Power mad, but only in a small way

Theodore Dalrymple writes on Australian "free-lance historian" and Drunkablog hero Keith Windschuttle in the New English Review: "Why Intellectuals Like Genocide." Good stuff, but we already know why:

If the current state was founded on genocide then, however superficially satisfactory it might appear at first sight, it is necessary to re-found it on a sounder, more ethical basis. And the architects and subsequent owner-managers will, of course, be the intelligentsia; for only they are qualified.

Windschuttle himself, as I noted last January, makes the same point:

[T]here is an important truth to the idea that the way to undermine a nation is to challenge its central narrative, its history. That is why for the past thirty years left-wing academics have waged a concerted campaign to re-write the histories of their own countries, especially the histories of the settler societies of the Americas and the Pacific.

They like genocide because it's their only hope for power.

(via PB)