“If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.
The strongest part of this piece is the Furet insight, and it deserves to be pushed further: a mentalité survives falsification because it was never a set of propositions. What it actually is, I would argue, is a substitution machine.It replaces the ground of politics (the real functioning of real societies) with a fixed moral hierarchy that can be applied anywhere, indefinitely: victimhood confers legitimacy, power confers guilt. That is why categories rotate (class, race, colonizer) while the mechanism persists: the content was always dispensable; the substitution was the point. And the empirical test is brutal: the ideology's own ground has abandoned it. Cubans flee Cuba; Iranians risk death protesting. Third-Worldism now lives almost entirely in advocates detached from the world it claims to speak for.
But here is a friendly objection. "Naming the threat" is a Schmittian gesture: it constitutes the political through the friend-enemy distinction. The essay criticizes Third-Worldism for dissolving every conflict into a single story, and then gathers universities, newsrooms, foundations, and movements into a single story of its own. A frame built against a totalizing frame inherits its structure. Your own epigraph warns of this: Aron asks us to doubt all the models, including the counter-model.
The way out, I think, is not a better name for the enemy but a different measure of legitimacy. Victimhood does not confer legitimacy; neither does power; neither does having the right enemy. Legitimacy has only one source: whether an order serves the survival and flourishing of humanity, the ground beneath it. That test condemns Havana and Tehran without invoking ideology at all. It also disciplines the counter-frame, because it must be applied at home too. An anti-imperial war can be legitimate self-defense (Turkey's War of Independence was exactly that: it ended where survival was secured, and made peace with its enemies); a "resistance" that feeds on permanent grievance is not. The distinction Third-Worldism erases, and that naming an enemy cannot restore, is the distinction between defending a ground and consuming one.
Zineb, I also agree with you Rubio, and Rogers that Third-Worldism is a major challenge to the US and the world precisely because it so insidious and so seductive to cultural elites and policymakers in the West. Your short essay is really effective at both situating the movement in the intellectual history and identifying the ideology’s pathologies. I’ll be sharing and discussing it with likeminded friends in the coming days.
And China is committing genocide against Muslims and Tibetans in their colonies. The Belt and Road is a neocolonial project exploiting the Global South. China is financing the Persian Empire's proxy war against Sunni Islam.
Actually, I would use the word genocide much more sparingly to bring it line with the Armenian genocide in WW1 or the Holocaust in WW2. There are two elements of genocide that must be present at the same time to qualify. A: It must be a population collapse much more dramatic than the host population, and B: It must be achieved through state mass murder.
Even if we look just at A, did Uighurs experience a population collapse dramatically larger than the Chinese Han population? I am just asking. That the Chinese don't treat Uighurs that well is obviously clear.
What about the French who erased the Dutch-speaking in the Western part of Low Countries and in Lorraine in the 16-18th century? Happens all the time... No-one spoke Arabic in North Africa before the late 7th century.
In anthropological terms until quite recently, wars were usually fought to kill all the men and capture the womenfolk.
We must make anti-Americanism and the overt hateful bigotry that comes with it TABOO again. This hate and all who espouse and sanitize it must be ostracized out of polite society and our mainstream politics, as we did to marginalize and defeat the KKK, or it will normalize and destroy the West.
“…A movement organized around grievance rather than program can migrate from climate to Gaza to Cuba without contradiction, because the object of protest is interchangeable so long as the accused remains the same…”
Unfortunately “grievance”, and its emotional handmaiden. ‘victimhood’, have become the near endemic lodestones of all shades of political movement across the developed world, mainly because they are such easy accusations to make (like “Racist”) and so easy to make appear as self-evident.
Absurdly, this instinct has become so entrenched that it can switch not only from Cuba to Gaza as you suggest, but as easily to national Reparations claims, Trans activism, BLM, ICE, and I would argue, as the driver for mass cross border migration from the Global South to the North.
Same pain, same easy reflexive response. You owe me: I want: I take.
Some of these claims are obviously valid and should be addressed by the Global North, but sadly the fog of near universal pathological self regard and self promotion of ‘rights’ obscures and devalues any legitimacy in those claims.
All we can hope that with the inevitable pushback balance is restored so those legitimate claims can be addressed and Social Justice vindicated so wounds can heal.
What third world “claims are obviously valid” ? There are no obviously valid claims , only poorly conceived fakes fabrications and frauds . Reject the invalid logic of decline - restore strength and prosperity for the first world .
This does not imply some moral imperative for Reparations, but it does suggest a practical obligation to share the accrued benefits by encouraging self-help through reciprocity.
For all its ills 19th century British colonialism left social structures such as education and civic administration, and physical infrastructure such as roads and railways, which still benefit parts of Africa to this day.
Perhaps the next step is to materially assist the Continent, not through condescending ‘Aid’ which largely fuels corruption while making donor countries feel better about themselves, but through direct economic investment building car factories, with the educational and economic benefits that would bring to the populace.
Empires didn't loot. That's not what empires are for. Armies passing through loot. But once an empire is established, there was a system of taxes, tributes and investments.
They need to adopt private property, meritocracy over tribalism, rule of law and until they do they will be taken advantage of by their own. The North has taken advantage but it was always a local selling their own out. Even with the aid. The above is the magic, not the dirt here. That they will most likely never adopt the above is the tragic.
Absolutely but it is the populations that are sold out for a corrupt leaders benefit only. The deals are usually incredibly lopsided but what does the low IQ dictator care, he is rich. The people have no say. "IF" we really cared we would have a disinterested 3rd party negotiating the for the 3rd world country. I know, won't happen but the IMF enslaves the countries and multi nationals get rich. Same as it ever was.
I think it is enough to note that the left is fundamentally on the side of the weaker ones. That Catholic ideology has become outdated, but the basic pattern provides: end-time idea and thus the division of people into good and bad. Any deviation from the path of virtue (in the sense of the respective ideology) reduces the well-being.
Those who are not ideologically trapped can take care of prosperity and progress. For a good life! A clear conscience is more important to others! You grow up either with one attitude or with the other: only a small part converted. In practice, only the intensity decides!
Nice comparison between Cuban communism and Russian communism, as well as between Marxist doctrine and Islamism! And Raymond Aron is such an underrated intelectual, which was much more than a foreign policy thinker.
It may not be something to boast about, but here in Argentina we might be considered the pioneers of this concept. I think it is no coincidence that Fidel's mind had Jesuit origins, or that there is a blend of Catholic priesthood and Marxism here in South America. In Argentina, the works of Ernesto Laclau were in vogue a few years ago—a Peronist intellectual who tried to elaborate an abstract and clean theory of thinking about "the political" by forcing a quite convincing mixture of Marxism (especially The Eighteenth Brumaire and the idea of the lumpenproletariat), psychoanalysis, and the works of the German jurist Carl Schmitt (without naming him). The friend vs. foe struggle that Schmitt uses to describe politics fits your analysis quite well as well.
Despite some lip service to that and reliance for support in UN GA, China is increasingly a developed country with surpluses of goods and capital, perhaps even the largest in the world.
Glad you’re back!
Brilliantly put, as always
Magistral!
The strongest part of this piece is the Furet insight, and it deserves to be pushed further: a mentalité survives falsification because it was never a set of propositions. What it actually is, I would argue, is a substitution machine.It replaces the ground of politics (the real functioning of real societies) with a fixed moral hierarchy that can be applied anywhere, indefinitely: victimhood confers legitimacy, power confers guilt. That is why categories rotate (class, race, colonizer) while the mechanism persists: the content was always dispensable; the substitution was the point. And the empirical test is brutal: the ideology's own ground has abandoned it. Cubans flee Cuba; Iranians risk death protesting. Third-Worldism now lives almost entirely in advocates detached from the world it claims to speak for.
But here is a friendly objection. "Naming the threat" is a Schmittian gesture: it constitutes the political through the friend-enemy distinction. The essay criticizes Third-Worldism for dissolving every conflict into a single story, and then gathers universities, newsrooms, foundations, and movements into a single story of its own. A frame built against a totalizing frame inherits its structure. Your own epigraph warns of this: Aron asks us to doubt all the models, including the counter-model.
The way out, I think, is not a better name for the enemy but a different measure of legitimacy. Victimhood does not confer legitimacy; neither does power; neither does having the right enemy. Legitimacy has only one source: whether an order serves the survival and flourishing of humanity, the ground beneath it. That test condemns Havana and Tehran without invoking ideology at all. It also disciplines the counter-frame, because it must be applied at home too. An anti-imperial war can be legitimate self-defense (Turkey's War of Independence was exactly that: it ended where survival was secured, and made peace with its enemies); a "resistance" that feeds on permanent grievance is not. The distinction Third-Worldism erases, and that naming an enemy cannot restore, is the distinction between defending a ground and consuming one.
Zineb, I also agree with you Rubio, and Rogers that Third-Worldism is a major challenge to the US and the world precisely because it so insidious and so seductive to cultural elites and policymakers in the West. Your short essay is really effective at both situating the movement in the intellectual history and identifying the ideology’s pathologies. I’ll be sharing and discussing it with likeminded friends in the coming days.
The Russian and Persian Empires are currently expanding their colonial empires. Hidden in plain sight.
Chinese Empire too. And India wouldn't be there without the Moghuls and then the British.
And China is committing genocide against Muslims and Tibetans in their colonies. The Belt and Road is a neocolonial project exploiting the Global South. China is financing the Persian Empire's proxy war against Sunni Islam.
Actually, I would use the word genocide much more sparingly to bring it line with the Armenian genocide in WW1 or the Holocaust in WW2. There are two elements of genocide that must be present at the same time to qualify. A: It must be a population collapse much more dramatic than the host population, and B: It must be achieved through state mass murder.
Even if we look just at A, did Uighurs experience a population collapse dramatically larger than the Chinese Han population? I am just asking. That the Chinese don't treat Uighurs that well is obviously clear.
The Chinese are erasing language, culture and religion.
What about the French who erased the Dutch-speaking in the Western part of Low Countries and in Lorraine in the 16-18th century? Happens all the time... No-one spoke Arabic in North Africa before the late 7th century.
In anthropological terms until quite recently, wars were usually fought to kill all the men and capture the womenfolk.
Excellent!
We must make anti-Americanism and the overt hateful bigotry that comes with it TABOO again. This hate and all who espouse and sanitize it must be ostracized out of polite society and our mainstream politics, as we did to marginalize and defeat the KKK, or it will normalize and destroy the West.
“…A movement organized around grievance rather than program can migrate from climate to Gaza to Cuba without contradiction, because the object of protest is interchangeable so long as the accused remains the same…”
Unfortunately “grievance”, and its emotional handmaiden. ‘victimhood’, have become the near endemic lodestones of all shades of political movement across the developed world, mainly because they are such easy accusations to make (like “Racist”) and so easy to make appear as self-evident.
Absurdly, this instinct has become so entrenched that it can switch not only from Cuba to Gaza as you suggest, but as easily to national Reparations claims, Trans activism, BLM, ICE, and I would argue, as the driver for mass cross border migration from the Global South to the North.
Same pain, same easy reflexive response. You owe me: I want: I take.
Some of these claims are obviously valid and should be addressed by the Global North, but sadly the fog of near universal pathological self regard and self promotion of ‘rights’ obscures and devalues any legitimacy in those claims.
All we can hope that with the inevitable pushback balance is restored so those legitimate claims can be addressed and Social Justice vindicated so wounds can heal.
What third world “claims are obviously valid” ? There are no obviously valid claims , only poorly conceived fakes fabrications and frauds . Reject the invalid logic of decline - restore strength and prosperity for the first world .
Historically, Empires looted for their own gain.
This does not imply some moral imperative for Reparations, but it does suggest a practical obligation to share the accrued benefits by encouraging self-help through reciprocity.
For all its ills 19th century British colonialism left social structures such as education and civic administration, and physical infrastructure such as roads and railways, which still benefit parts of Africa to this day.
Perhaps the next step is to materially assist the Continent, not through condescending ‘Aid’ which largely fuels corruption while making donor countries feel better about themselves, but through direct economic investment building car factories, with the educational and economic benefits that would bring to the populace.
Empires didn't loot. That's not what empires are for. Armies passing through loot. But once an empire is established, there was a system of taxes, tributes and investments.
They need to adopt private property, meritocracy over tribalism, rule of law and until they do they will be taken advantage of by their own. The North has taken advantage but it was always a local selling their own out. Even with the aid. The above is the magic, not the dirt here. That they will most likely never adopt the above is the tragic.
Taking advantage is normal human interaction. No-one should expect luxury goods for free.
Absolutely but it is the populations that are sold out for a corrupt leaders benefit only. The deals are usually incredibly lopsided but what does the low IQ dictator care, he is rich. The people have no say. "IF" we really cared we would have a disinterested 3rd party negotiating the for the 3rd world country. I know, won't happen but the IMF enslaves the countries and multi nationals get rich. Same as it ever was.
Finally you're back! missed your writing.
does this explain any conspiracy theory or dream-the 'deep state',the confederacy,maga,etc.,where facts are irrelevant vis-a-vis 'alternate truths'?
"Third, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism constitute one commitment expressed at two levels of a single hierarchy"....well put!
I think it is enough to note that the left is fundamentally on the side of the weaker ones. That Catholic ideology has become outdated, but the basic pattern provides: end-time idea and thus the division of people into good and bad. Any deviation from the path of virtue (in the sense of the respective ideology) reduces the well-being.
Those who are not ideologically trapped can take care of prosperity and progress. For a good life! A clear conscience is more important to others! You grow up either with one attitude or with the other: only a small part converted. In practice, only the intensity decides!
Nice comparison between Cuban communism and Russian communism, as well as between Marxist doctrine and Islamism! And Raymond Aron is such an underrated intelectual, which was much more than a foreign policy thinker.
It may not be something to boast about, but here in Argentina we might be considered the pioneers of this concept. I think it is no coincidence that Fidel's mind had Jesuit origins, or that there is a blend of Catholic priesthood and Marxism here in South America. In Argentina, the works of Ernesto Laclau were in vogue a few years ago—a Peronist intellectual who tried to elaborate an abstract and clean theory of thinking about "the political" by forcing a quite convincing mixture of Marxism (especially The Eighteenth Brumaire and the idea of the lumpenproletariat), psychoanalysis, and the works of the German jurist Carl Schmitt (without naming him). The friend vs. foe struggle that Schmitt uses to describe politics fits your analysis quite well as well.
No mention of the Chinese version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Worlds_Theory
Despite some lip service to that and reliance for support in UN GA, China is increasingly a developed country with surpluses of goods and capital, perhaps even the largest in the world.
There is a very interesting discussion on the phenomenon of “Third-Worldism.” It’s on YouTube: 133: Mamdani and America’s new left, with Reihan Salam