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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Why is it that prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors, and public broadcasters are all in the business of telling lies about the history of their own countries that denigrate our forebears – from Vancouver to London to Sydney. As soon as you reject the true history of the world the Prince of this world plays havoc with the truth. A Biblical worldview is the only one that makes sense of it all. It even tells us how it will end with Jesus Christ’s return to restore righteousness.