Nobody's fault but mine.

• Author: Minogue, Kenneth
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Neil McInnes's remarkable account of the rise and fall of "Australian genocide" ("Requiem for a Genocide", Summer 2004) is a case study in one of the more striking Western pathologies of recent times: that of the volunteer scapegoat. The common, in some ways rational, response when individuals or nations are reproached is to argue, "It's not my fault." In many cases, of course, this response is self-serving. The strange thing in these political cases is that the response of "it is our fault" often turns out to be no less irrational. Similarly, the rational response to being kidnapped or hijacked is resentment and an attempt to frustrate the crime. But the so-called "Stockholm syndrome" is a pathology in which the victims identify with their abductors. Some light is shed on these moral attitudes if we remember Orwell's view that many people (and especially intellectuals) find power hard to resist. They feel they must try to understand why Stalin, Hitler, Bin Laden and the like have the power and the passions they do. In the Australian case, most of the voluntary scapegoats belonged to the academic classes, and they went further. They not only embraced but virtually fabricated the case for national self-accusation. Many of them came to think that Australia...