Fake history is flourishing across the West. Just consider these three cases

Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.

Let's consider Canada. In May 2021 an Indian band in Kamloops, British Columbia claimed ground-penetrating radar had discovered "soil disturbances" that evidenced unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 "missing children" in land associated with an Indian Residential School.

The media quickly sexed up the story into one of "mass graves", with all its connotation of murderous atrocity. On May 30 the Toronto 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 it, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, professor of law at the University of British Columbia, wrote: "It is horrific. But it is not shocking. In fact, it is the opposite – 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 murdered children. Because the Kamloops school had been run by a Roman Catholic religious order, some zealous citizens took to burning and vandalising churches, 85 of them to date. The dreadful tale was eagerly broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera.

Yet, more than three years later, not a single set of remains of a murdered Indian child in an unmarked grave has been found either in Kamloops or elsewhere in Canada. Indeed, not a single attempt to disinter an alleged grave has been made.

Judging by the evidence collected by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan in their best-selling book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled us (and the Truth about the Residential Schools), it looks increasingly probable that the Kamloops story, and the ones that followed it, are myths.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to pour an initial £100m ($198.4m) of its assets into an investment fund for "black-led" businesses around the world. This was made "to address … past wrongs" in response to the discovery that the Queen Anne's Bounty, a forerunner of the church's endowment, had "links" with African chattel enslavement.

A document entitled Healing, Repair and Justice explains. "The immense wealth accrued by the church … has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement," it tells us. "African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation's wealth thereafter … The cruelty of a multinational white establishment … has continuing toxic consequences resulting from the denial of equal access to healthcare, education, employment, justice, and capital." Every one of these claims, however, is either dubious or false. The Queen Anne's Bounty 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.

Slavery was perpetrated on black Africans by other black Africans long before it was perpetrated by white Europeans. And between abolition in 1834 and the present day multiple causes have intervened to complicate and diminish the effects of slavery.

Consonant with his church's policy, then archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar on May 12, in which he criticised Christian missionaries for treating Africans as inferior and confessed that "we (British) must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar".

That is odd, since 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 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 that they are black and feels that they are just fellow men …. If a comparison were instituted, and Manyuema, taken at random, placed opposite say members of the Anthropological Society of London, clad like them in kilts of grass cloth, I should like to take my place among the Manyuema, on the principle of preferring the company of my betters."

Australia's equivalent is the extraordinary career of Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu. Published in 2014, this argues that Aboriginal people, far from being primitive nomads, developed the first egalitarian society, invented democratic government, eschewed "imperial warfare", pioneered complex fishing technology, and were sophisticated agriculturalists. Such was the morally superior civilisation that white colonisers trashed in their greed, racist contempt and relentless violence.

Dark Emu was named Book of the Year and received the Indigenous Writers' Prize in the 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. It has sold more than 360,000 copies and has been made the subject of an ABC documentary.

And yet, while enthusiastically praised for challenging conventional views about Aboriginal culture and popularising the topic, it has been widely criticised for being factually untrue. While not a professional academic, Peter O'Brien has forensically dismantled it in Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, systematically exposing the many gaps between claim and evidence.

And in Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, eminent anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, while vigorously rejecting the description of Aboriginal culture as "primitive", nevertheless dismiss Pascoe's claims for Aboriginal agriculture and aquaculture, and expose his editing of primary sources to make them appear to support his thesis. Reviewers have described their book variously as "rigorously researched", "masterful", and "measured".

So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries against noble (not-so-very) savages – from Vancouver to London to Sydney. Why?

The reasons are several, not least a well-meaning desire to raise respect for Indigenous cultures with a view to "healing" race relations. But that doesn't explain the impatient brushing aside – even the aggressive suppression – of concerns about evidence and truth in the eager rush to irrational self-criticism.

One plausible explanation is the operation of a degenerate Christian sensibility. For Christians, the paradoxical mark of the genuinely righteous person is a profound awareness of their own unrighteousness. The saint is distinguished as the one who knows more deeply than others just what a sinner he really is.

There's considerable virtue in this, of course, for it tempers self-righteousness with compassion for fellow sinners, forbidding the righteous to cast the unrighteous beyond the human pale.

Yet, like all virtue, it's vulnerable to vice. For it can degenerate from genuine humility into a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness, which exaggerates one's sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou.

In The Tyranny of Guilt, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner captures this when he writes of contemporary, post-imperial 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.

"Since Freud we know that masochism is only a reversed sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key … Barbarity is Europe's great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility)."

In this display of virtue, the penitent hogs the stage: "By erecting lack of love for oneself into a leading principle, we lie to ourselves about ourselves and close ourselves to others … 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 Australia's Aboriginal people, too.