The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Similar hyperbole has been attached to every aspect of empire and colonialism. In recent decades, it has become increasingly common to talk of the European settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and America as though they involved—by intent—the genocide of the local Indigenous populations. Most of the time, this includes reference to the Indigenous populations having been wiped out or significantly diminished by the deliberate spreading of disease. This, too, relies on a distortion of events. But at some point, someone else in the world was going to discover the New World. And whoever did so was—like the Europeans—likely to enter with a level of immunity to disease that the native populations (being more homogenous and having had less exposure to outside peoples) would not possess. The natural spread of diseases brought in by Europeans could not have been deliberate because the Europeans had no knowledge of immunology, what diseases they themselves were carrying, or how those diseases might spread. Still, none of this has stopped propagandists and academics from asserting that what happened in post-Columbus America, as well as Australia and New Zealand and Canada, was not just genocide but the worst genocide ever. Here is an academic with tenure at a British university speaking on the subject: “What is the first act of Europe in the Americas? It is the largest genocide that has ever existed on the planet . . . I actually don’t understand the science of this, but app...