The Perils Of Fake History By Keith Windschuttle

The University of Colorado's dismissal of Ward Churchill for academic fraud was not only a welcome decision in support of scholarly standards, it will also go some way towards discrediting one of the most depressing tendencies of our era, the politicisation of history.

In Australia, Churchill has long been frequently cited by historians of Aboriginal affairs. In their introduction to a special "genocide" edition of the academic journal Aboriginal History in 2001, the editors supported Churchill's contentions that colonialism in America and the Pacific was worse than the Holocaust and that the British were the most murderous of Europe's imperial powers.

Thirty-five years ago, when academic fashions were quite different than today, one of Churchill's precursors in the history of American Indian affairs, Francis Prucha, put the traditional view of how scholars in the field should practice their trade:

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