Is it possible that Intellectuals Like Genocide?
Theodore Dalrymple explores the case of Keith Windschuttle, an historian whose in-depth research laid bare the conventional wisdom of the past 25 years that a genocide of Tasmanian aborigines was carried out by the early European settlers.
Only 120 aborigines were killed in various conflicts, the rest died of disease.
What struck me at the time about the controversy was the evident fact that a large and influential part of the Australian academy and intelligentsia actually wanted there to have been a genocide. They reacted to Windschuttle’s book like a child who has had a toy snatched from its hand by its elder sibling. You would have thought that a man who discovered that his country had not been founded, as had previously been thought and taught, on genocide would be treated as a national hero. On the contrary, he was held up to execration.
To understand why you have to read the whole thing.