One of the most blatantly self-interested clauses in the Albanese government’s mercifully defeated ‘online misinformation’ bill was who it wouldn’t have touched.
Politicians and mainstream media.
That’s right: a bill supposed to tackle lies and false information excluded the two biggest sources of lies and mendacity in the modern world.
Consider some of the most egregious and damaging lies spread by politicians and mainstream media in recent years.
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.
There was just one problem: it was all lies.
There were no mass graves, nor even any evidence of unmarked graves, at all. Three years after the scandal broke, not a single murdered Indian child in an unmarked grave has ever been found. Not in Kamloops, not anywhere in Canada.
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.
Not content with flagellating itself, the church took the lash to all of Britain, claiming that its wealth was built almost entirely on “African chattel enslavement”.
The only problem is that, once again, absolutely none of that is true.
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.
In fact, Britain’s singular contribution to slavery was to end it. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby gibbered about what Britain ‘did in Zanzibar’, when in fact what Britain actually did in Zanzibar was to force its sultan to end the slave trade. Britain repeatedly went to war with (mostly Muslim) African states to end slavery.
The bill for Britain’s efforts in ending slavery was only finally paid off in 2015.
Why are so many Western elites, who should surely know better, so masochistically determined to flagellate themselves and their countries for things they never did?
The answer lies in the years of the Black Death in Europe.
As the plague tore through Europe, leaving shocking death in its wake, a curious phenomenon emerged: gangs of religious zealots travelling the land, literally whipping themselves into a frenzy. The Flagellants, as they were called, believed the plague was a punishment from God. So, they took to ostentatiously punishing themselves – whipping themselves bloody – in an attempt to convince God that they were repentant and should be spared from the plague.
The same mindset rules the Western elites today.
Determined to publicly demonstrate their virtue by means of self-punishment, they indulge in the most odious attempts to outdo one another in self-righteousness.
In The Tyranny of Guilt, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner captures this when he writes […] “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 […]
In this display of virtue, the penitent hogs the stage.
For the Western elite, it’s only ever all about them. Even when they’re pretending to profess concern for others, all they’re really doing is stroking their own egos and showing off for others’ benefit.