In Part 4 of the American Erosion series, Shahid Bolsen shifts the focus from the empire’s structural decay to one of its least examined casualties: the psychological condition of Muslims living inside it. He introduces two intertwined disorders. The first is psychological colonization — the quiet internalization of the colonizer’s worldview. The second, which he terms psychological colonizer‑ization, is more severe: the adoption not only of the colonizer’s sense of Muslim inferiority, but also of his supremacy, arrogance, and presumed right to dictate to others.
Bolsen argues that many Western‑based Muslims carry both conditions at once. The result is a fractured psyche: craving Western validation on one side, and looking down on the Muslim world on the other. Both impulses, he insists, spring from the same root — the unexamined belief that Western supremacy is legitimate.
He confronts diaspora Muslims directly on their reflexive attacks on Muslim governments, their habit of repackaging Western geopolitical narratives in Islamic language, their need to imagine the Muslim world as dysfunctional in order to justify their own place in the West, and their confusion of proximity to power with participation in it.
Bolsen ends with a blunt structural verdict: you are not part of the team. You are the soccer ball. And that demands a different posture entirely — not one of seeking acceptance, but one of witness, honesty, and real solidarity with the Ummah.
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