The Third-Worldist Logic
Third Worldism frames America and Israel as colonizers and oppressors. Yet Jews inhabited the land of Israel long before the Arabs arrived. Romans, Ottomans, British, and finally Arabs were the actual "colonizers". This article explains in detail.
In much of the contemporary West, decolonization has become a political theology - and, for some, an authorization of revolutionary violence. The days after October 7 showed how deeply this worldview has taken hold. Across Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, university protests and pundits denounced Israel as a “settler-colonial state”...
People often confuse these ideas with Islamism or with remnants of Communism. The confusion is understandable: Islamists condemn Israel in theological terms, and Communists cast global politics as a struggle between exploiters and the exploited. But today’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage - a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous...
They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West...
Israel could appear only as the last “settler colony” of the West, and Palestinians only as the final authentic representatives of global resistance. History, politics, and the region’s internal complexities no longer mattered...
[decolonization] now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology - applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict...
Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict...
The implications matter profoundly for the United States. The same framework that condemns Israel also condemns American power..
In this viewpoint, a terrorist organization like Hamas comes to be seen as the armed expression of a national liberation struggle...
A figure like Zohran Mamdani is the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory. He is neither an Islamist nor a Communist. His politics are rooted in a formation produced by the marriage of Third-Worldist sensibilities and postcolonial theory..
For the same reason, the decolonial imagination cannot register October 7 as an atrocity on its own terms...
Related
You may not be interested in Third-Worldism, but Third-Worldism is interested in you, by New Neo, 15 August 2026:
[Quoting from the above article]
... [T]oday’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage—a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.
That is why the unity between Islamists and young white leftist westerners was immediately apparent after 10/7, a unity that puzzled some people but not those who had been paying particular attention to what’s been taught in US colleges for at least the last thirty years. And that is why Israel is merely the proverbial canary in the coal mine and the larger target is western civilization in general...
The piece goes on to analyze the rise of Zohran Mamdani as “the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory”...
All of which need to be destroyed.
I also think it’s instructive to see Obama as the first president subscribing to Third-Worldism, and to interpret his “fundamental change” as a pivot towards that point of view. His attempt at rapprochement with Iran, his turning away from Israel, his apology tours, much of his presidency and in particular his foreign policy can be seen that way. Nowadays, it is the potent worldview behind the DSA, who are not just socialists but socialists with a Third-Worldist framework and Third-Worldist goals...