You may not be interested in Third-Worldism, but Third-Worldism is interested in you
In recent weeks I’ve heard the term “Third-Worldism” more and more often. Or maybe I’ve just noticed it more. Perhaps you’ve had the same experience. But what is it?:
Here’s a piece on the topic [my emphasis]:
… [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.
Strangely enough, the idea of Israel as colonist is historically inaccurate, since the Jews inhabited the land long before the Arabs arrived. The Arabs were the actual “colonizers” (after the Romans, and followed by Ottomans, British – well, you get the idea). But “colonizers” has changed its meaning:
Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn’t vanished, but it 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.
This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.
That helps to explain why neither logic arguments nor historical ones matter to those who espouse these ideas. Logic and historical facts might change a few minds, but just a few.
A short history of the settler/colonizer framework, including how flexible it has become [my emphasis]:
Much of the contemporary decolonial worldview can be traced to the intellectual realignments of the late 1960s, when the Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson published “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes shortly after the Six-Day War. Rodinson did not limit himself to criticizing Israeli policies. He offered a structural reinterpretation of Zionism itself, arguing that it was a colonial movement indistinguishable from European expansion abroad. If Zionism is colonialism, Israel becomes illegitimate by definition and Palestinian violence becomes anti-imperialist by default.
Rodinson’s structural Marxist approach ignored basic history. Jews were indigenous to the region; their migration followed persecution and displacement; and Zionism was a national revival, not an extension of the European empire. Yet his template would furnish Middle East studies with a grand structural narrative. Edward Said absorbed Rodinson’s categories and extended them into a sweeping indictment of Western knowledge itself. With Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, “colonialism” became the master key for interpreting everything from literature to foreign policy.
Over the following decades, settler-colonial studies hardened into a discipline. Alongside it emerged the concept of surrogate colonialism. First invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to describe how technological and economic dependency could mimic colonial rule, it was later repurposed by anthropologists such as Scott Atran to argue that British support for Zionist immigration made Jews “surrogate colonizers” of Palestine.If Jews were not direct colonizers, they must have been colonial proxies; if historical evidence did not support the accusation, the accusation evolved. Like settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism functioned as a tool designed to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty.
I really can’t summarize the richness of the article; I suggest you read it yourself. But here’s an excerpt describing how the ideas evolved over the years, and while you read this, remember that this is what our university-“educated” young people have been taking in for a long long time. It will help make it clear why so many of them believe what they believe so fervently [my emphasis]:
This expanding catalog [of the evils of which Israel is supposedly guilty] rests on an older revolutionary formula that took its most influential form during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) defeated France militarily; it also transformed how Western intellectuals spoke about power, legitimacy, and violence. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FLN’s presentation of the conflict as a struggle between a foreign settler population and an indigenous nation electrified French and European thinkers. Sartre embraced this narrative in 1960, describing FLN violence as a cleansing force, and Franz Fanon canonized it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), portraying revolutionary violence as the sole path to psychic and political liberation.
Their writings established the ideological foundation of Third-Worldism. The categories they articulated—the illegitimate settler, the pure native, the dismantling of the colonizer’s institutions, and the inherent morality of resistance—shaped generations of postcolonial scholars in France, Britain, and the United States.
By absorbing this FLN-derived vocabulary, decolonial theory symbolically defines Israel as the new France and Palestinians as the new Algerians. Once a conflict is cast this way, negotiation becomes impossible: the settler can only be dismantled, never recognized. This is why contemporary calls to “decolonize Palestine” echo the rhetoric used against France in 1961, and why the experience of Algeria—not Iran—guides both academic theory and activist instinct.
The FLN narrative aligned neatly with the sensibilities that came to dominate U.S. Middle East studies. …
This climate shaped figures such as Karen Brodkin at UCLA, who denied the historical continuity linking Jews to the land of Israel and portrayed the state as inherently racist; and Joseph Massad at Columbia, who cast Zionism as a European racial ideology. These scholars and kindred scholars collapsed the complexities of the Middle East into the moral certainties of decolonial thinking. The FLN model, moralized in the 1960s, was naturalized in American classrooms in the 1990s and 2000s.
That’s at least how long this has been building and spreading in universities – and beyond, as generations of students graduate. The article doesn’t deal with the influence of Soviet Russia, which beginning in the 1960s also began to spread the word that Israel was a settler colonial power; I’ve described some of the process in this previous post. The Soviets spread propaganda that indicted Israel as a racist and colonialist state, knowing this would target western sensibilities and help turn them against Israel.
But back to Third-Worldism and October 7:
Politicians and activists formed in these intellectual environments emerged fluent in the idiom of settler colonialism and Third-Worldist liberation. By October 7, the decolonial imagination had migrated from the margins of academia into public life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the attacks were the product of an intellectual system built over decades. Rodinson’s structural Marxism, surrogate-colonial and settler-colonial theories, and the legacy of the FLN coalesced into a political language in which Israel functions as a condensed symbol of Western domination.
The piece goes on to analyze the rise of Zohran Mamdani as “the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory”:
When Mamdani speaks about Israel, he is not making a local argument but delivering a civilizational critique of the West through the most convenient example at hand.
In decolonial thought, the United States is not merely Israel’s ally but also the structure that makes Israel possible—the master empire, the global settler republic, the architect of racialized modernity. Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project. When politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice. It’s no surprise, then, when decolonial rhetoric moves quickly from Gaza to policing, capitalism, immigration, borders, and the Constitution.
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.
[NOTE: You may or may not recall the 2016 debate in which Chris Christie tangled with Rubio and made the latter look somewhat incoherent. At the time, I did a deep dive into their exchange and found that Rubio actually came out way better than most people perceived, although at the time the perception of ineptitude had won out. I was revisiting that post on the 2016 debate the other day – I may end up writing another post on it – and re-read this statement Rubio made during the exchange, which seems to fit into what I’ve just been saying about Obama. Here it is:
Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America.
Obama and his political heirs (and those who are even more leftist than he) want the US to be more like the appeasing European First World, and more like the rest of the Third World.]
Third Worldism is a state of mind, taking the worst of sh1t hole cultures (and countries) as a replacement for thought; whatever it is I’m the victim.
Propagated by power mad monsters.
Neo, in your last paragraph, about this:
“and more like the rest of the Third World.”
Do you mean in poverty, in shambles?
A dystopian?
Marlene:
Yes, I do. The Cloward-Piven sort of thing – so they can take over and build anew, a Brave New World.
I’m so exhausted with the constant push of many types of activists to make people pay for perceived “sins of the fathers”.
They are never satisfied.
And certainly not satisfied with “live & let live”, nor “mprovement for all “.
Those deemed too successful must be punished.
I’m so exhausted with the constant push of many types of activists to make people pay for perceived “sins of the fathers”.
And even then, they are never satisfied.
Certainly not satisfied with “live & let live”, nor “improvement for all”.
Those deemed too successful must be punished!
Neo, thanks for the reply.
How selfish are that type!!
They seem to only feel alive when participating in a dramatic revolution scheme.
We are in dire need of more “changers”.
I am thankful for people like Rubio!
Prayers that he and his are protected.
In the article cited by Neo, Zineb Riboua does a good job descibing the intellectual and political history of what she calls “third worldism.” Maybe it’s because I’m old and she’s young, but I’m more struck by the continuity than she is.
These people have always been a threat. It’s true that they’re different from the Islamists. It’s also true that the threat has grown with leftist indoctrination by universities, the media, and the other usual suspects. But I don’t see any great current change that warrants a claim to a new political species — “third worldism.” Instead, as I said, I’d emphasize the continuity.
Way back when I first went to college, I can remember New Lefties constantly babbling about Fanon. He was the intellectual version of Che’s red beret. That’s who these people are.
Third worldism is the natural ‘child’ of the unspoken meme that the left has been gradually inculcating in the West, arguably since Antonio Gramsci. Namely, that only by racial, cultural and national suicide can the West ‘atone’ for its ‘ancestral sins’. Its source is satanic.
“The hunger of the left is control. They would rather control the wreckage of a country than to not be in control of a thriving, prosperous & happy economy. It’s a variation of Milton’s great line about Satan, who would rather rule in Hell, than serve in heaven. These are people who would rather crash the economy and be on top of the smoking pile of rubble, be at the center of the debris field… as long as they were in charge.” Pastor Doug Wilson .
It’s true that they’re different from the Islamists. Cornflower
How so? They are both totalitarian ideologies. One just wears a facade of religious pretense.
I have thought for some time that what we have seen, and what we continue to see, is the international Left and Islam operating as allies; the less-evident trick is that the Left is using Islam as an apparent ally–but the Left actually views, and uses, Muslims as its mercenaries. The apparent alliance will continue until they are, together, evidently victorious–at which time the Left will move to impose their control over their Muslim mercenaries. What the Left does not realize is that the Muslims will then turn against them in order to impose Islam on their people and governance, with the ultimate goal of imposing Islamic control over the entire world.
And make no mistake about this part of it–to the extent that it matters: Islam is indeed a totalitarian ideology. But that does not keep it from being a religion. It is very much a religion.
One of the common tactics in the attempt to drive Israel and America apart is the frequent assertion (from Tucker to Mamdani) that the US should not be sending foreign aid to Israel.
This article demolishes that argument.
“Sorry, Israel-haters — US aid pays off big for America and the numbers don’t lie”
https://nypost.com/2026/04/25/opinion/sorry-israel-haters-us-aid-pays-off-big-for-america/
Third-worldism is a key component of *one* major pattern of anti-Israel (and often anti-Semitic) thinking, but there is also another pattern. Here’s a table showing the differences between the two archetypes, which are broadly associated with Left and Right…feminine-coded and masculine coded.
https://substack.com/@vivianbaruch/note/c-303036093
The Left version has been the most virulent over the past several years, but the Right version should not be ignored.
Related…most unfortunately:
“JONATHAN TURLEY: The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.”—
https://instapundit.com/816891/
“Warmth of collectivism” (Spanish edition)…
“It Was Destroyed In Just Days…”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/it-was-destroyed-just-days
Third-Worldism is likely believed by our betters to be the FASTEST, most effective way to establish WEF/WTF-style One-Worldism**.
The rest is commentary.
Fauci and his gang of “FOLLOW-THE-SCIENCE” thugs was merely a cog in that totalitarian-adjacent, global machine.
“Fauci In Hiding As ABC Censorship Bombshell Explodes”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fauci-hiding-abc-censorship-bombshell-explodes
** I.e., EU / UN / WHO / US Democratic Party / UK-Canada-Australia Labour-Liberal Parties, et al.
@Betsybounds:
“Islam is indeed a totalitarian ideology. But that does not keep it from being a religion. It is very much a religion.”
For us the net question then becomes how do we deny said ideology/religion the protections of our 1st Amendment?
Some definition of religion must be brought to bear that excludes Islam if we want to deny them the rights derived from the Westernized Judeo-Christian culture.
Obama has become quite wealthy in his pursuit to destroy Capitalism. Ditto Susan Rice. 3rd Worldism is an accurate description of the fundamental transformation doctrine the Obama regime instituted; however, they had a different term they used – trans nationalism I think it was.
And another promising front-runner in the PowerBall-I-hate-you-all-I-hate-this-country-I’m-a-victim sweepstakes:
“El-Sayed’s ‘Queer Muslim’ and Pro-Palestinian Half-Sister Causing Headaches for the Campaign”—
https://www.blazingcatfur.ca/2026/08/15/el-sayeds-queer-muslim-and-pro-palestinian-half-sister-causing-headaches-for-the-campaign/
Speaking of Canada…Woke 2 is already in the pipeline and, according to this, is unstoppable.
“…Woke 1 was crazy. Woke 2 is worse and has already conquered Canada;
“The second wave is quieter and about consolidating power”—
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/geoff-russ-woke-1-was-crazy-woke-2-is-worse-and-has-already-conquered-canada
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
(The valiant Jordan Peterson tried to warn us all but paid the price…)
To be sure, it’s not just Canada.
Cornflour
Which reminds me of a paragraph from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, when he was a student at Occidental College.
Note that teenybopper Barack was a poseur: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.” Even back then, he was thinking like a politician : adopt stances not because you believe in them, but because they will get the reaction you want.
Betsybounds:
The trouble with calling Islam a religion is the USA’s Freedom of Religion clause, which allows the ideology of Islam to march unabridged across the land, as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) does. I view Islam only as pure ideology. Going to a mosque 5x per day and prostrating oneself is a sign of subjugation, not prayer. I understand that prostrate “prayers” are recitations of verses from the Koran, not individual prayers a la Christianity. The antique (made in Iran) small prayer rugs of Islam are often quite beautiful, however.
This post as well as the comments are a veritable feast!
Geoffrey Britain bringing in Gramsci to fortify Said, for example. Plus all the relevant links.
Everywhere do we see the tired Marxist inversion of Truth, facts, and reality. The goal is always POWER. Control over minds to propagandize and lure the credentialed into useful idiots!
And nowhere do we see these Zombie-Commies explain the fact that developing countries around the globe send their teens to the West, hoping to take acquired skills and real sustaining knowledge home. Their admiration for the West is boundless.
For example, in later 2021, I was on a flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Doha. My young seat companion was taking a break from engineering studies in Jakarta to go home to the formerly French islands, the Maldives via Doha. He insisted on my email address, so eager he was to practice his English skills.
The Classic Marxist reply is unfalsifiable: these students from the third world are suffering “false consciousness.” This all-too convenient accusation therefore justifies the top down insistence on conformity to leadership diktats.
Why? Because, as the classical Marxists explained, the proletarian masses are gullible and thus must be led by the reins and the bit and the slap on the head, like a horse. Collective cruelty grows from these ideological demands on people.
What madness must we still endure? Why do we still pay taxed dollars to the campus Kings of “Hate America — and the West — Firsters?
R2L and Cicero: The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was, at least arguably and perhaps veritably, a blunder with respect to the Freedom of Religion Clause–and so it arguably and perhaps veritably remains. THAT is why the Founding Fathers included a method for said Constitution’s amendment. In this case, amending the First Amendment is precisely what we should pursue.
The valid definitions of certain particular terms do not change according to variable opinions. The Founding Fathers were not exclusively confined to knowing Christian theology as a body of knowledge and study; they were aware, for example, of the Islamic Barbary Pirates (aka the Ottoman corsairs). They were students and heirs of European history, including the Muslim Ottoman Empire, its theological beliefs, and their enforcement means and motivations–yes, its RELIGION–including its attempt to overtake and rule Europe until its defeat in 1648.
South Africa claims that Orania’s free association equals “RACISM!” And now they want to claim direct benefit from them.
This brief video looks at different cultures and their different moral psychology by looking at the roles of guilt, shame, and fear in regulating human social behavior.
Title ‘Why Did the Third World Learn to Cry Racism?”
Basic Logic channel says:
Over the last year the small Afrikaner town of Orania in South Africa’s Karoo has gone viral. With no government subsidies, no welfare, and even independence from the national power grid, its residents turned a barren plot into a safe, functioning community. The response from much of the rest of the country (and from voices across the West) has been to brand it a new form of apartheid and demand that the Afrikaners open it up or hand it over.
This video examines why the same people who insist the West must become diverse, redistribute its resources, and abandon freedom of association never apply those standards to their own societies. Why the language of “racism” and “discrimination” is used so selectively and effectively against the West. We look at the difference between guilt-based, shame-based, and fear-based societies, and why moral language that works inside a high-trust, homogeneous culture becomes a powerful tool once that homogeneity is broken. Using Orania as the concrete example, the video shows how the demand to share what others built is not primarily about justice, but about a simpler calculation: it is easier to take than to create. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tg_gnb7KJo
BEST COMMENT ON this YouTube POST:
Brokenfirehydrant
Why can’t you develop your own country
“Slavery”
But you weren’t a slave
“Colonialism”
You weren’t Colonized
“Racism”
Racism isnt everywhere
“Yes it is”
How to fix it?
“Give me free stuff”
The 8m video ends by citing a Thomas Jefferson quote, but it is really from Alexander Hamilton: “To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizenship would be nothing less than to admit the Trojan Horse into our citadel of liberty and sovereignty.”
TJ:
Thank you for that EXCELLENT Alexander Hamilton quotation/citation!
It don’t get no better nor righter than that.
Now TJ I have it from another poster here that the entire continent of Africa is a garden spot of peace and beauty.
Now TJ I have it from another poster here that the entire continent of Africa is a garden spot of peace and beauty.
==
Stop lying.
Lying, Keith? Inconceivable.
At best he forgot a (sarc) tag, except that he didn’t name that “another poster.”
Does Keith think Africa is a small homogeneous place?