The Great Moral Accounting Fraud

On the Moral Credit Economy of the Post-Christian World

The Money Changer and His Wife, 1514, Quentin Matsys,

Contemporary Western moral-political conscience is organized around a negative canon. It is made of a trinity of sacred crimes: Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, and European imperialism. They are taught, memorialized, litigated, aestheticized, theorized, and endlessly returned to as the trinity that makes up the singular historical identity of the modern West. Each belongs to history, but none of them remains merely historical. Each has become a site of moral interpretation and re-interpretation, a privileged scene in which the West reads its own promises against the revelatory record of its own acts.

This theological centrality is why their place in Western moral life cannot be explained only by scale, cruelty, or novelty. Human beings conquered before Europe conquered. People enslaved before the Atlantic system. They massacred, expelled, burned, starved, deported, and humiliated long before the twentieth century furnished murder with rail schedules, offices, files, industrial scalability, and the administrative rigor of the modern state. To say this is not to diminish the three crimes but to clarify them.

Atlantic slavery came to be read as the secret wound beneath modern liberty. The Shoah came to be read as the abyss beneath Enlightenment’s reason. European imperialism came to be read as the theft beneath material prosperity. Each crime was attached to one of modernity’s noblest words and made to darken it from within. The crimes are not merely treated as events but as revelations, each made to appear as an apocalypse disclosing the concealed truth of the modern West and judging it. In this sense, they exited the realm of history and entered the realm of myth. And if we see them as myth, we discover that their singularity is a function of narrative rather than of the events themselves. Their canonical singularity lies in the form of historical consciousness into which they were and are received. They became epochal because they were incorporated into modernity’s own literature of self-narration.

A crime committed in history can be made to serve as a myth about history. The enslaved African, the murdered Jew, and the colonized subject are drawn out of the density and particularity of their own worlds and made to appear inside a drama whose real protagonist remains the West. Even guilt becomes a form of possession. Modernity places itself in the dock, but, like Milton’s Satan, it also appoints itself witness, prosecutor, historian, penitent, and priest; its abasement becomes another mode of centrality. The victims are invoked, often with solemnity, but they are invoked as figures in modernity’s endless self-commentary.

Only a provincial mind could say that these crimes exhaust evil, or that the West possesses a monopoly on sin. But the West did not merely remember these crimes; it learned to narrate itself through them. The modern university, the museum, the human-rights NGO, the postcolonial literature, the DEI bureaucracy, the foundation world, the literary canon wars, the pedagogy of historical guilt, and the politics of recognition all draw, in one form or another, upon the authority of this negative canon. It supplies the moral atmosphere in which whole vocabularies now breathe: race, genocide, coloniality, trauma, restitution, representation, decolonization, structural violence, and historical repair.

There is a reason for this institutional explosion. Each of the three events generated a category that outgrew itself. Atlantic slavery became the foundation for race as a modern moral ontology. The Shoah became the foundation of genocide, crimes against humanity, Holocaust memory, and the postwar world order of human rights. European imperialism became coloniality, decolonization, postcoloniality, the Global South, and the entire suspicion that the West’s wealth and prosperity, its liberty and happiness, were all acquired through murder and plunder, and even its claim to knowledge was itself a continuation of power.

The negative canon of modernity is therefore not merely a memory of evil but a self-reflexive machinery of moral transformation. It takes real crimes and turns them into myths of self-interpretation; it takes those myths and turns them into categories; it takes those categories and turns them into credit; it takes that credit and places it in the hands of those who know how to exchange it, transfer it, spend it, and accumulate it.

This essay is concerned with that passage: from crime to abstraction, from abstraction to value, from value to credit, and finally from credit to fraud. For the sacralization of these three events has produced a system, and systems can be defrauded. What follows is an attempt to describe a three-step accounting fraud: the conversion of real history into abstract moral value, the conversion of that value into transferable credit, and the reassignment of that credit to parties whose relationship to the original suffering is remote, selective, or outright fictive. The fraud does not require that the crimes be unreal. It requires only that they be singular — and that the singularity itself be mythic.

The Singularity of Modern Self-Narration

“Modernity” is already a fiction before it becomes a philosophical problem. It does not name a people, a regime, or even an epoch in any substantive sense; it names a vast literature of self-commentary, a way of arranging historical experience so that certain societies may appear to themselves as having entered a new relation to time, consciousness, freedom, reason, technique, and moral universality. To speak of modernity is to enter a discourse, a particular literary genre about itself. Its unity is literary before it is temporal. It exists because it is narrated, periodized, and endlessly self-commenting.

The familiar accounts of modernity are always less descriptions than plots. Enlightenment, disenchantment, progress, emancipation, secularization, alienation, revolution, development, catastrophe: each term proposes not only a historical claim but a narrative form, an arrangement of beginnings and endings, innocence and knowledge, oppression and liberation, promise and betrayal. The so-called modern age is inseparable from the prose that makes it appear as an age — the strange period that discovered, or imagined, itself as a period; the historical condition that generated an enormous secondary literature explaining why it was no longer merely historical.

Its singularity lies precisely here. Not in moral superiority, nor in uniquely monstrous guilt, nor in the claim that its crimes exceed the whole previous record of human cruelty, but in the density of mediation by which experience becomes commentary and commentary becomes reality’s authorized form. Conquest, slavery, massacre, law, commerce, science, empire, revolution, and bureaucracy existed as events and institutions, but under the sign of modernity they also became signs within an ever-expanding literature about Man, history, freedom, domination, and the meaning of the age. The event was never left alone but had to be pressed for totalizing disclosure. It had to reveal a structure, and the structure had to reveal a world.

Guilt enters this literature late, though not accidentally. The older mythology of modernity was largely affirmative. It had a positive canon. It spoke of emancipation, reason, mastery, humanity, and historical progress. Even its darker idioms — alienation, disenchantment — retained the prestige of depth; they made suffering into consciousness and loss into insight. The negative canon belongs to a later turn, when the literature of self-congratulation gave way, without relinquishing its narcissism, to a literature of self-accusation. The same fiction that once made modernity the bearer of universal emancipation could now make it the bearer of universal guilt.

This is where Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, and European imperialism acquire their peculiar authority. They are not merely placed among the crimes of history but received into an already existing literary machine and made to serve as privileged scenes of self-disclosure. Their function is not so much commemorative as it is interpretive: to disclose what the fiction of modernity had concealed from itself.

Other cultures committed horrors without turning those horrors into a universal theory of themselves. Other peoples remembered defeat, captivity, humiliation, and slaughter without producing from them a global consciousness. Modernity does precisely this because, as literature, it is nothing apart from the will to self-narrate. It cannot simply suffer an event, commit an act, inherit a memory, or endure a contradiction; it must translate each into the language of self-knowledge.

The result is endless narration under the sign of guilt. The crime becomes a text; the victim becomes a figure; the historical wound becomes a method of reading. The enslaved African, the murdered Jew, and the colonized subject are made to pass into the symbolic economy of modernity’s self-description, where their suffering is preserved only by being made to signify more than itself. The preservation is also an appropriation. The words remain; the persons recede.

This is why the negative canon is a literary achievement unique to the post-Christian condition. The old affirmative myth had said: here is man come into his freedom. The new negative myth answers: here is man exposed in his domination. But both myths belong to the same literature of self-enclosure. The more guilty the drama becomes, the more it confirms the centrality of the consciousness that stages it.

The three crimes matter not because they prove the essence of modernity, as the pieties of the age insist, but because they have been made to perform that claim. They are real historical events installed as metaphysical evidence. Their authority comes from the fusion of fact and myth: enough fact to prevent dismissal, enough myth to permit endless expansion. Once this fusion occurs, the crimes no longer remain tethered to the people who suffered them. They become transferable scenes in a larger literature of guilt, and it is from this literary transformation that the later moral economy of category, value, credit, and fraud becomes possible.

Three Category-Generating Crimes

Human history has never wanted for acts of conquest, enslavement, and mass murder. All three existed wherever large groups of men interacted with others. Each of the three canonical crimes possessed distinctive historical features — the Shoah’s non-pragmatic totality, Atlantic slavery’s hereditary racial structure and oceanic scale, European imperialism’s global administrative reach and epistemic penetration. But distinctive features are not the same as extra-categorical singularity. The Mongol conquests possessed distinctive features too: speed, geographic range, and demographic annihilation that dwarfed the Shoah in absolute numbers. The Arab slave trade possessed distinctive features: a duration exceeding a millennium, systematic castration, and the near-total elimination of descendant populations. Every great crime in history possesses distinctive features. The question is why these particular features were elevated into markers of cosmic singularity while those of other atrocities were not.

The answer is authorship. The negative canon is a confessional, and you can only confess your own sins. These are the crimes the narrator committed. The selection principle that governs the canon is not severity, nor scale, nor the presence of features that exceed prior categories, but narrative identity — the fact that the self-narrating consciousness that processes crimes into myths belongs to the same civilization that committed them. The Mongol conquests are not in the canon because the Mongols did not build the confessional booth. The Arab slave trade is absent because the Arabs did not produce a literature of self-accusation. The Ottoman devshirme, the Comanche empire, the Rwandan genocide — none enter the sacred register because the sacred register belongs to the narrator, and the narrator is talking about himself.

The literary singularity of the negative canon has a political and institutional counterpart. Each crime becomes singular in a second and more technical sense: it produces the moral-political category by which its meaning is subsequently administered. Myth gives the crime its aura; category gives it its institutional career. The crime is first elevated into a revelation of modernity, then translated into a concept that can travel through law, pedagogy, scholarship, activism, bureaucracy, and international politics. The crime seems singular because it required a new name; the new name then confirms the singularity of the crime. Historical judgment and conceptual invention become inseparable.

Atlantic slavery is the clearest case. Its moral afterlife did not merely enlarge the older condemnation of slavery; it produced racism as a distinct domain of modern moral reality. Earlier societies knew slavery, captivity, caste, servitude, subordination, and conquest, but the Atlantic system fused body, ancestry, labor, property, law, reproduction, and geography into an order that later became intelligible as racial domination.

From this emerged the first great category of the negative canon: racial injustice. In its narrower and more historically disciplined form, the category refers to the concrete afterlife of Atlantic slavery, above all in the United States, where emancipation did not abolish the civil, economic, and symbolic consequences of bondage. The language of civil rights drew its power from this specificity. It did not arise as a generalized vocabulary for all exclusion or all difference; it arose from the unresolved contradiction between a republic of liberty and a legal-historical order that had made black slavery one of its constitutive facts.

The later abstraction begins when that precision is loosened. The black American descendant of slavery becomes an abstract “racialized subject.” The category is not false in itself; it is dangerous because of its mobility. It can gather under one moral sign persons whose histories are not the same: the descendant of American slaves, the Caribbean heir of plantation society, the African immigrant, the Arab or Muslim minority in Europe, the Latin American migrant, the indigenous activist, the elite postcolonial scholar. Race, which arose from a specific historical experience, becomes a general ontology of injury, capable of carrying the moral charge of slavery into domains where the relation to slavery may be distant, partial, analogical, or completely imaginary.

The Shoah generates another category, and one even more unstable because its universalization begins almost immediately. The German extermination of European Jewry became the event through which the twentieth century produced a juridical and moral vocabulary for the organized destruction of a people. Genocide, crimes against humanity, Holocaust memory, and the postwar institutional order of human rights were born in its shadow. The murdered Jew becomes central to the postwar moral imagination because Jewish death is made to bear a universal warning about man, state, ideology, bureaucracy, and extermination.

Here, too, the category begins by honoring particularity and then imperils it. The Shoah is irreducibly Jewish: a crime directed at Jews as Jews, by a regime that imagined Jewish existence as a metaphysical contamination requiring total removal from the earth. Yet the language generated from the Shoah tends toward universalization. The Jew becomes the victim, the persecuted, the stateless, the vulnerable, the Other; the destruction of European Jewry becomes the myth through which humanity learns to speak about absolute evil. Nothing in this movement is simply illegitimate. A crime of such magnitude inevitably exceeds the people to whom it was done. But the danger is already present. Once the murdered Jew becomes the universal victim, the symbolic value produced by Jewish suffering can be separated from the concrete Jew.

This separation will later become decisive. Holocaust memory may remain morally authoritative while the Jews themselves, especially when encountered as a sovereign people, are recoded as power. The Jew who supplied the category can be displaced by the abstraction that category produced. The moral authority of the Shoah can migrate toward other claimants who appear to embody vulnerability more purely, while Jews are made to appear as having betrayed the universal meaning extracted from their own dead, in a kind of moral supersessionism whose deeply Christian themes are thinly adapted for a post-Christian age. The Holocaust brought a new moral annunciation to the world by first revealing itself to the Jewish people. From within that people, some apostles went on to formulate our new universalist understandings of human rights, international law, and cosmopolitan justice. But the Jews themselves, by turning to Zionism and American power, rejected this prophecy and learned all the wrong lessons from their privileged status, rendering them permanent bearers of inherited sin. The conditions for fraud are already established at the level of category.

European imperialism produces the third category, though its path is less juridical than political and epistemic. The concept of empire helped produce national self-determination as a universal right, decolonization as a moral-political imperative, and later coloniality as a theory of domination after formal empire. All that had once been described through the older language of sovereignty, conquest, trade, mission, tutelage, civilization, and administration was transformed into a single moral structure. Once imperialism becomes coloniality, the category expands beyond the history that authorized it. The colonized subject becomes the Global South; a geopolitical identity becomes a moral position; political independence gives way to an open-ended demand for epistemic, cultural, economic, and psychological emancipation. At its limit, every asymmetry can be redescribed as empire’s afterlife.

The consequence is a new form of innocence. Under the category of coloniality, the non-Western claimant may enter history chiefly as injured, even when his own world contains empires, slave systems, caste orders, religious supremacies, tribal hierarchies, racial dominations, and authoritarian traditions that cannot be explained away as Western residues. The category does not need to deny these facts explicitly. It only needs to subordinate them to the master narrative of injury, which is nothing but a reflection of modernity’s self-narration of Western guilt.

This is the technical importance of the category-generating — and instantly category-transcending — crime. It produces a vocabulary that cannot easily be challenged because the vocabulary appears to carry the authority of the crime itself. To question the inflation of racialization appears to weaken the memory of slavery. To question the abstraction of Holocaust memory appears to dishonor the Shoah. To question coloniality appears to excuse empire. The category’s power lies precisely in this borrowed invulnerability.

At this stage the fraud has not yet occurred, but its conditions have been established. A crime bound to particular persons and histories has generated a category capable of movement. The category retains the moral force of the crime while escaping the limits that historical judgment would impose. The event supplies gravity; the category supplies circulation. Only after this passage can moral experience be converted into value, and value into credit.

From Category to Value

The categories described above do not merely classify but acquire an abstract social form. And abstraction, in any system of exchange, is the precondition for commensurability — the operation by which unlike things are made comparable, and comparable things are made exchangeable.

Consider what happens when a concrete historical injury is absorbed into one of the three canonical categories. A black American whose family has carried the afterlife of chattel slavery across ten generations in the Deep South, and a Nigerian physician who immigrated to Houston in 2003 and whose relationship to American history began the day he cleared customs, and the daughter of Indian engineers who arrived in New Jersey in 1987 and whose experience of American racialism bears no genealogical relation to the Atlantic system whatever — these three inhabit historical worlds so remote from one another that only an act of considerable intellectual violence could render them commensurable. Yet under the category of “racialization,” their radically distinct histories become instances of a single condition, because the category, having been abstracted from the specific history of Atlantic slavery into a universal ontology of bodily difference and power, makes non-whiteness itself the sufficient credential of membership. The particulars are dissolved into a single, self-narrating moral substance. The category does not describe what they have in common; it produces what they have in common by suppressing everything that distinguishes them.

The same operation applies across the other two domains. A Polish Jew murdered at Treblinka and a Cambodian killed under the Khmer Rouge and a Tutsi slaughtered in Rwanda do not inhabit the same historical world. The political, cultural, and theological conditions that produced each catastrophe are incommensurable in every relevant particular. But under the category of “genocide,” their deaths become comparable — scaled against one another, ranked, debated as to whether they qualify for the designation or fall short of it. The category does not illuminate the specificity of each crime; it subordinates specificity to commensurability. And commensurability is never neutral. It always serves a subsequent operation.

That subsequent operation is the production of exchangeable moral value. Once abstraction has made unlike injuries comparable, the moral weight attached to them becomes detachable from the concrete circumstances that produced it. The authority generated by the specific history of black Americans descended from chattel slavery can now circulate under the heading of “racial justice” — available, in principle, to anyone who can credibly position themselves within the category. The moral seriousness earned by the specific catastrophe of European Jewry can now circulate under the heading of “genocide” or “human rights” — available to any claimant who can map their situation onto the abstraction even if they were antisemitic themselves. The grievance generated by the specific experience of people subjected to European colonial rule can now circulate under the heading of “decolonization” — available to movements, regimes, and intellectuals whose actual relationship to the history of European imperialism ranges from direct to tangential to beneficiary to nonexistent, not to mention many of whom are worse offenders of imperialism and colonialism themselves.

This is how moral authority actually moves through institutions. The mechanism follows a logic that is, in its formal structure, identical to the logic of commodity form. A commodity is a concrete useful thing — a coat, a bolt of linen — that enters the market and is thereby stripped of its particular qualities and reduced to an abstract quantity of value, expressible in money and exchangeable for any other commodity of equivalent value. The coat ceases to matter as a coat; what matters is its exchange value. The useful thing becomes a bearer of abstract value and abstract value is what circulates according to laws of supply and demand.

The moral economy of the negative canon operates by the same formal logic. In this moral fetishism, a concrete historical injury enters the categorical system and is stripped of its particularity. What remains is abstract moral value: a quantum of grievance, suffering, or victimhood expressible in the universal currency of the relevant category and exchangeable, in principle, for the moral value attached to any other injury subsumed under the same abstraction. The concrete victim ceases to matter as a concrete victim; what matters is the exchange value of their suffering within the system.

Three consequences follow. First, the system generates a strong incentive to maximize abstraction, because the more abstract the category, the more claimants it can accommodate, and the more widely the moral value can circulate. “Racism” admits more claimants than “Atlantic chattel slavery.” “Genocide” admits more claimants than “the German extermination of European Jewry.” “Coloniality” admits more claimants than “the British Raj” or the “Scramble for Africa.” At every level, the pressure is toward greater abstraction because it expands the market.

Second, the system structurally disadvantages the original victims. The more the category expands, the more the moral value generated by their specific suffering is diluted. Black Americans descended from slaves now share the category of “racialized people” with recent immigrants from societies that were themselves participants in the slave trade. Jews now share the category of “genocide victims” with political actors whose relationship to the Shoah is, at best, one of appropriation and, at worst, complicity. Colonized peoples now share the category of “the Global South” with Third World elites whose own domestic power structures replicate or exceed the coercions of European imperialism — to say nothing of those whose peoples were never colonized or who themselves did a lot of colonizing, or both.

Third, and most consequentially, the system creates a distinction between those who produce moral value and those who trade in it. The producers are the concrete victims, those whose suffering generated the moral weight that the categories now carry. The traders are those who have positioned themselves within the categories without bearing the original injury, and who possess the institutional access, the theoretical vocabulary, and the professional incentive to exchange moral value for authority, prestige, appointment, immunity, and power.

The actual victims are consigned to a precarious place by the traders’ economy. As the only generators of the most prized currency, they quickly become targets of resentment by those who see themselves as performing a free trade for a more efficient allocation. And as their own victimization mutates into a cosmic category, they themselves can never live up to its demands for purity. Meaning is the new cotton.

The producer class has endowed the trader class with its surplus moral value. And it is to the trader class, and to the operations by which they effect the transfer, that we now turn.

From Value to Credit

Value describes; credit authorizes. The passage from one to the other is the passage from a system of moral classification to a system of moral entitlement, and it occurs at the moment when association with a canonical category begins to confer not merely recognition but standing — the presumption that one’s speech carries greater weight, one’s grievances demand prior attention, and one’s conduct deserves more generous interpretation than others.

There is a respectable intellectual lineage behind this presumption. The idea that the sufferer sees what the comfortable do not is neither modern nor frivolous. It runs through the Prophets, through Pascal’s insistence that misery is the proper vantage of truth. To dismiss this entirely is philistinism.

But the tradition in question grants privilege to testimony — to the voice that speaks from within a particular suffering. What the modern categorical system grants is privilege attached not to experience but to position within an abstraction. Testimony cannot be transferred. It belongs to the person who lived it, dies with the generation that bore it, and diminishes with each degree of removal from the original wound. Credit, by contrast, is inheritable, assignable, and inexhaustible, because it is attached not to what one has suffered but to where one is located within the categorical grid. It accrues not to pain but to legibility.

Once credit rather than testimony is the operative currency, the system necessarily privileges those who are most fluent in the institutional language of injury over those who are most proximate to injury itself. The sharecropper’s grandson who carries slavery’s material aftermath in his daily life and the postcolonial theorist who carries it in his bibliography enter the same categorical space, but they do not enter it with the same resources. The theorist commands the vocabulary in which credit is recognized; the grandson may not. The theorist can translate his position into institutional standing — appointments, publications, grants. The grandson’s inheritance is more likely to manifest as poverty, diminished opportunity, and the compounding disadvantages that slavery’s afterlife actually looks like when it is not being theorized from an Ivy League office. Credit flows upward, toward articulacy and institutional access, not downward.

Credit begins to reshape the very standards by which moral judgment operates. The creditor enters every dispute with a prior surplus of moral consideration — a deposit that must be spent down before ordinary evaluation can begin. His violence is received as reaction; his resentment is heard as critique; his failures are interpreted as the still-unfolding consequences of historical injury rather than as failures. The practical effect is a sliding scale on which the same act is weighed differently depending on the categorical position of the actor.

The system thereby acquires a partial immunity that no merely intellectual position could possess. The strong version of this immunity — that the moral credit of historical victimhood is license for acts otherwise deemed immoral — is easy to reject and anyway impossible to transfer. The weak version presents a subtler problem. It makes no explicit claims and draws no explicit boundaries, which is precisely what makes it so amenable to abstraction. The victims’ credit, in this weak and abstract form, preserves and sanctifies the status hierarchy of the crime. The immunity itself maintains the lower status: the moral equivalent of looking the other way at the minor infractions of a child. This very limited credit is hardly indefeasible, and it can have perverse effects, turning contemporary political disputes into competitive positioning rather than a weighing of ideas.

An argument can be refuted. A factual claim can be falsified. But credit does not operate in the register of argument or evidence; it operates in the register of moral presumption — the pre-argumentative disposition that determines which voices will be heard with sympathy and which with suspicion before a single claim has been evaluated on its merits. To question the distribution of credit is, within the logic of the system, to question the suffering that authorized it.

From Credit to Fraud

Credit requires management, and management produces a class. Between the concrete victims whose suffering generated the moral value and the institutions that now trade in it, there has emerged a professional class whose function is neither to suffer nor to remember but to broker — to control the mint by which injuries are certified and made legible within the economy where credit is honored. The postcolonial intellectual, the DEI administrator, the NGO employee, the activist-scholar, the institutional consultant, the curator of approved grievance: none of these figures typically possesses the original wound in any direct sense. What they possess is jurisdiction over the system of recognition through which wounds are converted into standing. They have the power to sell modern indulgences.

Their authority is interpretive before it is political. They determine which suffering counts as structural and which as incidental, which analogies between disparate histories are permitted and which are impermissible, which claimants may speak as victims and which must answer as agents. They do not create the moral value; they administer its circulation, and administration, in any economy, is where the real power accumulates.

This is a form of secondary accumulation, and it follows the logic of the first with an almost parodic fidelity. The original accumulation was material. The secondary accumulation is symbolic: the moral value generated by the original crimes is extracted and concentrated in the hands of a professional class. In both cases, the producers of value and its beneficiaries are different classes. In both cases, the transfer is obscured by a legitimating narrative — civilization in the first instance, justice in the second.

No one can easily inherit the specific experience of the black American descended from chattel slavery, or the murdered Jew of Europe, or the colonized subject of a particular imperial administration. But one can inherit racialization, otherness, coloniality, displacement. The more abstract the category, the wider the class of eligible claimants, and the more distant those claimants may be from the historical event that underwrites their authority. The fraud does not require that the new claimants have suffered nothing but the inflation of partial, historically mixed, or analogical injury into total moral innocence.

The most audacious case of such fraud is the passage of moral credit from the West’s negative canon of cosmic crime to the Arab Middle East, and occasionally more broadly to Islam taken as a whole, the moral foil to the West’s triumphs and guilts in the twenty-five years since September 11.

It was around then, in the years following the massacre in Lower Manhattan, that a trope of academic writing on terrorism and the Middle East started making inroads on the mainstream consciousness. The September 11 attacks and the wars that America and its allies fought in the Middle East solidified the turn of radical Islam, and especially the Middle Eastern form, into the repository of Western fears and thus guilt. Conceived thus, jihadism was just blowback from the sins of colonialism and imperialism. The transition here was not that jihad had assumed a new form or a new rationale. It was that the West was now seemingly mobilized against it. So, in the ultimate act of self-narration, the explanations for terrorism in Western cities were to be found not in the belief systems of those who carry out the attacks or support them, but in ourselves. Musings that were fringe before 2001 and edgy perhaps immediately after were firmly established in respectability by the 2015 terrorist attacks in France. By then September 11 had already informally turned into, among other things, a National Day of Reflection on the Sins of Islamophobia.

Three days after the Charlie Hebdo attack and less than twenty-four hours after the massacre at the Hypercacher supermarket, a widely shared New Yorker essay blithely suggested that the act of mourning the writers and artists of the French satirical magazine was itself an act of racism. The article maligns the murdered staffers as bigots, most notoriously by not getting a joke the magazine poked at actual racists. Nearly a decade before the October 7 War, it still has the by-then mandatory reference to “hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year,” and of course historical reference to antisemitism in a discussion of Voltaire. But curiously, though the article references the full death toll of both the magazine and kosher supermarket shootings, it cannot bring itself to even mention the latter — ironically enough, under the social media-optimized headline “Unmentionable Bodies.”

But the idea that jihadist terrorism is just payback for the cosmic Western crimes of the negative canon falls short even as self-narration. Nowhere in the non-European world experienced less penetration by European imperialism than the Arab Middle East. With the exception of Algeria, no Arab majority country saw extraction, settlement, or domination on the scale of what the Spanish and Portuguese achieved in the Americas or the British in the Raj or the Dutch in the East Indies or the Belgians in Congo. If anything, the rapid spread of Islam and the Arabic language in the Middle East is itself a massive imperial endeavor, exceeded in the last five hundred years only by the imperialism of a few European sea powers.

The “lessons of the Holocaust” are routinely invoked either to condemn any action the Jewish state might take to protect its citizens from mass murder or to demand that European countries open their gates to mass migration from the Middle East. It goes without saying, or should at the very least, that neither Arabs nor Muslims were victims of the Holocaust, and the Arab world is one of the few places today where open admiration of Hitler and the Nazis as well as Holocaust denial are not entirely out of the bounds of public discourse. The international moral and legal architecture established in the shadow of the Holocaust was, by the 1970s, entirely hijacked for the cause of reversing repeated Arab military defeats against Israel. “International law” meant that Israel’s attackers were entitled to recoup their losses, though no such law had ever existed. “Human rights” meant that every Israeli action was conceived in terms that explicitly recalled the crimes of the Third Reich, even when those actions were standard practice for democracies at war and paled in comparison to the violence meted out by the world’s more repressive states, including those making the accusations against Israel. And the web of international organizations, most especially the UN, would devote inordinate portions of budgets and manpower to traducing the Jewish state, entrenching the conflict around it, and extending a line of political insurance to all actors, state and non-state, targeting it.

African slavery existed in the Arab world well before Europeans “discovered” it, and it persisted there much longer than anywhere else, with human property trafficked overland across the Sahara and by sea in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea well into the twentieth century. Abolition would only come in 1962 in Saudi Arabia, 1970 in Oman, and 1981 in Mauritania. And the modern form of transcontinental indentured servitude was pioneered in the Gulf oil sheikdoms, the excess value of its labor, together with resource extraction, sustaining some of the highest per capita GDPs in the world — and funding, directly or indirectly, the IOs, NGOs, research institutes, academic departments, and slick media outlets of the global human rights community.

In the United States, the accrued credit of slavery, Jim Crow, and all the subsequent abuses meted out to black people dominates historical memory, and it looms large internationally because of the centrality of American domestic politics and culture to the global discussion. The mechanisms of redress are a tempting target of credit fraud. Mechanisms such as DEI, racial and ethnic studies departments, and social justice organizations embarked, in the last generation, on the same credit shift that the international human rights community had already made in the one before. Throughout the twentieth century, Arab-Americans had been seen as white and were classified as such for immigration purposes as well as for securing voting rights where these were still denied on racial grounds. Nor did they stand out, unlike other white minorities, for their efforts to end those discriminatory practices during the Civil Rights era. This has been entirely upturned in the moral universe of DEI, with Arab and Muslim minorities now conceived as “brown” and reimagined as racial victims nearly on par with black Americans and victims of discrimination no different from the experience of Latinos, interned Japanese-Americans of the 1940s, or the Chinese laborers of westward expansion.

A notable personage in all three credit transfers is, probably not coincidentally, also one of its dominant intellectual accountants. Edward Said’s life in the American academy was essentially that of the WASP elite whose power was just being eclipsed at the very time he was getting his start. No one in America of the 1960s would have seen him as anything other than white. By the time he died in 2003, he could plausibly see himself as a victim of European imperialism, and people with the same background as him could plausibly claim to be “brown” victims of American racism.

Most hilariously, Said styled himself “the last Jewish intellectual,” a claim of inheritance that is in reality intellectual identity theft. An implied exaltation of an extinct Jewish form is supposed to subtly highlight the fallen nature of the one in abundance here and now — in Israel of course, but most especially in the United States. This is the same little practical joke that the recent fetishization of the Bund in some progressive circles plays.

Sociologically, there is something considerably more subtle going on. In the innermost courts of American civilization, the guardians of the canon have undergone at least two major social transformations in the last century. Leading public intellectuals and especially humanities professors at elite universities once hailed overwhelmingly from the upper classes of the WASP establishment. Postwar, they were rapidly deposed by middle-class Jews — some German transplants, but most American-born of American Jewish parents. Beginning in Said’s time and in a torrent in the last decade, these were replaced by a new elite cast in the image of postcolonialism. The politics of the academy has moved with each social transfer, at times leaning into it, and at other times dragged against its will in an ecstatic purge.

Said is the bridge from the first generation to the third. From the WASP-y elite to the privileged tier-mondistes, almost none of whom hail from countries that were ever actually colonized (though the starring role of far-left Indian and Indian-descent intellectuals merits its own study in this context), full of rage at America and the Jews, who by some unspoken rule of etiquette are never to be asked why exactly their own families are so obviously wealthy. His claim to belong to the second of the three generations is, in joke form, a miniature version of the transfer of credit writ large.

Said’s authority was, thus, the authority of a type — a late Central European literary-intellectual type that had once been the exclusive property of the radical Jewish thinker: exilic, cosmopolitan, adversarial, incapable of reconciliation with nation or settled form, morally universal in precisely the register that Mitteleuropa had made prestigious. The appropriated, and only semi-serious, Jewishness of Said’s claim was not Jewish in any religious, cultural, ethnic, historical, or national sense — he had no relationship to Judaism or to Jewish life — but Jewish in the way that Deutscher and Steiner and the whole tradition of the non-Jewish Jew had made the word function: as a synonym for the rootless critic whose homelessness is his credential and whose displacement is his moral authority.

Said’s achievement was to take this symbolic inheritance — the credit of Jewish exile, the moral capital of Jewish homelessness, the epistemological authority of the outsider who sees what the insider cannot — and transfer it wholesale to himself, while simultaneously recoding Jewish sovereignty as the betrayal of the very meaning that Jewish suffering had produced. The Jew was morally legible so long as he remained homeless, vulnerable, textual, diasporic. The sovereign Jew — the Israeli who refused exile as destiny and built a state — became, within Said’s transvaluations, not merely a political opponent but a moral traitor: one who had abandoned the universal meaning extracted from his own dead. The symbolic Jew remained useful; the concrete Jew became an obstacle. Holocaust memory could be preserved as moral instruction while the people whose destruction had generated it were reclassified as settlers, colonizers, agents of Western power. The abstract credit produced by Jewish suffering remained in circulation. Only its ownership had changed.

Every subsequent transfer follows Said’s original template. The moral authority generated by Atlantic slavery migrates, under the sign of “racialization,” to populations whose relationship to the event is wholly nonexistent. The moral authority generated by the Shoah migrates, under the sign of “genocide” and “otherness,” to political movements that are themselves antisemitic. The moral authority generated by European imperialism migrates, under the sign of “coloniality,” to elites and regimes whose own histories include empire, slavery, sectarian domination, and the violent suppression of minorities.

This is the accounting fraud in its mature form. Real crimes generate categories. Categories produce abstract moral value. Value is converted into transferable credit. Credit is brokered by a professional class. And the brokered credit is reassigned to parties who did not suffer the original injury — or who suffered one kind of injury while concealing, minimizing, or laundering their own implication in others.

Conclusion

The accounting fraud is the most consequential engine of cultural and ideological transformation in Western nations since the Second World War. Its first and most complete victory was the destruction of the positive canon by means of the negative one. The Western literary and historical inheritance — the literary tradition that ran from Homer through Dante through Shakespeare through the novel and into the modern university — was subjected to a systematic re-reading in which every text became evidence, every author a suspect, and every tradition an indictment. The negative canon supplied the hermeneutic by which the positive canon was convicted: each great work was made to disclose its complicity in one or more of the three sacred crimes, and the act of reading was transformed from an encounter with meaning into a tribunal of guilt. To study English or History at a serious university today is, for all practical purposes, a radically different undertaking than it would have been fifty years ago. The student enters a crime scene to be processed. Literature is read for what it conceals about domination. History is studied as the genealogy of who is owed and by whom.

The humanities, in the sense that the word possessed from the Renaissance through the mid-twentieth century — as the disciplines charged with the cultivation and transmission of civilizational memory — are, in all likelihood, irreversibly destroyed. What operates under their name is a professional mechanism for the production and certification of moral credit. The professoriat administers a ledger. This is the erasure of the institutional space in which the West conducted its ongoing argument with itself about what it had been, what it was, and what it owed to its own highest aspirations. That space has been replaced by a machinery of accusation incapable of the argument it displaced, because the argument required the possibility that the tradition might contain something worth defending, and the machinery requires that it not.

The consequences have long since passed beyond the university gates. The moral worldview of the negative canon has moved through every major institution of Western public and it was carried there, for the most part, by Westerners. White liberal administrators adopted it because it answered to their own institutions’ need for legitimation in an age of eroded authority. Jewish intellectuals, working through their own fraught history — children and grandchildren of the catastrophe that had supplied the system with one of its three founding crimes — furnished much of its theoretical architecture. Women entering institutions that had historically excluded them reached, understandably, for the most powerful available critique of those institutions and found the negative canon ready to hand. We must remember the system of moral credit was built by the West, out of the West’s own materials, to serve the West’s own post-Christian need for confession without absolution. It is endogenous. It is not an invasion.

What the system generated, having established itself, was a demand. The negative canon required interpreters who could supply the appearance of exteriority — voices that seemed to come from outside the confessional booth, or that could at least perform outsideness with conviction. This is where the professional Third World intellectual enters the story: the postcolonial scholar, the activist-theorist, the institutional broker drawn from Arab, Muslim, Indian, Latin American, and other non-Western elites, installed at the commanding heights of Western academic and cultural life and charged with lending the entire enterprise the credibility of the outside.

The geopolitical consequences of the fraud are by now unmistakable. Western nations find themselves paralyzed — morally, not materially — from acting in defense of their own interests and their own citizens when such action can be redescribed, however fraudulently, as a repetition of the canonical crimes. The accusation of colonialism, racism, or genocide, however detached from historical reality, functions as a strategic weapon capable of deterring, delaying, or delegitimizing the exercise of sovereign power by democratic states. The negative canon has become an instrument of war wielded by the very actors to whom the fraudulent credit has been transferred, while the Western nations whose self-narration produced it find themselves disarmed by their own mythology. What separates the reallocation of institutional power from the inevitable reallocation of geostrategic power may turn out to be measured in decades, not generations.

The fraud enriches the self-appointed spokesmen of the wretched of the earth while leaving the wretched themselves exactly where they were. It converts the suffering that generated the credit into a currency spent by those who never bore the original cost. And the West, which invented the mechanism of self-accusation, discovers too late that the mechanism has no off switch — that a confession which can never be completed is a sentence, and that the sentence is being served by the inheritors of the guilty, who are left with the debt, the guilt, and the endless, voluntary, and catastrophic performance of their own undoing.