Victor Davis Hanson recently asked a blunt question of the Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow travellers: do they rank the United States as morally worse than Mao Zedong's body count of roughly seventy million? The Chinese Communist Party remains in unbroken power from Mao to Xi. Its current surveillance state, re-education camps, and coercive policies are not ancient history. Yet the loudest American critics of their own country rarely dwell on that record with anything like the intensity they bring to America's sins. The same selective outrage appears when the conversation turns to the Aztecs' industrial-scale human sacrifice, Shaka Zulu's conquests, or the endemic warfare and slavery among pre-Columbian and African societies. Western self-criticism, once a genuine engine of reform, has been pushed into something closer to civilisational self-loathing.
The pattern is not confined to the United States. The identical logic operates in Britain and Australia under the banner of "white guilt." In both countries a dominant cultural narrative treats the national story primarily as a catalogue of original sins, empire, settlement, racism, while downplaying or ignoring the far bloodier records of the non-Western societies that the same narrative often romanticises. The result is not honest historical reckoning. It is a political strategy that weakens national cohesion and confidence precisely among the populations whose consent is required for the continuance of liberal institutions.
In Britain the mechanism is familiar. The empire is presented as the defining moral fact of the national past, stripped of context about the global norms of the time, the ending of the slave trade, the spread of legal and parliamentary institutions, or the comparative performance of post-colonial states. Contemporary Britain is then framed as a continuing perpetrator whose primary duty is perpetual atonement. This framing justifies demographic transformation without assimilation, the elevation of group grievance over individual citizenship, and the progressive erosion of the cultural confidence that once underpinned the country's ability to defend its borders, free speech, and legal equality. Critics who point to China's treatment of Uyghurs, the Middle East's record on minorities, or the internal tyrannies of various post-colonial regimes are often met with the charge that such comparisons are themselves racist. The ledger is deliberately unbalanced.
Australia follows the same script with local variations. The settlement of the continent is cast as an original crime that permanently taints the legitimacy of the modern state. Again the comparison is missing. Pre-colonial Aboriginal societies were not pacific utopias. Frontier violence was real and often brutal on all sides, as was true of almost every human migration and conquest in history. Yet the public culture increasingly treats Australian success: high living standards, stable democracy, rule of law, as something to be apologised for rather than defended and improved. The practical effect is to demoralise the majority population while offering no coherent alternative vision beyond managed decline and managed guilt.
What Hanson observes about American DSA elites travels easily. The most vehement critics are rarely the poor or the newly arrived seeking opportunity. They are frequently the beneficiaries of the very systems they denounce: tenured academics, media professionals, politicians, and activists whose own comfort depends on the productive capacity and open institutions of the societies they portray as uniquely wicked. Their parents or grandparents often chose these countries precisely because they offered security and prosperity unavailable at home. The children then treat that choice as evidence of the host society's moral failure rather than its relative success.
Self-criticism is a Western strength. When it becomes selective amnesia about everyone else's crimes and an obsessive focus on one's own, it ceases to be criticism and becomes a form of political warfare against the nation's ability to maintain itself.
Britain and Australia are further along this path than many realise. The white-guilt narrative does not produce humility or justice. It produces paralysis, resentment, and a progressive transfer of moral authority to those who reject the liberal order that made the guilt narrative possible in the first place. The body counts of Mao and his successors remain larger. The silence about them remains telling.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/do-dsa-elites-rank-america-worse-maos-70-million-body-count