Counter-Currents
Putting the Cart Before the Horse
On the Fallacy of Rightist Third-Worldism
Jarosław Ostrogniew
1,889 words
Rightist third-worldism is a tendency among people of the broadly understood Right — nationalists, New Rightists etc. — to take the side of the “Third World.” The Third World is understood by them very differently from its original meaning — that is, referring to those countries that were not on either side of the Cold War). I think that in most cases “Third World” basically means “non-white countries.” Thus, in reality Rightist third-worldism boils down to people of the Right taking the side of non-white countries, because they think that for certain reasons it would benefit their own countries. I believe that this is a completely wrong viewpoint and aim to explain why in this short essay.
A brief history of Rightist third-worldism
The two Rightist thinkers, among those who have the most influence on the contemporary Right, who were the first to present a form of third-worldism were the founders of Integral Traditionalism, René Guénon and Julius Evola. Already in their early fundamental works — Guénon in Crisis of the Modern World and Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World — argued that the West is not synonymous with the ideology of progress, humanism, and secularism, and that these are a corruption of the original Western Tradition. They have also argued that the East is not inferior to the West given that it has preserved more elements of the original Primordial Tradition. While Guénon went so far as to claim that the East is in fact superior to the West, and that it is only in the East that man can reunite with Tradition, Evola claimed that putting action above contemplation is a unique Western path which can still be followed today. Regardless of these differences, both Guénon and Evola inaugurated a different way of looking at both the East and the West on the Right which would eventually result in the birth of contemporary Rightist third-worldism.
You can buy Alain de Benoist’s Ernst Jünger between the Gods and the Titans here.
The pinnacle of Rightist third-worldism came with Alain de Benoist and the French New Right, especially his book Europe, Tiers monde, même combat (Europe, Third World, One Struggle), first published in 1986. In this work, de Benoist makes all the classic Rightist third-worldist arguments: Both Europe and the Third World are victims of American imperialism, liberalism, and capitalism; Europe and the Third World should unite in a struggle against the United States; non-white migrants are not the main problem but rather the liberal capitalist order which brings them here; and the Third World is in a terrible state because the West continually undermines or destroys it. This was paired with the new concept of “ethnopluralism,” the idea that every ethnic group, white or non-white, has the right to preserve its own identity and does not need to be in conflict with any other ethnic group when it is minding its own business.
Alain de Benoist’s ideas were soon developed — or rather various elements of these ideas, and to varying degrees — by Claudio Mutti, Derek Holland, Roberto Fiore, Troy Southgate, and most other New Right and Third Position figures and organizations. They were finally picked up by the famous charlatan Alexander Dugin, who made use of them when speaking to Rightist audiences, and it is probably due to this influence — along with English translations of Alain de Benoist and interest in the French New Right — that Rightist third-worldism has enjoyed a second coming, this time among contemporary anglophone nationalists such as the National Justice Party.
Fallacies of Rightist third-worldism
The core of the fallacy of Rightist third-worldism is a case of putting the cart before the horse: mistaking consequences with causes. The Rightist third-worldist believes that the non-white world hates the West — and white people — because the West is liberal or capitalist. This belief is based solely on the anti-liberal or anti-capitalist declarations of non-whites. To put it differently, if whites changed their ideology, the Third World would change their hard feelings toward us. This is false. The vast majority of white people of either the Left or Right hugely underestimate the level of hatred that non-whites have for people of other ethnicities, especially white people. The level of racial hatred which even those whites who identify as racists would consider borderline mad is the norm among non-whites. Non-whites are ethnocentric by default. They hate people of other ethnicities exactly because of the otherness of their ethnicities; hatred for the characteristics associated with other ethnic groups is a consequence of this original racial hatred. Hatred for other ethnic groups is the starting point, not the endpoint, of the non-white vision of the world and society.
The Rightist third-worldist believes that non-whites hate liberalism and capitalism, and thus they hate the West and white people. In reality, non-whites simply hate the West and white people, and therefore they hate liberalism and capitalism. Had white people been conservative monarchists, non-whites would hate conservatism and monarchy (anti-colonialist movements in the British colonies in the early twentieth century are a good example). Had white people been Communists, non-whites would hate Communism (non-white independence movements in the Soviet Union are a good example, where Communism was associated with white Communists, in this case with the Russians). Changing the predominant ideology in the West will not change non-whites’ hatred for the West and white people, because this deeply-rooted racial hatred is the unchangeable basis of the non-white worldview.
This current non-white hatred of liberalism and capitalism, and their past hatred of conservatism and monarchy, is just a declaration and an expression of non-white ressentiment towards white people. My main proof to support this argument is the fact that whenever they are faced with the possibility of voting with their feet, non-whites choose to go to liberal and capitalist white countries. This has nothing to do with their ideology or their current system of government, but everything to do with the fact that whites are much better at creating well-functioning countries than non-whites. Despite their declarations, non-whites are well aware of this fact — much more so than whites, in fact.
Here we touch upon the next fallacy of the Rightist third-worldists: Non-white countries are in a poor state because of Western colonialism and exploitation as well as present aggressive Western foreign policies. This in turn causes increased non-white migration to the West. While one must admit that Western foreign policy, especially when it comes to the Middle East, used to be quite aggressive, and the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan were pointless and surely did not improve the situation in the region — this is not the main cause of the poor situation there (or in any other non-white region, for that matter). The fact is that non-whites have not been able to create a well-functioning country. There are some examples of quite well-functioning non-European countries, such as ancient Persia or modern Japan, although the former was a “borderline white” country and the latter is a mix of white social order with non-white ethnocentrism. Non-white countries have always oscillated between anarchy and tyranny, both of which are based on violence and exploitation.
China is a great example. Although it has been ruled by local despots (warlords), an Emperor, or by a Communist dictator throughout its history, one feature remains constant: It has always been a dog-eat-dog society where the state’s purpose is to rob you, not protect you. The history of Europe and the larger West has not been all roses, either, but the common people have on average had it much better here than those in non-white countries. Non-white countries have been either anarchical or tyrannical since long before Western colonialism, and are still this way almost a century after Western colonialism ended. No matter how many bombs or food the West sends, non-white countries will always be worse to live in than white countries. Again, this is something that non-whites are well aware of (and they are much more aware of it than whites).
You can buy Julius Evola’s East & West here.
The overall permanent poor state of non-white countries is directly connected to the next fallacy of the Rightist third-worldists: non-white immigration to white countries is a consequence of Western foreign policies. Now, I must admit that there is some truth to this: Non-whites migrate to white countries because white countries are a better place to live. But the rest of that statement is false. As I have just argued, the poor state of non-white countries is not caused by Western foreign policy but by non-whites themselves. Hence the final third-worldist fallacy: Had the West ceased interfering in the Middle East or any other non-white region, we would not have non-white immigration from these countries. This is false. While the West should cease interfering in the Middle East, because it is not beneficial to whites, this is not the cause of non-white migration. The actual cause is the fact that white countries are better places to live. Let us observe that it is not during a crisis such as a war that most non-whites come to Europe. It is rather during times of relative peace and when conditions in these countries improve — i.e., when the conditions are good enough for non-whites to carry out their migration. There will always be migrants from non-white countries, and we should be thinking about actual ways of stopping them. Improving the conditions in non-white regions will actually mean more non-white migration into white countries.
The answer to the fallacy: Taking our own side
Rightist third-worldism is a great proof of the evolutionary biologists’ claim that a positive trait — in this case, intelligence and abstract thinking — can become an obstacle or even the downfall of both an individual or a whole group. René Guénon ended up rejecting his French identity, converting to Islam, and role-playing as an Arab, ultimately breeding out his genes through intermarriage. Alain de Benoist, for his part, has completely alienated himself from the nationalist scene in France, and while he remains one of the most important Rightist intellectuals of the twentieth century, he has lost any chance of seeing his ideas having any actual impact on the real world. By distancing himself from the Right, he has not found any following on the Left, who see him as an “evil fascist” who needs to be silenced into oblivion. Furthermore, non-whites do not care about “ethnopluralism” or the “common struggle of Europe and the Third World”; they simply want to get free stuff from white people and ultimately see us go extinct. The only good thing about contemporary Rightist third-worldists is that they have zero impact on the real world, and the only thing they can do is to cheer on non-whites as they genocide whites in their groups on Telegram and Discord.
My answer to the fallacy of Rightist third-worldism is the same as always: White people need to take their own side. There is no one coming to save us. Either we save ourselves or we become extinct. There is no common struggle of Europe and the Third World; there is only our struggle against our extinction. Liberal capitalism and the Third World are working hand-in-hand against us. While the original Rightist third-worldism of Alain de Benoist was a theory created in good faith, it is a perfect example of an intellectual overthinking simple truths and turning a blind eye to his own mistakes; the later Dugin-inspired aggressive third-wordlism is an anti-white cancer which needs to be banished from our movement.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
17 comments
There was a time in the not too distant past when people of the Third World were more content in their own space. White hippies and vagabonds were able to travel through Afghanistan and North Africa freely. There must have been more good will or indifference or respect out of fear towards Whites to allow this. They didn’t always hate. Maybe because they didn’t have the opportunity.
It is the effects of globalism that have set people on the march. It is certainly American intervention that has made many enemies.
The internet allows them to see something perceived as better and to be envied. All the illegal aliens were looking at their phones on a recent Tucker exposé.
This hatred is the result of non-Whites losing respect for their hosts because they just let them in. They perceive Whites as weak because of this and thus the contempt. It is basic to ‘base’ human nature to feel this way.
Global shift in the world economies with the free flow of capital, interventions, and open borders are the fault of Whites—at least those in power. Rightist Third Worldism has or rather had a valid point.
The cat is out of the bag at this point. The above article states what must be dealt with now. The White world is not blameless and it’s going to be difficult to herd them cats back to where they belong especially when the ruling class of their countries take advantage of the safety valve by letting their malcontents emigrate. Then there is the maliciousness of releasing a vanguard.
🎶How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.🎶
That old song was written about the restlessness of returning Great War veterans and now it applies to mass migration.
This hatred is the result of non-Whites losing respect for their hosts because they just let them in. They perceive Whites as weak because of this and thus the contempt. It is basic to ‘base’ human nature to feel this way.
Perhaps this is a healthier way to look the relations between racial groups than the article itself: search for commonalities amongst everyone and then you can begin to sort out differences.
Different racial or ethnic groups must learn to get along with each other, at least from across their mutually defined borders. Honesty, empathy and/or sympathy are important. We are defined by our relationships with others.
Thank you. That was clear and coherent. I now have some understanding of what ‘third worldism’ is (I never bothered following up on it, I just was aware of this Dugin guy and how dangerous he is).
A perfunctory glance at how Japan and Germany rebuilt themselves after WW2 shows how some peoples are functioning-society builders, and others are not.
As a representant of the Third World I can only agree with the author. Just let us alone. All of us: Kaukasians, Qazaqs, Chinese, Arabs, Ukrainians, Uygurs, Iranians, Afghanis, Türks, Hindus, etc. We are not Western Europeans and we do not want to be them. Only our traitorous ruling elites sometimes wanted this, because they have sold themselves to the West, and their pro-Western activities were not good for both natives and for Westerners.
Ukrainians are not members of the Third World. Don’t try and claim them. I consider them outright Westerners or honorary members of the West, that will one day be “true” Westerners.
It is odd to place Ukrainians side by side with those ethnicities, although they are fairly different from Western Europeans. On a global-cultural scale, they could not be anything but European.
Well, Ukrainians, with the exception of the so-called Western Ukrainians, annexed by Stalin in 1939 and 1945, are mostly descendants of Slavized Türkic peoples, specifically of Pecenegs (Becinekler) and Polovtsy (Qipcaklar), but also of Hazars, who have built Kiev, and others. They were and are Europized but this was only shallow.
***
that will one day be “true” Westerners.
Before this one day they all will be dead in the war, provoked by the “Westerner” Boris Johnson, who himself is a Circassian Türk. We all can see now how many goods and benefits the Europization and Westernization have brought to Ukraine.
Why am I not surprised that a deluded Turk supremacist would claim that most Ukrainians are Turks, without a shred of evidence?
The genetic studies I’ve seen on Ukrainians show a primarily Slav ancestry with a little Turkic influence.
I’ve never been to Ukraine, but I have a friend who lived there for over a year during the last decade. He emailed me many photos. The people in the photos looked very white to me. Some Turks are racially white (perhaps their ancient ancestors were European inhabitants of what was once “Asia Minor”); we classify Turks as Asiatic more because of their religious and cultural than racial background (not that there aren’t a lot of clearly non-white Turks, too). Even if many Ukrainians have some non-Slavic/Euro ancestry, they could probably be likened to the many white Americans with some Amerindian blood. Racial classifications at the margins are messy. Ukrainians look white, and they are European by dint of geography and religio-cultural heritage; therefore, we should call them “white”.
Without sounding pessimistic, every year this gets worse and more ingrained in the countries and continents in which this infiltration takes place. Cultural, political, social and religious progressive views grow exponentially and with ease, the same can be said with the mass influx of immigrants into the west.
There will be no quick fix. I can’t remember a right leaning policy being implemented in my life time, never mind the policy becoming so successful for our side that it blossomed to the the levels of growth witnessed with mass immigration on the progressive side.
We’ve given up too much and it’s been seized upon and extrapolated as to have become unrecognisable to the original motive or action. Each decade that passes means that what we have given up or lost or been robbed of will not return. The left (or whatever label) have played a long game and taken over our society, infrastructure and politics. They have built nothing, rather they have undermined many institutions. This fact is the most depressing and distressing – they don’t have to build a thing, they’ve just been handed it. They’ve built nothing original, rather just gutted the institution they have been handed (in many cases in the UK, venerable places such as many universities and the National Trust, to name two examples) and flipped it’s politics on it’s head. Off topic a little due to the main focus of the author being non-white immigration, but nonetheless a symptom of such a policy – hey, if you are hijacking the demographic, why not the bricks and mortar also.
As for the colonial legacy, at best we should have just left what we built in good order (which I think for the most part we did) and should never have implemented the 1948 UK Nationalities Act – whatever comparisons took place in your respective countries, that should not have happened either. Now we are fighting pretty much every government and very powerful NGO like the Open Border Society to avoid a garotte.
You forgot to mention that non-Whites, especially before The Mass Media, had a much more positive opinion of Whites. This constant harping on ressentiment is overplayed and hyperbolized. TBH, ressentiment is further reduced today due to non-Whites seeing how decrepit and degenerate Whites are. They see White trailer communities. They see White tweakers. They see morbidly obese White Walmartians. And these aforementioned are all Nordics.
Whatever ressentiment there was, which was exaggerated to begin with, it has decreased substantially given the modern-day degraded state of (Nordic) Whites.
When the Whites, but not Western Europeans, like Russians or Ukrainians or almost all post-Soviet peoples, despise and even hate Westerners, regarding them as weaklings, drunkards, drug addicted, homosexuals, Negro-lovers, ruled by Jews and mad Leftists, (derogatory terms for Europe like Gayrope and Jewrope confirm this), here we see not racial, but rather cultural conflict between different civilisations (Kulturkreise).
Another advocate of the position you criticise – though more of a fringe figure – was Francis Parker Yockey, who argued that the radical right should support Third World anti-colonial movements which threatened the United States.
Yockey was also pro-Soviet in his last years. Maybe he thought that Comrade Stalin was a defender of the White Race and Saviour of the European Tradition, just like Comrade Pu is now.
Can anyone show an example of a New Rightist alliance with Third Worlders which has produced anything useful?
For example, an alliance which has stopped the farm attacks in South Africa, or protected British girls from “Asian” sexual slavery, or halted the ongoing mass migrations into Europe and North America?
There might be a tactical edge (as well as some schadenfreude) gained insofar as the globalist regime now dominating the Western world is at least temporarily discredited in the aftermath of a third worlder victory, say by the Taliban sweeping into Kabul or whatever. But in the long run, third worlder opposition to “settler-colonialism” means they are looking to bring down countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and ultimately the United States (a point which is made explicit in much of their agitprop).
The fact that third world militants appear to be fighting a common foe means little because even if somehow they can bring low the globalist regime, it does not mean that the third worlders would provide a better alternative. You replace a decadent ruling elite with an invading barbarian horde, so to speak.
A much more viable strategy for the New Right would be to organize an international network of pro-White movements for mutual political action.
Any “rightist” who makes common cause with Third Worldist movements is a ‘tool’ or a traitor. I sort of understand some on the counter-semitic Far Right taking up the cause of the Palestinians, but mostly that’s just schadenfreude. It doesn’t help white genetic, cultural or political interests.
As I’ve stated in many comments here, whites are going extinct on their present course, and most white genomes cannot (and should not) be saved. Our focus as prowhites should be on developing precisely such international networks of our own people as you recommend. These networks need to be more than online, too (even if they originate and mostly function there). They must become real world networks of mutual aid, political organizing, and general camaraderie. Ultimately, out of such networks must be borne a new nation, a “transnational nation” based purely on blood and common white preservationist ideology, not the traditional criteria of ethnicity, geography and shared history. We would seek to preserve our race in, ironically, cosmopolitan fashion, as a stateless people, like the Jews prior to Israel (1948), searching for its own “White Zion”.
But ultimately, we must found our “Zion”. That white fortress nation will be the last citadel of our once great people (at least for many centuries, until our numbers, racial consciousness and strength of will, shall again send us out in force into a hostile and alien world).
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment