The Second Question
The Times of Israel recently interviewed Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for a congressional district in New York City. Much of the coverage focused on her attendance at a pro-Palestinian rally on October 8, 2023, one day after the Hamas massacre in Israel.
What struck me, however, was not primarily her views on Israel. It was that she appeared to apply the same moral framework to Israel, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and other questions of nationalism. She did not seem motivated by a unique hostility toward Jews. Rather, she seemed to be operating from a broader political ontology.
That distinction matters.
Too often, discussions of anti-Zionism collapse every motivation into one category. Sometimes anti-Zionism is inseparable from antisemitism. Sometimes it grows out of religious hostility toward Judaism. But sometimes it arises from an entirely different worldview—one that interprets history primarily through the relationship between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed.
Understanding that worldview is more illuminating than simply dismissing it.
My concern is not that this framework sees nothing true. Quite the opposite.
Third Worldism begins with a profound historical truth, recognizing the victims of empire and nation-building. But it has not fully answered the moral problem that begins after liberation: how a formerly oppressed people avoids becoming the next oppressor.
The Truth It Sees
One of the most important historical lessons I learned as an adult came from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The modern nation-state was not born peacefully.
Europe was a patchwork of languages, religions, and peoples living within multinational empires. As those empires collapsed, new nation-states emerged claiming to represent particular nations. But their borders rarely matched the populations living inside them.
The result was not simply national self-determination.
It was also displacement, minority persecution, statelessness, forced assimilation, population transfers, and countless people who suddenly discovered that they belonged to the “wrong” nation.
The same story unfolded in different forms throughout the colonial world. European empires imposed borders, elevated some communities over others, and reorganized societies around imperial interests. Millions lived under systems they neither chose nor controlled.
Third Worldism begins by insisting that these victims matter.
It asks us to remember not only the triumphant stories of nation-building but also those who paid the price.
That is an important corrective.
Any defense of nationalism that ignores those victims is historically incomplete.
Liberation as the Exception
Within this framework, nationalism occupies an unusual place.
Ordinary nationalism is viewed with suspicion because it creates insiders and outsiders, majorities and minorities, boundaries and hierarchies.
But anti-colonial nationalism receives an exception.
If a people is struggling against domination, national consciousness becomes morally legitimate because it serves liberation.
The distinction makes sense on its own terms.
One nationalism preserves hierarchy.
The other destroys it.
The question I keep coming back to is remarkably simple: What happens after liberation?
History suggests that this is where the real difficulty begins.
Once the liberation movement wins, it inherits borders, ministries, courts, police, intelligence services, prisons, schools, and political opponents.
Yesterday’s revolution becomes today’s government.
The movement that fought hierarchy now possesses hierarchy.
What prevents it from reproducing the very patterns it once opposed?
Zimbabwe
The struggle against white-minority rule in Rhodesia was rooted in genuine injustice.
After independence, Robert Mugabe’s liberation movement became the ruling party of Zimbabwe.
Within a few years, government forces carried out the Gukurahundi massacres against perceived political opponents. ZANU-PF remained the dominant political force for decades.
The injustice of colonial rule did not guarantee the justice of the post-colonial government.
The question remained:
What happens after liberation?
Algeria
French rule in Algeria was brutal.
The National Liberation Front fought a long and costly war for independence.
After victory, however, the FLN became the ruling establishment. Political competition narrowed, military influence expanded, and the liberation movement gradually transformed into a one-party state.
Again, liberation answered one question.
It did not answer the next one.
Eritrea
Perhaps the clearest example is Eritrea.
The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front fought for decades against Ethiopian rule. Its discipline and sacrifice became legendary.
After independence, the movement simply became the state.
There have been no national elections. Opposition parties are prohibited. Independent journalism has disappeared. The same organizational discipline that sustained a liberation movement became the organizational discipline of an authoritarian government.
The liberation movement defeated foreign domination.
It did not solve the problem of power.
The Missing Theory
None of these examples invalidate the justice of the causes that began them.
That is precisely the point.
A movement can identify genuine oppression.
It can heroically resist injustice.
It can deserve victory.
And yet, after victory, it can create new victims.
This is what I increasingly see as the blind spot in many liberation philosophies.
They possess a sophisticated theory of oppression before liberation.
They possess a much thinner theory of power after liberation.
How does a liberation movement avoid becoming the next establishment?
How does yesterday’s revolutionary avoid becoming tomorrow’s ruling class?
How do today’s oppressed avoid creating tomorrow’s oppressed?
These are not rhetorical questions.
They are historical questions.
Jeremiah’s Second Question
As I was thinking about these issues, I happened to be reading Jeremiah 34.
The timing was uncanny.
The prophet condemns Judah because wealthy Israelites had been unlawfully enslaving their fellow Jews. To modern ears, that phrase requires some explanation.
The Torah did not envision Israelite debt servitude as perpetual chattel slavery. A fellow Israelite who fell into servitude because of poverty or debt remained a member of the covenant community. He was not to be treated ruthlessly or permanently reduced to property. The Torah required that he be released in the seventh year. Even more remarkably, Deuteronomy commands that when he is released, he must not be sent away empty-handed. His former master is commanded to furnish him generously from the flock, the threshing floor, and the winepress so that freedom does not simply mean returning to destitution.
Why?
Because Israel was never to forget Egypt.
Again and again, the Torah grounds these laws in the nation’s defining memory:
“You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.”
The purpose was not merely to commemorate the Exodus. It was to ensure that a people liberated from oppression would not recreate oppressive relationships among themselves.
Jeremiah 34 records a remarkable failure of that ideal.
Confronted with Jeremiah’s warning, the people repented.
They released their servants.
Then, almost immediately…
They forced them back into servitude.
Jeremiah announces that catastrophe will follow.
The episode is remarkable because of what it assumes.
Israel’s national story begins with liberation from Egypt.
One might expect that a people whose identity is built upon liberation would never recreate the injustices from which they had escaped.
The Bible assumes exactly the opposite.
It assumes that liberation is not enough.
Memory is not enough.
Even a people armed with the memory of Egypt and the commandments of Sinai remain capable of reproducing Egypt.
That is why the prophets never stop speaking.
The remarkable insight of the Hebrew Bible is that the moral problem does not end when the oppressed become free.
It begins again.
The Second Question
Every political philosophy begins by identifying something true.
Nationalism sees the human need for solidarity and shared purpose.
Liberalism sees the dignity of the individual.
Socialism sees exploitation.
Third Worldism sees the victims of empire, colonialism, and nation-building.
Each begins with a truth.
The danger comes when that truth becomes the organizing principle for everything else.
Third Worldism asks an essential first question: How do the oppressed become free?
History suggests there is an equally important second question: What happens after they win?
The Hebrew prophets understood that no founding event—whether liberation, revolution, or national independence—permanently solves the human problem.
Power remains power.
The temptation to dominate remains.
Yesterday’s victims can become tomorrow’s rulers.
And tomorrow’s rulers, unless restrained by something higher than themselves, can become tomorrow’s oppressors.
That, it seems to me, is the second question every liberation movement must answer.
