In America, as in Australia, such a constant drumbeat of guilt changes a people’s natural feelings about their own past. It transforms feelings of patriotism into shame or at the very least into deeply mixed emotions, and troubling effects result from this. A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future. It makes a country nervous about itself whatever the wisdom of its actions. Embedding the idea of original sin in a nation is the best possible way to breed self-doubt. National original sin suggests you can do little by way of good because you were rotten from the start.

A final country also widely ‘blamed’ on the Europeans and so often regarded as having the same ‘original sin’ is the state of Israel. Since its founding in 1948, its founding ‘sin’ has only grown louder. Never mind that the creation of Pakistan, within the same year as the creation of Israel, brought forth unimaginable massacres and necessitated the forced movement of millions of people, the movement – and occasional expulsions – of thousands of Palestinians in order to create the State of Israel in 1948 has become the ‘original sin’ of the world’s only Jewish state. As the years passed, an Arabic term was popularised for this: nakba, or ‘catastrophe’. Very few states have ever been created without the movements of people. Many created in the twentieth century (Bangladesh, for instance) witnessed movements of people and bloodshed far exceeding anything seen in every succeeding decade combined since the creation of Israel. But today it is Israel that is continuously alleged to have been born into this ‘original sin’. The citizens of Pakistan or Bangladesh may blame things on the British, but they themselves would never be expected to feel guilt as all Europeans and their descendants are.