Western ethnocentrism and the Third World

Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Contributor to the Daily Signal, who is considered an outstanding historian in conservative circles, recently asked, Is “Third World” a pejorative term? That the question can be asked is a symptom of the profound ethnocentrism of U.S. political culture.

Let us respond to Hanson’s question. No, the term “Third World” is not pejorative, even though U.S. political culture has lost consciousness of its original meaning. During the 1950s and 1960s, the term was politically important, intending to convey a future world different from the capitalist West and the socialist East, a world being constructed by the emerging colonized and neocolonized peoples. The drive of the Third World implied a political practice and critical social theory that was broadly socialist but was different from both Western Marxism and Soviet communism.

Hanson’s Western ethnocentrism is also evident in the curious fact that, even though he is a specialist in military history, he does not fo…