresaw just how widespread, and how passionate (as in Yeats’s “the best lack all conviction, the worse are full of passionate intensity”), the Church of Environmentalism would be in the early 21st Century.

There is a lot to be said about this church, and I will doubtless have occasion to return to say more about it in the future. For now, I’d just like to reprise a little quiz I propounded some time ago. You’ll need a pencil and a piece of paper. Ready?

Who said this, Al Gore or Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a., the Unabomber? Take your time . . .

“The twentieth century has not been kind to the constant human striving for a sense of purpose in life. Two world wars, the Holocaust, the invention of nuclear weapons, and now the global environmental crises have led many of us to wonder if survival – much less enlightened, joyous, and hopeful living – is possible. We retreat into the seductive tools and technologies of industrial civilization, but that only creates new problems as we become increasingly isolated from one another and disconnected from our roots.”

OK, time’s up: that one was Al Gore, from his book Earth in the Balance.

How about this one:

“It is not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order. Nature takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for countless centuries, many different kinds of human societies coexisted with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage. Only with the Industrial Revolution did the effect of human society on nature become really devastating.”

Stumped? That one is Mr. Kaczynski, from the Unabomber’s Manifesto.

Here’s another:

“Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response. Isolated pockets of resistance fighters who have experienced this juggernaut at first hand have begun to fight back in inspiring but, in the final analysis, woefully inadequate ways.”

What d’ya think? Don’t be hasty! That one’s big Al, that chap Mark Steyn once described as our first alien candidate for President.

But this one should be easy:

“The positive ideal that is proposed is Nature. That is, wild nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control.”

Did you guess Al again? Nope: it’s the other insane fellow, the chap whose hobby was mailing letter bombs to people. Gosh, this is confusing. But after all, Al Gore is a Serious Person: former Vice President of the United States, possible Democratic nominee for the top slot in 2008. Did he write this:

“The modern individual on the other hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless: nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, and nationwide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.”

Yes, that’s Al! Oops–nope, my mistake: that one’s the unabomber. This one’s Al:

“Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will have an impact that is, on average, many times more destructive than that of a child born in the developing world.”

Surely you can tell the difference. Right? I mean, one are the insane ravings of a homicidal lunatic: that’s clear enough. And the others? What are they? The clarion call of conscience by one of our elder statesman–aren’t they?

“Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems.”

Quick: who said that one? Nope, not Al.

“All pre-industrial societies were predominantly rural. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did before.”

That’s not Al, either. But this is:

“What does it say about our culture that personality is now considered a technology, a tool of the trade, not only in politics but in business and the professions? Has everyone been forced to become an actor? In sixteenth century England, actors were not allowed to be buried in the same cemeteries as ‘God-fearing folk,’ because anyone willing to manipulate his personality for the sake of artifice, even to entertain, was considered spiritually suspect.”

Have a nice day. (Hat tip to this link, which has a fuller version of this quiz.)

Here’s the news report, sent to me by a friend some while ago:

June 6, 1944. -NORMANDY- Three hundred French civilians were killed and thousands more wounded today in the first hours of America’s invasion of continental Europe. Casualties were heaviest among women and children.

Most of the French casualties were the result of the artillery fire from American ships attempting to knock out German fortifications prior to the landing of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. Reports from a makeshift hospital in the French town of St. Mere Eglise said the carnage was far worse than the French had anticipated and reaction against the American invasion was running high. “We are dying for no reason,” said a Frenchman speaking on condition of anonymity. “Americans can’t even shoot straight. I never thought I’d say this, but life was better under Adolph Hitler.”

The invasion also caused severe environmental damage. American troops, tanks, trucks and machinery destroyed miles of pristine shoreline and thousands of acres of ecologically sensitive wetlands. It was believed that the habitat of the spineless French crab was completely wiped out, threatening the species with extinction.

Michelle Malkin has more, including this classic video from The Combat Report.

Amusing? Yes, sure. But sobering when you ask yourself this: could we actually prosecute an operation like the Normandy landings today–I don’t mean “Would such an operation be within our tactical and strategic competence?” It would. But it is not at all clear that media would acquiesce in the operation–acquiesce, I mean, in their own survival.

Now, on the 65th [Oops--I meant 64th, as several kind readers have pointed out] anniversary of D-Day, I propose 2 moments of silence. One in thanks for the brave men who fought and died that tyranny might be checked and freedom flourish, one in hopes that, when and if we are challenged again by such enormity as Hitler’s Reich, we will have the courage and character to meet it forthrightly.

So, “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has told supporters that she would agree to be Senator Barack Obama’s running mate if he offered her the vice presidential spot.” Thanks for the offer! Now, what would you do were you Obama? Hillary potentially brings a lot of votes, especially among adults. But at what cost? How do you spell “Vince Foster?” Advice to Senator Obama should he choose Mrs. Clinton as a running mate: watch your back.

Most of us who live in the West like to believe that we enjoy an ever more robust right of free speech. How many things that were unmentionable when we or our parents were children are now broadcast from the roof tops, not to mention the local news stand and computer screen?

In fact, though, about many things speech is far more curtailed now than it was a hundred years ago. I was reminded of this by “Caveat Emptor,” David Warren’s excellent though depressing comparison of how two different advertising campaigns in Canada have fared. On the one hand, there is the billboard advertisement paid for by LifeCanada, a pro-life group, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision to remove all legal restrictions on abortions in the Maple Leaf republic [correction: monarchy, as several readers have pointed out]. The advertisement read:

“9 months. The length of time an abortion is allowed in Canada. Abortion. Have we gone too far? www.AbortioninCanada.ca.”

You might approve of Canada’s law regarding abortion, or you might disapprove of it. LifeCanada disapproves and exercises its putative right of free speech 1) to remind the public of what the law actually is and 2) to ask whether it is a good thing. The result? Advertising Standards Canada last week ruled that the ad was “deceptive.” Why? Because, explained ASC, the ad did not deal with “access” issues. Meaning–what? As Warren notes, “The feminist red herring about “access” is not something worthy of serious discussion. When a woman wants an abortion in this country, she gets it, pronto. That is indeed a very good reason why abortions in the third trimester are comparatively rare. And yet they do happen, and they are quite legal. The billboard wasn’t discussing numbers, it was discussing law.”

Warren compares what happened to LifeCanada’s ad to the fate of a widely disseminated “public service” advertisement from the feminist Canadian Women’s Foundation meant to “create awareness of domestic violence.” “Under the headline, ‘Shelter from the Storm,’” Warren notes, the advertisement

depicts “a sullen, rather menacing father, staring defiantly at the camera” from one end of a sofa, and “a waifish, stressed-looking mother shielding anxious children’ at the other. (The descriptors are Barbara Kay’s, and I cannot improve on them.) A dotted vertical line divides this father from the rest of his family.

The message of this advertisement is as unambiguously hateful as it is clichéd and slick. Without any further words it communicates a savage denunciation of “white males,” and supports the feminist stereotype that they are violent, abusive, and tyrannical by nature. . . .

It is inconceivable that any “advertising standards” authority would rule such an advertisement “deceptive” at the present day. Even had they the desire, none would have the courage to face down the inevitable feminist wrath. The (typically white male) corporate executives who agree to disseminate such obvious hate literature, do so in an expectation of what would happen if they refused. And yet if the stereotype were true, they would be quivering in fear of all the sullen, menacing, defiant male customers they had mortally offended.

Welcome to the Orwellian realm of political correctness where white is black, night is day, and freedom is slavery.