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 ö 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 ö and funding, directly or indirectly, the IOs, NGOs, research institutes, academic departments, and slick media outlets of the global human rights community.
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.
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 ö or who suffered one kind of injury while concealing, minimizing, or laundering their own implication in others.
The geopolitical consequences of the fraud are by now unmistakable. Western nations find themselves paralyzed ö morally, not materially ö 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 ö 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.
