The Decolonial Delusion

When victimism becomes a worldview

The Double Secret, by René Magritte, 1927.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

As Oswald Spengler wrote, cultures can find themselves trapped in forms that do not belong to them. He called this condition “pseudomorphosis,” when an emerging cultural soul is forced to develop within the external structures of a dominant civilization. Spengler believed this happened to the Magian (Arab-Islamic) world after the Battle of Actium, when the eastward momentum of a rising cultural order was halted by Roman power. The result was not synthesis, but arrest: the deeper impulses of the new culture were shaped, and also misshaped, by a civilizational shell not of its own making.

A version of that dynamic can be seen today, not through empire but through ideology. The intellectual and political classes of the contemporary Middle East increasingly speak in a language developed elsewhere, for different experiences, different crises, and different wounds.

This language is decolonial ideology. What began as a framework for analyzing colonial legacies has ossified into a secular theology. In Western universities, NGOs, and activist spaces, it no longer questions power as it replaces thought with posture. History is flattened into morality and politics reduced to grievance. The world is split into binary roles: oppressor or oppressed, villain or victim. Context is discarded, complexity unwelcome, and identity elevated above all.

“Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.”
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

Decolonial ideology claims to be a framework for justice, but in practice, it offers something else: escape. It turns blame into worldview, grievance into identity, and self-examination into betrayal. It thrives in environments marked by dysfunction because it offers a ready-made explanation that demands nothing but a moral script and a permanent enemy.

Its intellectual roots lie in Marxist-Leninist thinking. Like Marx, it views history as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed. Like Lenin, it appoints a self-righteous vanguard to speak on behalf of the voiceless. But instead of class struggle, it deals in cultural grievance; instead of factories, it fixates on identity. Transplanted into the Middle East, the formula breaks down almost immediately.

First, it mistakes foreign fingerprints for the whole crime scene. The region’s core dysfunctions—nepotism, tribalism, and institutional stagnation—are not colonial remnants. They are locally manufactured and zealously preserved. Second, it imposes an ill-fitting colonial narrative on societies whose problems are largely self-inflicted. Third, it paralyzes reform: turning self-critique into betrayal and blame into political capital.

Another striking contradiction in the Arab world is the following: societies that once exalted strength, pride, and honor now embrace a worldview built on fragility and grievance. A political culture shaped by stoicism and status has adopted a language that valorizes woundedness. The mismatch is glaring but almost never acknowledged.

That disconnect is amplified, not challenged, by the diaspora. In fact, the appeal of decolonial ideology is often strongest among diaspora communities in the West. Second- and third-generation Arabs and North Africans, caught between inherited identity and modern liberal norms, often adopt decolonialism as a moral anchor. It offers instant purpose, social legitimacy, and a ready-made narrative of justice. But what they defend is rarely a living society, indeed it’s a projection: an imagined homeland, purified of contradiction. From the safety of Paris or Toronto, they denounce repression they do not endure and romanticize regimes their families once fled. In doing so, they help export an ideology that excuses the very dysfunctions they claim to oppose.

And as this ideology travels, it mutates. The further it gets from reality, the more symbolic and dangerous it becomes. One of its most corrosive forms is the antisemitism now embedded in its rhetoric. In much of the Middle East, Israel is no longer treated as a state, but as a symbol, an abstract embodiment of colonial evil. The Jewish state becomes a screen for projection: the target of every grievance, humiliation, and failure. All of this becomes a conspiracy disguised as virtue. And it’s not incidental. It’s ultimately and utterly structural. A worldview built on oppression requires a permanent oppressor. If the West is too abstract, Israel, and by extension, the Jew, becomes the next convenient stand-in.

That same worldview also demands conformity and punishes those who reject it. The contradiction deepens when we look at Arab states that have explicitly refused to adopt the language of permanent grievance especially in the Gulf. Countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain have prioritized strategic autonomy, modernization, and institutional development over victimhood narratives. They decline to play the role of the eternally oppressed and for this, they are treated with suspicion. Not for failure, but for refusing to fail in the prescribed way. Their success breaks the narrative.

At the same time, other regimes have learned to weaponize that very narrative. At the geopolitical level, the stakes grow sharper. Decolonial rhetoric has become a strategic tool for states that thrive on misdirection. The Islamic Republic of Iran cloaks its brutality in the language of resistance, using anti-imperial slogans to justify domestic repression and regional interference. Russia and China use the same playbook, dressing expansionist ambitions in post-colonial rhetoric to deflect criticism and discredit rivals. Decolonialism has become the ideology of regimes that need enemies more than they need reform.

What begins as moral theater in the West becomes political cover elsewhere and intellectual dependency at home. That such a worldview has taken root in the Arab world is not merely surprising, it signals a deeper intellectual retreat. A region with a long tradition of legal reasoning, political thought, and cultural production now borrows its moral vocabulary from movements that would rather see it remain a victim than become a participant in its own recovery.

This dependency comes at a cost. When critique is imported unexamined, it erodes self-awareness. Societies begin to imitate resistance rather than confront their own realities. They chant, they posture but they do not ask questions. And in this performance, they remain suspended.

A culture that refuses to face itself cannot change. A politics built on deflection will eventually collapse. And a society that builds its identity on grievance will remain captive to it, forever demanding, never transforming. In the end, decolonial ideology is not a path forward, it is a delusion.